The annotated table of contents below offers a sneak peek at what’s in issue 28. To get the issue delivered straight to your door, subscribe now.
Letter from the Editors
On the End of the Canon Wars
[John Michael Colón]
The critical theorists’ attacks on a canon narrowly focused on a white, male, European tradition were hardly misguided. The problem isn’t that they went too far. It would be better to say they stopped too soon.
Essays
Minor Resurrections
On failing to raise the dead
[Elisa Gonzalez]
Goading myself through writing my brother’s eulogy, I felt as if I might die from the effort of expression, and yet people insisted that it was fortunate that I was a writer, not understanding that words could only truly be a consolation if they called him back.
The Lull
Our age of catastrophic uneventfulness
[Nicolas Guilhot]
There was a time when it wasn’t just philosophers like Günther Anders who thought that the Anthropocene required a new world organization: when the most realist political thinkers of his generation spoke of moving beyond the injustices of capitalism or the horrors of war, about creating genuine equality or global peace through regional or world federalism, they could not have been more serious. If these proposals sound jejune today, it says something about our condition, not theirs.
When Reasons Fail
The literature of mass shootings
[Sam Kriss]
In a country where the random slaughter of children is so common that it’s been integrated into the structure of ordinary life, literary culture simply has nothing to say on the subject. It will talk about awkward interactions and sexual confusion and learning to love yourself in the face of trauma, but it’s afraid to touch this thing that seems to sum up the entire experience of modernity.
The Sound Makes All the Difference
Stanley Cavell’s style
[Lola Seaton]
Why, then, if Cavell was so interested in making philosophy less technical and more inclusive—more admitting of “ordinary,” personal experience—did he write the way he did?
Correspondence
The Perils of the Past
Living through history in Beirut
[Zeead Yaghi]
As a historian, I had been trained to maintain critical distance from the materials I was analyzing, to second- and triple-guess the motives and incentives of their authors, to understand and contextualize the contingencies surrounding their work processes and decisions. At the same time, I was living in a place and a moment where everything seemed ad hoc, where a travesty lurked at every corner and the existing social contract was lit aflame.
Literature
Foreword
[John Michael Colón]
What does the stream of our consciousness feel like today, and what kind of novel could capture it?
The Fall and Rise of McGovern McNabb
[Leon Forrest]
Now the body of McNabb, once dead to life, was actually doing a kind of vamped upwards dance, touched by an electrical voltage through some unseen conductor. And I became troubled, then horrified (not whether the death of McNabb would bring on the loss of my aunt’s liquor license) but that the unconscious wrath of McNabb’s body would bring down the whole flooring, flora, fauna, tropical plants, chairs, walls, bottles of liquor from the shelves. It reminded me of attending scores of wrestling matches as a kid, and noticing these body-slamming wrestlers banging bodies down upon that same mat, week in and week out, and thinking surely one of them is going to drive his foe through the mat—that is, until I woke up to the fact that matches were set up fakes. But this was real, what McNabb was doing to my aunt’s floor.
The Emigrants
[Bárbara Jacobs]
while some arms release you, others receive you. that was the title of the novel i wanted to write. that i started to write. that i ran out of time to write. i let time go by and now it’s too late. the day juan saw the test results he said. zinser. oncologist. if you don’t stick to the treatment, you’ll live just a few months. if you stick to it, you’ll live twice that. i stuck to it. i stuck to it. i lasted barely a year. family i’m leaving behind. i’m dying. what’ll you do without me.
Reviews
Ethnic Studies
[Vikrant Dadawala]
Today, ethnic studies finds itself in the uneasy position of being both a counterculture inevitably targeted by conservative critics as well as the semi-official ideology that governs America’s corporate human-resources departments, National Public Radio and the New York Times.
Erotic Fiction
[Jess Bergman]
It wouldn’t be unfair to read Acts of Service as a test case for the idea, advanced by Chu and others, that to corral desire within predetermined ideological parameters is to smother it—and to no real end.
Elite Capture
[Nicholas Whittaker]
How does study—even study steeped in sociality—get us closer to that world, or the world of any genuinely radical, genuinely transformative politics? Can the politics of the undercommons be genuinely constructive? Can the undercommons escape elite capture? Can Elite Capture?
