Henry Louis Gates, Jr.
         Critical Fanonism
         One of the signal developments in contemporary criticism over the
            past several years has been the ascendancy of the colonial
            paradigm. In conjunction with this new turn, Frantz Fanon has now
            been reinstated as a global theorist, and not simply by those
            engaged in Third World or subaltern studies. In a recent collection
            centered on British romanticism, Jerome McGann opens a discussion
            of William Blake and Ezra Pound with an extended invocation of
            Fanon. Donald Pease has used Fanon to open an attack on Stephen
            Greenblatt's reading of the Henriad and the interdisciplinary
            practices of the new historicism. And Fanon, and published
            interpretations of Fanon, have become regularly cited in the
            rereading of the Renaissance that have emerged from places like
            Sussex, Essex, and Birmingham.1
            My intent is not to offer a reading of Fanon to supplant these
            others, but to read, even if summarily, some of these readings of
            Fanon. By focusing on successive appropriations of this figure, as
            both totem and text, I think we can chart out an itinerary through
            contemporary colonial discourse theory. I want to stress, then,
            that my ambitions here are extremely limited: what follows may be a
            prelude to a reading of Fanon, but does not even begin that task
            itself.2
             
            1. See Jerome McGann, "The Third World of Criticism,"
            in Rethinking Historicism: Critical Readings in Romantic
            History,ed. Marjorie Levinson et al. (New York, 1989), pp. 85-107,
            and Donald Pease, "Toward a Sociology of Literary Knowledge:
            Greenblatt, Colonialism, and the New Historicism," in
            Consequences of Theory,ed. Barbara Johnson and Jonathan Arac
            (Baltimore, 1991).
            2. A properly contextualized reading of Fanon's Black Skin,
            White Masks,the text to which I most frequently recur, should
            situate it in respect to such germinal works as Jean-Paul
            Sartre's Réflexions sur la question Juive(Paris, 1946),
            Dominique O. Mannoni's Psychologie de la colonisation(Paris,
            1950), Germaine Guex's La Névrose d'abandon (Paris,
            1950), as well as many lesser known works. But this is only to
            begin to sketch out the challenge of rehistoricizing Fanon.
             
            Henry Louis Gates, Jr.is coeditor of Transition,a quarterly review,
            and the author of Figures in Black (1987) and The Signifying Monkey
            (1988), which received an American Book Award.
Gilles Deleuze
         The Conditions of the Question: What Is Philosophy?
         Perhaps the question "What is philosophy?" can only be
            posed late in life, when old age has come, and with it the time to
            speak in concrete terms. It is a question one poses when one no
            longer has anything to ask for, but its consequences can be
            considerable. One was asking the question before, one never ceased
            asking it, but it was too artificial, too abstract; one expounded
            and dominated the question, more than being grabbed by it. There
            are cases in which old age bestows not an eternal youth, but on the
            contrary a sovereign freedom, a pure necessity where one enjoys a
            moment of grace between life and death, and where all the parts of
            the machine combine to dispatch into the future a trait that
            traverses the ages: Turner, Monet, Matisse. The elderly Turner
            acquired or conquered the right to lead painting down a deserted
            path from which there was no return, and that was no longer
            distinguishable from a final question. In the same way, in
            philosophy, Kant's Critique of Judgment is a work of old age,
            a wild work from which descendants will never cease to flow.
            We cannot lay claim to such a status. The time has simply come for
            us to ask what philosophy is. And we have never ceased to do this
            in the past, and we already had the response, which has not varied:
            philosophy is the art of forming, inventing, and fabricating
            concepts. But it was not only necessary for the response to take
            note of the question; it also had to determine a time, an occasion,
            the circumstances, the landscapes and personae, the conditions and
            unknowns of the question. One had to be able to pose the question
            "between friends" as a confidence or a trust, or else,
            faced with an enemy, as a challenge, and at the same time one had
            to reach that moment, between dog and wolf, when one mistrusts even
            the friend.
             
