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Afterword: Chinese Communism, Cultural Revolution, and American Multiculturalism

Steven S. Lee

in The Ethnic Avant-Garde: Minority Cultures and World Revolution

The Afterword highlights the afterlives of the inter-war ethnic avant-garde, first by tracking China's rise as a new revolutionary center which attracted a new generation of leftists. I then show how ... More

The Afterword highlights the afterlives of the inter-war ethnic avant-garde, first by tracking China's rise as a new revolutionary center which attracted a new generation of leftists. I then show how Karen Tei Yamashita's 2010 novel "I Hotel"--which captures this turn to China--resuscitates many of the features of the inter-war ethnic avant-garde, adding to it a host of formal innovations, as well as heightened emphases on local resistance and gender equality.Less

Circumspect and Prospect

Donald R. Kelley

in Frontiers of History: Historical Inquiry in the Twentieth Century

This chapter examines issues concerning the newer “new histories,” interdisciplinary encounters, the “linguistic turn,” the question of the “end of history,” and various other postmodernist ideas. It ... More

This chapter examines issues concerning the newer “new histories,” interdisciplinary encounters, the “linguistic turn,” the question of the “end of history,” and various other postmodernist ideas. It offers a more personal critique of the state of history at the start of the third millennium within deepening perspectives and expanding horizons. It also discusses personal experiences in historical studies and argues that the idea of an end to history belongs to the philosophy or theology of history and not to historical inquiry.Less

Decade: Period Pieces

Theodore Martin

in Contemporary Drift: Genre, Historicism, and the Problem of the Present

This chapter argues that the arbitrary timespan of the decade becomes a central feature in the contemporary realist novel. In the work of Zadie Smith and Bret Easton Ellis, the decade represents the ... More

This chapter argues that the arbitrary timespan of the decade becomes a central feature in the contemporary realist novel. In the work of Zadie Smith and Bret Easton Ellis, the decade represents the difficulty of periodizing the present in an age shaped by post-Cold War anxieties about the “end of history” and the endlessness of capitalism. In response to such anxieties, the decade provides an ambivalent but necessary way of reasserting the inevitability of historical change.Less

Thresholds of History:: India and the Limits of Europe in Hegel’s Lectures on the Philosophy of History

Jeffrey S. Librett

in Orientalism and the Figure of the Jew

This chapter examines the structurally determined recalcitrance of the mediating border in the grandiose expansion of typological thinking that is Hegel’s Lectures on the Philosophy of History. ... More

This chapter examines the structurally determined recalcitrance of the mediating border in the grandiose expansion of typological thinking that is Hegel’s Lectures on the Philosophy of History. Focusing on Hegel’s treatment of the “Oriental World,” the chapter pays particularly close attention to his views on ancient Indian and ancient Hebraic cultures, both of which trouble him because they are situated on crucial frontiers in the trajectory of history from necessity to freedom, and from prehumanity to humanity as such. For Hegel, these two uncanny cultural Others are bound together, among other things, by the fact that both Sanskrit (language) and Hebrew (texts) play the role of anticipatory letter with respect to modern languages and thought. The motif of the pantheism of Oriental thought is further examined here, in connection with Hegel’s anxiety about materiality. Finally, the chapter examines the repetitions of the anxiety about the borderline impingements between matter and mind with respect to “modern” transitional processes such as the role of Islam, the Crusades, the French Revolution, and the future in America itself. The moment of Hegelian history turns out to be suspended somewhere between its already (over) and its not yet.Less

Beckett’s Tragic Pantry

Richard Halpern

in Eclipse of Action: Tragedy and Political Economy

The eclipse of action by production in the age of political economy does not necessarily result in reduced conceptions of action. On the contrary, one common response, especially in the realm of ... More

The eclipse of action by production in the age of political economy does not necessarily result in reduced conceptions of action. On the contrary, one common response, especially in the realm of political theory, is a countermovement that gins up inflated accounts of action, often defined explicitly against the neutralizing powers of the marketplace. This chapter tracks Samuel Beckett’s response to two such inflationary theorists: Alexandre Kojève and Georges Bataille. Beckett’s best-known early plays, Waiting for Godot and Endgame, can be seen as responses to the dilemmas of action in the twentieth century. Waiting for Godot situates itself at the Kojèvian “end of history,” conceived explicitly as an end to possibilities for action. Endgame engages in a critical response to Bataille’s notion of dépense or expenditure in order to deflate the inflated notions of action then current. Beckett’s aim is not therapeutic, however. He does not intend to restore action to an earlier condition of health, but rather to stage the contemporary impasse of action that inflationary theorists imagined they could surmount.Less

Unmodern Thinking: Globalization, the End of History, Great Events

Gary Shapiro

in Nietzsche's Earth: Great Events, Great Politics

This chapter focuses on Nietzsche’s Unmodern Observations, reading these four essays as polemics against late and quasi-Hegelians (especially D.F. Strauss and E. von Hartmann) who posit some version ... More