The annotated table of contents below offers a sneak peek at what’s in issue 28. To get the issue delivered straight to your door, subscribe now.
Letter from the Editors
On the End of the Canon Wars
[John Michael Colón]
The critical theorists’ attacks on a canon narrowly focused on a white, male, European tradition were hardly misguided. The problem isn’t that they went too far. It would be better to say they stopped too soon.
Essays
Minor Resurrections
On failing to raise the dead
[Elisa Gonzalez]
Goading myself through writing my brother’s eulogy, I felt as if I might die from the effort of expression, and yet people insisted that it was fortunate that I was a writer, not understanding that words could only truly be a consolation if they called him back.
The Lull
Our age of catastrophic uneventfulness
[Nicolas Guilhot]
There was a time when it wasn’t just philosophers like Günther Anders who thought that the Anthropocene required a new world organization: when the most realist political thinkers of his generation spoke of moving beyond the injustices of capitalism or the horrors of war, about creating genuine equality or global peace through regional or world federalism, they could not have been more serious. If these proposals sound jejune today, it says something about our condition, not theirs.
When Reasons Fail
The literature of mass shootings
[Sam Kriss]
In a country where the random slaughter of children is so common that it’s been integrated into the structure of ordinary life, literary culture simply has nothing to say on the subject. It will talk about awkward interactions and sexual confusion and learning to love yourself in the face of trauma, but it’s afraid to touch this thing that seems to sum up the entire experience of modernity.
The Sound Makes All the Difference
Stanley Cavell’s style
[Lola Seaton]
Why, then, if Cavell was so interested in making philosophy less technical and more inclusive—more admitting of “ordinary,” personal experience—did he write the way he did?
Correspondence
The Perils of the Past
Living through history in Beirut
[Zeead Yaghi]
As a historian, I had been trained to maintain critical distance from the materials I was analyzing, to second- and triple-guess the motives and incentives of their authors, to understand and contextualize the contingencies surrounding their work processes and decisions. At the same time, I was living in a place and a moment where everything seemed ad hoc, where a travesty lurked at every corner and the existing social contract was lit aflame.
Literature
Foreword
[John Michael Colón]
What does the stream of our consciousness feel like today, and what kind of novel could capture it?
The Fall and Rise of McGovern McNabb
[Leon Forrest]
Now the body of McNabb, once dead to life, was actually doing a kind of vamped upwards dance, touched by an electrical voltage through some unseen conductor. And I became troubled, then horrified (not whether the death of McNabb would bring on the loss of my aunt’s liquor license) but that the unconscious wrath of McNabb’s body would bring down the whole flooring, flora, fauna, tropical plants, chairs, walls, bottles of liquor from the shelves. It reminded me of attending scores of wrestling matches as a kid, and noticing these body-slamming wrestlers banging bodies down upon that same mat, week in and week out, and thinking surely one of them is going to drive his foe through the mat—that is, until I woke up to the fact that matches were set up fakes. But this was real, what McNabb was doing to my aunt’s floor.
The Emigrants
[Bárbara Jacobs]
while some arms release you, others receive you. that was the title of the novel i wanted to write. that i started to write. that i ran out of time to write. i let time go by and now it’s too late. the day juan saw the test results he said. zinser. oncologist. if you don’t stick to the treatment, you’ll live just a few months. if you stick to it, you’ll live twice that. i stuck to it. i stuck to it. i lasted barely a year. family i’m leaving behind. i’m dying. what’ll you do without me.
Reviews
Ethnic Studies
[Vikrant Dadawala]
Today, ethnic studies finds itself in the uneasy position of being both a counterculture inevitably targeted by conservative critics as well as the semi-official ideology that governs America’s corporate human-resources departments, National Public Radio and the New York Times.
Erotic Fiction
[Jess Bergman]
It wouldn’t be unfair to read Acts of Service as a test case for the idea, advanced by Chu and others, that to corral desire within predetermined ideological parameters is to smother it—and to no real end.
Elite Capture
[Nicholas Whittaker]
How does study—even study steeped in sociality—get us closer to that world, or the world of any genuinely radical, genuinely transformative politics? Can the politics of the undercommons be genuinely constructive? Can the undercommons escape elite capture? Can Elite Capture?
If you liked this essay, you’ll love reading The Point in print.