            Gilles Deleuzewas professor of philosophy at the University of
            Paris VIII, Vincennes-St.-Denis, until his retirement in 1987.
            Among his books translated into English are the two-volume
            Capitalism and Schizophrenia (Anti-Oedipus [1983] and A Thousand
            Plateaus [1987]), the two-volume Cinema (The Movement-Image [1986]
            and The Time-Image [1989]), The Logic of Sense (1990), and
            Expressionism in Philosophy: Spinoza (1990). Daniel W. Smith is a
            doctoral candidate in philosophy at the University of Chicago. He
            is at work on a study of the philosophy of Deleuze, and is
            translating Deleuze's Francis Bacon: Logique de la
            sensation.Arnold I. Davidson, executive editor of Critical
            Inquiry,teaches philosophy at the University of Chicago and is
            currently Marta Sutton Weeks Fellow at the Stanford Humanities
            Center.
David Saunders and Ian Hunter
         Lessons from the 'Literatory': How to Historicise Authorship
         Authorship has proven a magnetic topic for literary studies and is
            now identified as an index of the current state of literary history
            and theory. The significance of this topic stems from a
            characteristic that literary criticism shared with the other human
            sciences: its drive to adopt a reflexive and self-critical posture
            towards its own central objects and concepts. By reflecting on
            authorship, criticism aspires not just to describe a literary
            phenomenon; it also wishes to bring to light the conditions that
            make this phenomenon possible and thinkable.
            At the heart of recent studies of authorship, no matter how
            historical their aspiration, we find a certain quasi-philosophical
            dialectic or play between authorship and its material conditions,
            between the author as an exemplary consciousness and the
            unconscious determinations that bring this consciousness into being
            and speak through it. The thematic name for this play is the
            &lsquo;formation of the subject.'. Our purpose is to provide
            a historical and theoretical argument against this conception of
            authorship and to outline an alternative approach.
             
            David Saundersand Ian Hunter teach in the Division of the
            Humanities, Griffith University, in Brisbane, Australia. Saunders
            is the author of Law and Authorship (forthcoming), and is coauthor
            with Hunter and Dugald Williamson of Book Sex: Obscenity Law and
            the Policing of Pornography (also forthcoming). Hunter is the
            author of Culture and Government: The Emergence of Literary
            Education (1988). His current project is a study of aesthetics as
            an ethos or way of life.
Brook Thomas
         Reflections on the Law and Literature Revival
         At a key moment in the 1988 presidential debates, Michael Dukakis
            claimed that the issue in the campaign was not ideology but
            competency. A major reason for Bush's victory was that
            Dukakis was most competent at creating the illusion that even
            George Bush was competent. Even so, a useful way to begin some
            reflections on the law and literature revival is to note that even
            a hardened political pragmatist like Bush felt that it was in his
            political interest to declare that the issue was indeed ideology.
            Bush's insistence on the importance of ideology is noteworthy
            for those interested in the humanities because it seems to much at
            odds with the conservative position in current cultural politics.
            Ideology might be the issue in political campaigns, but for the
            conservatives it has no role in the humanities, which properly
            understood are the repository of essential human values. As
            contradictory as this position might seem, it is actually quite
            consistent. The ideological function of government is to impart to
            its citizens the proper values, values that find expression in
            great humanistic documents. To turn the role of the humanities from
            that of guarding and defending these sacred documents to that of
            demystifying them as ideological products is to undermine the
            possibility of government performing its proper ideological
            function. Radicals in the current wars over culture thus stand
            accused of subverting the fundamental values that the country
            represents.
             
            Brook Thomas is professor of English at the University of
            California, Irvine. He is the author of Cross-Examinations of Law
            and Literature; Cooper, Hawthorne, Stowe, and Melville (1987) and
            The New Historicism and Other Old-Fashioned Topics (forthcoming).
Barbara Hoffman
         Law for Art's Sake in the Public Realm
         Contemporary public art is still in the process of defining its
            artistic and legal identity. Indeed to juxtapose the terms public
            and art is a paradox. Art is often said to be the individual
            inquiry of the sculptor or painter, the epitome of self-expression
            and vision that may challenge conventional wisdom and values. The
            term public encompasses a reference to the community, the social
            order, self-negation: hence the paradox of linking the private and
            the public in a single concept. A goal of any general or
            jurisprudential theory concerning government sponsorship or
            ownership of art in the public context must reconcile, through
            state institutions and law, this tension between art's
            subjectivity with hits potential for controversy and
            government's need to promote the public good.
            This essay critically examines and discusses existing contemporary
            legal doctrine and its failure to accommodate or even adequately
            define the issues and competing values at stake in the public art
            context. Such failure may be attributed in part to the fact that
            neither legal theory nor art policy have been inspired by the
            vision of or located in the broader context of a sociopolitical
            public realm.
             
