By Russell Kilbourn
Richard Grusin. Premediation: Affect and Mediality in America after 9/11. Palgrave Macmillan, 2010. 208 pp.
While visiting Amsterdam recently, I asked a friend if he had heard the weather report for that afternoon. He responded by calling up a ‘real-time’ satellite weather tracking website on his laptop, which showed us in convincing graphics that it would rain at 1:00 pm that afternoon.
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By Dilia Narduzzi
Sally Chivers. The Silvering Screen: Old Age and Disability in Cinema. University of Toronto Press, 2011. 213 pp.
Sally Chivers’s The Silvering Screen: Old Age and Disability in Cinema is an important volume because it examines “contemporary film to ask why claims of physical and mental ability are necessary for older actors – and older people more generally” (xii).
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By Mitchell M. Harris
Slavoj Žižek and John Milbank. The Monstrosity of Christ: Paradox or Dialectic? Ed. Creston Davis. MIT Press, 2009. 320 pp.
In The Monstrosity of Christ, Creston Davis, the book’s relatively unnoticed editor, brings together an unconventional pair of contemporary thinkers: the Hegelian, Lacanian, Marxist materialist philosopher Slavoj Žižek and his orthodox, Western Catholic theologian counterpart, John Milbank.
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By Ilya Parkins
Clare Hemmings. Why Stories Matter: The Political Grammar of Feminist Theory. Duke University Press, 2011. 272 pp.
Clare Hemmings’s Why Stories Matter: The Political Grammar of Feminist Theory is poised to prompt a major rethinking of feminist theory, and more importantly, of how we construct our histories of this field – and what this says about feminists’ intellectual investments and our futures.
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By Carolyn Sale
Caren Irr. Pink Pirates: Contemporary American Women Writers and Copyright. University of Iowa Press, 2010. 214 pp.
Straddling a quarter-century between Ursula Le Guin’s The Dispossessed (1974) and Leslie Marmon Silko’s Gardens in the Dunes (1999), Caren Irr’s Pink Pirates: Contemporary American Women Writers and Copyright (2010) has an exciting premise: it proposes to read the work of four novelists — Le Guin, Silko, Kathy Acker, and Andrea K.
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By Margrit Talpalaru
François Dosse. Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari: Intersecting Lives. Trans. Deborah Glassman. New York: Columbia University Press, 2010. 672 pp.
François Dosse’s account of the intellectual relationship between Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari starts from the thesis that the two played equal, albeit different, roles in the formulation of their influential works.
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By Brent Bellamy
Evan Calder Williams. Combined and Uneven Apocalypse. Zero Books, 2011. 264pp.
Evan Calder Williams’ Combined and Uneven Apocalypse tracks apocalyptic visions of the future back to their occluded origins, which for Williams is to say, back to the present moment. In different contexts, Teresa Heffernan and Slavoj Žižek have similarly asked: what if the apocalypse has already taken place, and we missed it?
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By Stephanie Clare
Diana Coole and Samantha Frost, eds. New Materialisms: Ontology, Agency, and Politics. Duke University Press, 2010. 336 pp.
If a sentence could summarize Diana Coole and Samantha Frost’s 2010 edited collection, it would be the editors’ claim that “materiality is always something more than ‘mere’ matter: an excess, force, vitality, relationality, or difference that renders matter active, self-creative, productive, unpredictable” (9).
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By Russ Leo
Melissa Gregg and Gregory J. Seigworth, eds. The Affect Theory Reader. Duke University Press, 2010. 416 pp.
“There is no single, generalizable theory of affect: not yet, and (thankfully) there never will be” (3): Melissa Gregg and Gregory J. Seigworth insist on this point, and The Affect Theory Reader demonstrates its critical import in contemporary debates concerning that most slippery term, “affect.” Seigworth and Gregg, under the artfully provocative heading “An Inventory of Shimmers,” attend in brief to a wide variety of theories of affect—from phenomenology, psychoanalysis, psychology, and post-Cartesian philosophies (read: Spinozism) to Marxism, feminism, science and technology studies, queer studies, and various histories of emotion.
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