Continental Theory Buffalo : Transatlantic Crossroads of a Critical Insurrection

Continental Theory Buffalo is the inaugural volume of the Humanities to the Rescue book series, a public humanities project dedicated to discussing the role of the arts and humanities today. This book is a collaborative act of humanistic renewal that builds on the transcontinental legacy of May 1968 to offer insightful readings of the cultural (d)evolution of the last fifty years. The volume contributors revisit, reclaim and reassess the "revolutionary" legacy of May 1968 in light of the urgency of the present and the future. Their essays are effective illustrations of the potential of such interpretive traditions as philosophy, literature and cultural criticism to run interference with (and offer alternatives to) the instrumentalist logic and predatory structures that are reducing the world to a collection of quantifiable and tradeable resources. The book will be of interest to cultural historians and theorists, media studies scholars, political scientists, and students of French and Francophone literature and culture on both sides of the Atlantic. Contents 8 Acknowledgments 10 Introduction: Humanities to the Rescue 12 Notes 17 Continental Theory and Graphic Narrative: A Long Yet Missed Encounter 18 Notes 29 When Poetry Talks Theory: Language Poetry and New Narrative’s Dialogue with Continental Critical Theory and Philosophy 34 New Narrative’s Discourse about Theory 36 Theory as Agonistic Conversation 39 The Argument 46 Notes 47 OulipoHack 50 Notes 61 Poststructuralist Turn? 64 Notes 73 France, 1968, and the Radical Politics of 1970s Film Theory 76 Notes 88 Postscriptum on the Master’s Tools 92 Allow us . . . temporarily 93 Magical Resistance on the Network 95 Technology, Magic, and Politics 98 Postscriptum 100 Notes 101 Return to Form? Expanded Formalism and the Idea of Literature 104 New Formalism in the Twenty-first Century 105 Form, Foucault, Affordance 107 Styles, or Minding Our Manners 110 Oulipotentiality, or the Utopia of Form 113 Notes 115 Not Reading Blanchot: Theory and Practice 120 We Are Together, Aren’t We? 120 There Is Hope, but Not for Us 125 Notes 126 Politics and Life Are Not Coextensive: Nancy, Badiou, Balibar, and General Equivalence 130 Catastrophic Calculation 130 It Is Now Too Late 135 True Life 142 Notes 149 Is Love Revolutionary? Lacan and Duras after ’68 156 Unsayable 158 The Hole 160 The Letter’s Resonance 162 Notes 164 May ’68 and SubStance 168 Notes 176 May ’68 and the Crisis of Philosophy of History: Georges Bataille, Furio Jesi, and Latin America 178 ’68 and the Question of Radical Negativity 178 The Revolt as the Suspension of Historical Time 182 ’68 as a Negative Event 185 The Mexican ’68 189 Notes 193 Afterword: Ends of Thinking in Computational Age 198 “To Think What We Are Doing . . .” 198 The Computational Ends of Event Processing 202 Between Thinking and Algorithmic Calculations: Early Critiques of Computationalism in Poststructuralist Theories and Computer Sc 204 Confronting the Unprecedented Computationalism: Humanities to the Rescue? 208 Notes 210 Contributors 214 Index 220