This chapter focuses on Nietzsche’s Unmodern Observations, reading these four essays as polemics against late and quasi-Hegelians (especially D.F. Strauss and E. von Hartmann) who posit some version of an “end of history” thesis. Nietzsche’s critique is relevant to more recent discussions by thinkers like Alexander Kojève and Francis Fukuyama, which attempt to update the Hegelian argument. Strauss’s smug triumphalism at the consolidation of Bismarck’s Reich is the optimistic side of the position. Hartmann takes the pessimistic, Schopenhauerian view that the “world-process” eventuates both in something like “globalization” and a final realization of the impossibility of human happiness. Nietzsche attempts to save Schopenhauer from such appropriations, praising his alternative to the time’s journalistic philosophers (or “public intellectuals”) who desperately seek to be contemporary. In contrast to the Hegelians and journalistic thinkers, Wagner is celebrated as ushering in a new “great event” of global significance. The chapter concludes by suggesting that Nietzsche’s apotheosis of Wagner was more Hegelian than he realized at the time. While this impasse interrupted the Unmodern series, it set the stage for Nietzsche to develop the concept earth in opposition to world and to rethink the idea of “great events” in that context.Less

The Clash of Civilizations

Manlio Graziano

in Holy Wars and Holy Alliance: The Return of Religion to the Global Political Stage

This chapter analyses the clash-of-civilization concept as a possible tool of US foreign policy after the fall of the USSR.

Mourning and Melancholia at the End of Nature

Margaret Ronda

in Remainders: American Poetry at Nature's End

This chapter begins with a consideration of the development of the discourse of the “end of nature” and its implications for understanding ecological relations. Pointing to the elegiac dimensions of ... More

This chapter begins with a consideration of the development of the discourse of the “end of nature” and its implications for understanding ecological relations. Pointing to the elegiac dimensions of this discourse, the chapter turns to Juliana Spahr’s long poem “Gentle Now, Don’t Add to Heartache” as an example of a literary exploration of the consequences of this conceptual absence. The chapter draws on the Romantic philosophy of Schiller as well as more recent psychoanalytic accounts of elegy and mourning to argue that the operations of elegy become the subject of investigation in Spahr’s work. “Gentle Now” serves as a representative eco-elegy that dwells in melancholia rather than moving toward the completion of the mourning process. The chapter closes with a consideration of a more recent poem by Spahr, co-written with Joshua Clover, that investigates the affective and political limits of melancholy as a response to present conditions.Less

Prehistory and Posthistory: Apes, Caves, Bombs, and Time in Georges Bataille

Maria Stavrinaki

in Power and Time: Temporalities in Conflict and the Making of History

After the Second World War, the thinker who imagined the symmetrical rapport between pre- and posthistory in the most complex terms was Georges Bataille. His interpretation of history and time is all ... More

After the Second World War, the thinker who imagined the symmetrical rapport between pre- and posthistory in the most complex terms was Georges Bataille. His interpretation of history and time is all the thornier because it was completely opposed to his vision of history from the 1920s, notably as he had elaborated it in the journal 'Documents' (1929–1931). Prehistory as he had invented it in that early period undermined biological evolutionism, particularly by deconstructing the political rapports on which evolution’s political authority was founded. It had been the matrix of a contingent and formless conception of history that was devoid of any teleological compass. But after the war, Bataille placed prehistory in a highly antagonistic relationship with history. His reading of the cave paintings of Lascaux, determined by the catastrophes of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, permitted him to weave a narrative of universal history. To reconstitute and analyze this narrative is to interrogate the relationships between history and fiction, between longue durée and the event, between evolutionism and catastrophism. In Bataille’s case, it allows us to track the movement of a thought that, fleeing the dystopian presentism of its era, took shelter in the Hegelian contemplation of the end of history.Less

‘Transprosing and Transversing’: religion, revolution, and the end of history in Dryden’s late works

Matthew C. Augustine

in Aesthetics of contingency: Writing, politics, and culture in England, 1639-89

Notwithstanding its reputation as a secular age, the Restoration was notable for its religious converts, not least its most famous pair of writers, Lord Rochester and the Stuart laureate John Dryden. ... More

Notwithstanding its reputation as a secular age, the Restoration was notable for its religious converts, not least its most famous pair of writers, Lord Rochester and the Stuart laureate John Dryden. This chapter explores the development of Dryden’s art in the wake of his conversion to Rome in 1685 and the subsequent failure of Stuart rule. Its theme is ‘transprosing and transversing’, as Dryden and his contemporaries referred to the transformation of one kind of text into another. Dryden’s late work of fable and translation represents an extensive body of transversive writing – one that resonates strongly with his experience as a convert, of fashioning a new spiritual and political identity on top of a prior script that cannot be wholly erased. And indeed, in the palimpsestic play of Dryden’s late aesthetic, this chapter also traces a shift in the poet’s conception of English history, from the providential typologies of Astraea Redux (1660) and Absalom and Achitophel (1681) to the self-consciously contingent allegories of The Hind and the Panther (1687), Don Sebastian (1689), and Fables (1700).Less

