This article considers film director Masao Adachi's contributions to the landscape theory known as _fukeiron_, developed by radical filmmakers in Japan in the 1960s. In this theory, landscape is the generalized phenomenality that appears in conditions of "ruling power"— but not mimetically as the power’s own figure, nor correlatively as its cause, spring, or effect. Rather it is that appearance in, through, on, and over which "ruling power" registers—a phenomenality that allows an abstract totality to be imagined. The article explores (...) the resources of Adachi's notion of landscape for radical political theory. (shrink)

The assumption that poststructuralist theories must posit a world of weakened emotion co-exists with irritated perception that, nevertheless, certain theorists seem too willing both to claim and to represent strong emotion. Derrida, especially, has been criticized for appearing in his work to enjoy and solicit feelings of suffering, triumph, and animosity, supposedly against the grain of his reasoning. Much of the secondary literature dealing with poststructuralism assumes, first, that poststructuralist theory does not have an account of emotion, and, second, that (...) evidence of its own emotion belies its accounts of mind and self. We should consider instead that this theory is directly concerned with emotion. This article suggests a theory of emotion drawn from the same matrix of ideas that generates Derrida's deconstructive account of consciousness. (shrink)

Wittgenstein’s confidence in the stability and public character of language coexisted with a dreadful expectation that he would himself be unintelligible. A hard-core belief in the pub-lic nature of language and a terror of isolation may well go together. The more public language is, the more awful failures of communication must be. When one can no longer imagine that an utterance retains a meaning independent of its reception, an ineffective utterance matters more. Without an ideal standard, one needs only to (...) be generally, not completely, competent; but at the same time, one needs only to be generally incompetent to become linguistic pariahs. And for the very reason that one’s intelligibility is never perfect or finally destroyed, each exchange counts. Wittgenstein’s life and work alike show that these incremental shifts in the account book of one’s intelligibility are large enough to perceive with the naked eye. (shrink)

Paul de Man's work has been used to exemplify both the claim that poststructuralist writing is cold and the claim that it does not possess an adequate account of emotion. In fact, after 1971 de Man develops a highly organized theory of emotion. Emotions arise, he argues, to mitigate epistemological uncertainties. When it's not clear what to think, emotions give something to feel; they make unstable perceptions and sensations seem more stable and nameable. To inquire into emotions' motivations is not (...) to doubt their reality or power. The originality and controversy of de Man's view lies in his identification of emotions and figures: de Man shows that emotions themselves are rhetorical structures, organizing analogies and exchanges between perceptible things and possible inner states. (shrink)

Hannah Arendt’s low estimation of household and society in _The Human Condition_ is ambiguously grounded in her objections to expropriation of labor, on one hand--an expropriation that she associates with the "life process"--and to what she perceives as the "futility of mortal life" on the other. This essay explores this tension in _The Human Condition_ and compares it (more briefly) to related thoughts about bare life, subjectivity, and meaninglessness in Karl Marx, Giorgio Agamben and T.W. Adorno. It suggests that bare (...) life and subjectivity alike occlude living--something different from either the life process or work, being neither human nor bare life, bios nor zoe, vitality nor culture, and which therefore involves the toleration of meaninglessness. (shrink)