Commemorating the End of History: Timelessness and Power in Contemporary Russia

Kevin M. F. Platt

in Power and Time: Temporalities in Conflict and the Making of History

Russian history and memory of the era of the Soviet collapse and the turbulent 1990s is an important topic for comprehension of contemporary Russian culture and politics, yet one that is poorly ... More

Russian history and memory of the era of the Soviet collapse and the turbulent 1990s is an important topic for comprehension of contemporary Russian culture and politics, yet one that is poorly understood and minimally theorized. Work on Russian history and memory has focused primarily on representations of iconic personalities, events and processes: Soviet triumph in World War II, the era and figure of Joseph Stalin, issues of post-Soviet nostalgia and memory of collective trauma, etc. But what of other historical moments and events of equally great significance for contemporary Russia, such as the founding era of the current Russian polity at the start of the 1990s? This chapter turns attention to the history and memory of this “by no means unequivocal” period, as Vladimir Putin characterized it in his 2007 “Memorandum to the Russian Federal Assembly.” Russian discourse concerning the years of transition range from a studied silence among political elites to a managed cacophony of divergent non-official and semi-official representations. As analysis of monuments, educational materials, popular history, and public and political speech reveals, this unusual distribution of historical and memorial activity functions to disorient Russian political discourse by sustaining a regime of historical indistinction and “timelessness.”Less

Introduction: Beyond the ‘End of History’

Christopher Hobson

in The Rise of Democracy: Revolution, War and Transformations in International Politics Since 1776

This chapter provides an introduction to the central arguments and themes of the book. It considers the standing of democracy following the end of the Cold War, noting that liberal democracy still ... More

This chapter provides an introduction to the central arguments and themes of the book. It considers the standing of democracy following the end of the Cold War, noting that liberal democracy still remains ideationally in the ascent a quarter of a century later. It is suggested that there is a strong need to understand the history of democracy in order to comprehend the challenges and problems it currently faces. The historical approach the book takes is outlined, proposing that there is a need to explore democracy’s development in relation to the emergence of modern international society.Less

The hiatus of history

Salvatore Babones

in American Tianxia: Chinese Money, American Power and the End of History

When Henry Luce famously called the twentieth century the "American Century," he strongly implied that it was the "first" American century (i.e., not the only one). Subsequent commentators have ... More

When Henry Luce famously called the twentieth century the "American Century," he strongly implied that it was the "first" American century (i.e., not the only one). Subsequent commentators have misunderstood Luce because they have failed to identify the relevant "width of a time point" for world-historical analysis. World-historical trends unfold over centuries, not decades. Demographic change is also slow but sure. China's low fertility rate means that China's population will soon by declining. By 2100 China may have roughly the same population as the Anglo-Saxon core of the American Tianxia. Francis Fukuyama's famous "end of history" is thus much more stable than he has subsequently maintained. The American Tianxia is the universal homogeneous state that Fukuyama once claimed was to be found at the end of history. The Pax Americana of the American Tianxia is very stable because it is based on personal incentives, not interstate relations. It constitutes a new, postmodern world-system, the millennial world-system, that is likely to last for several centuries.Less

Fragile friendships: Films of the 1980s

Joseph Mai

in Robert Guédiguian

This chapter examines the lesser known, but high quality, films made by Guédiguian during the 1980s. His first film, Dernier été, explores in an original way many of the themes important to ... More

This chapter examines the lesser known, but high quality, films made by Guédiguian during the 1980s. His first film, Dernier été, explores in an original way many of the themes important to friendship: its way of giving meaning to everyday spaces (it thus establishes the importance of l’Estaque in Guédiguian’s work) and seemingly empty time. Subsequent films examine Guédiguian’s Marxist view of History, the history of l’Estaque, and the commemoration of the French bicentennial. These films are highly pessimistic, mainly due to a kind of intellectual exorcism that the director is attempting to perform vis-à-vis Communism and militant politics. But the films have a counterbalancing tendency, especially through the development of Guédiguian’s group of collaborating friends, on screen and behind the camera.Less

From the Brink to ‘Triumph’: The Twentieth Century

Christopher Hobson

in The Rise of Democracy: Revolution, War and Transformations in International Politics Since 1776

This chapter focuses on the ‘long war’ between the competing ideologies of democracy, communism and fascism that defined the twentieth century. Only decades after World War One, democracy’s existence ... More

This chapter focuses on the ‘long war’ between the competing ideologies of democracy, communism and fascism that defined the twentieth century. Only decades after World War One, democracy’s existence was threatened. The Allied countries would fight in democracy’s name, but it was a war for survival against the vicious imperialism of the Axis powers. The grand alliance between the democratic powers and the Soviet Union defeated fascism, but this was due in large part to force of numbers and the self-destructiveness of the Nazis. Contestation continued between the two remaining ideologies of democracy and communism until the end of the Cold War. In 1989 the ideological contestation that had defined so much of the twentieth century was replaced by a remarkable consensus around liberal democracy. The chapter concludes by reflecting on the liberal zeitgeist of the post-Cold War era.Less

Conclusion: The End of the End of History?

Ngoc Son Bui

in Constitutional Change in the Contemporary Socialist World

This conclusion summarizes trends and major points in socialist constitutional change, and addresses broader implications. The socialist constitutions’ history or progress indicates the trend to ... More

This conclusion summarizes trends and major points in socialist constitutional change, and addresses broader implications. The socialist constitutions’ history or progress indicates the trend to incremental adaption of core socialist constitutional institutions. In some case, socialist constitutional change leads to partial adoption of some institutions of liberal democracy and market economy. But, the resistance to institutions of liberal constitutional democracy is also vehement in several cases. In addition, the divergence between socialist and liberal political and economic institutions is increasingly sharp. This institutional divergence is mainly due to socialist and local constitutional innovation. The partial adaption, resistance, and local innovation suggest that socialist constitutional change has not converged with “the end of history.” The socialist constitutions are increasingly dissonant documents, which is the condition for continuing evolution of the socialist constitutional order. Socialist constitutional change is connected to the broader global constitutional landscape. Constitutional change to improve the material wellbeing of living conditions is a part of human development.Less

The War on Terrorism and International Law: Toward a Continental Divide

Amnon Lev

in The Long Decade: How 9/11 Changed the Law

The West’s response to the 9/11 attacks is perceived to have brought out transatlantic differences in commitment to international law. This chapter situates those differences within the geopolitical ... More

The West’s response to the 9/11 attacks is perceived to have brought out transatlantic differences in commitment to international law. This chapter situates those differences within the geopolitical context of the Cold War of which, it is argued, the attacks signaled the passing away. It is further argued that the perception of terror is a function of the underlying nexus of popular agency and sovereignty that define the constitutional culture of the United States and Europe, respectively. It is not the response to terror that has brought about a difference in commitment to international law, but the passing away of a specific geopolitical horizon that has brought into view already existing differences. In conclusion, the chapter considers what recent jurisprudence from the E.U. Court might tell us about the possible development of a political dimension to the European legal order.Less

Moving in Circles: Kinetic Elite and Kinetic Proletariat in ‘End of the World’ Films

Ewa Mazierska

in Journeys on Screen: Theory, Ethics, Aesthetics

This chapter considers two science fiction films, Elysium (2013) by Neill Blomkamp and Snowpiercer (2013) by Joon-ho Bong, which  utilize the motif of journey and take us to the near future. What is ... More

This chapter considers two science fiction films, Elysium (2013) by Neill Blomkamp and Snowpiercer (2013) by Joon-ho Bong, which  utilize the motif of journey and take us to the near future. What is specific about them is that the journeys take place on Earth or near the Earth. In the future they present there is no escape from our planet; the Earth appears to be a limit even for the privileged. They convey a sense of the end of history, when there is nothing new to discover or conquer and the conflict is around finding the best place within the existing economic and social structures.  This investigation draws on the concepts of the ‘end times’, and ‘fast and slow lanes of social life’ and ‘kinetic elite’ to examine how mobility reproduces and exacerbates social inequalities caused by the hegemony of neoliberalism.Less

The Evangelical-Capitalist Resonance Machine

William E. Connolly

in Crediting God: Sovereignty and Religion in the Age of Global Capitalism

This chapter attempts to come to terms with this coincidence of opposites: the end of history according to secularization theory and the end of history according to a ... More

This chapter attempts to come to terms with this coincidence of opposites: the end of history according to secularization theory and the end of history according to a messianic reading of the history of salvation, with the result of a new openness of time. If the original Weberian thesis concerning vocation showed that salvation consisted, for the “Protestant ethic,” in a progress through an empty and calculable form of historical time, fundamentalism fast-forwards to the “end” of this saeculum or profane time as the time of salvation. The chapter takes up the question—which has recently been the object of much debate—between neoliberal, supply-side capitalism and U.S. evangelicalism. It identifies a common “ethos,” a shared “sensibility” between these unlikely partners, one that is characterized by what Nietzsche called the “spirit of revenge” and by resentment against those who are seen as caring for the future of the world, in opposition to those who sacrifice it for present profits or in view of the destruction of the world in the Second Coming.Less