            Barbara Hoffman practices arts and entertainment law in New York
            and is counsel to the College Art Association. She is a former
            professor of constitutional law at the University of Puget Sound,
            and she has served as chair of the Public Art Committee of the Art
            Law Committee of the Association of the Bar of the City of New
            York, and president of the Washington Volunteer Lawyers for the
            Arts.
Richard Serra
         Art and Censorship
         In the United States, property rights are afforded protection, but
            moral rights are not. Up until 1989, the United States adamantly
            refused to join the Berne Copyright Convention, the first
            multilateral copyright treaty, now ratified by seventy-eight
            countries. The American government refused to comply because the
            Berne Convention grants moral rights to authors. This international
            policy was and is incompatible with United States
            copyright law, which recognizes only economic rights. Although ten
            states have enacted some form of moral rights legislation, federal
            copyright laws tend to prevail, and those are still wholly economic
            in their motivation. Indeed, the recent pressure for the United
            States to agree, at least in part, to the terms of the Berne
            Convention came only as a result of a dramatic increase in the
            international piracy of American records and films.
            In September 1986, Senator Edward M. Kennedy of Massachusetts first
            introduced a bill called the Visual Artists Rights Act. This bill
            attempts to amend federal copyright laws to incorporate some
            aspects of international moral rights protection. The Kennedy bill
            would prohibit the intentional distortion, mutilation, or
            destruction of works of art after they have been sold. Moreover,
            the act would empower artists to claim authorship, to receive
            royalties on subsequent sales, and to disclaim their authorship if
            the work were distorted.4 This legislation would have prevented
            Clement Greenburg and the other executors of David Smith's
            estate from authorizing the stripping of paint from Several of
            Smith's later sculptures so that they would resemble his
            earlier and more marketable unpainted sculptures. Such
            moral rights legislations would have prevented a Japanese bank in
            New York from removing and destroying a sculpture by Isamu Noguchi
            simply because the bank president did not like it. And such
            legislation would have prevented the United States government from
            destroying Tilted Arc.
             
            4. Although this section appeared in the original version of
            Kennedy's bill, the current version provides for a study of
            resale royalties.
             
            Richard Serra is known for his large-scale site-specific works in
            landscapes, urban environments, and museums.
Jerome Christensen
         Spike Lee, Corporate Populist
         [W. J. T.] Mitchell focuses on the exemplary status of the Wall of
            Fame in Sal's Pizzeria, "an array of signed publicity
            photos of Italian-American stars in sports, movies, and popular
            music" (p. 892). He argues that the Wall "exemplifies
            the central contradictions of public art" (p. 893).
            "The Wall," he writes, "is important to Sal not
            just because it displays famous Italians but because they are
            famous Americans … who have made it possible for Italians to think
            of themselves as Americans, full-fledged members of the general
            public sphere" (p. 894). For Buggin' Out, the young
            black customer who angrily objects to the absence of photos of
            black people, the Wall "signifies exclusion from the public
            sphere" (p. 894). Although the streets are saturated with
            images of "African-American heroes," those
            "tokens of self-respect" are not enough for
            Buggin' Out, who wants "the respect of whites, the
            acknowledgment that African-Americans are hyphenated Americans,
            too, just like Italians" (p. 894). Mitchell astutely
            interprets the desired integration of the Wall as merely a symptom
            of a larger struggle for "full economic participation. As
            long as blacks do not own private property in this society,"
            he states, "they remain in something like the status of
            public art, mere ornaments to the public place, entertaining
            statues and abstract caricatures rather than full human
            beings" (p. 895). By foregrounding the economic implications
            of the film, Mitchell has surely engaged one of the dominant goals
            of the man who formed Forty Acres and a Mule Productions and who
            recently opened the store called Spike's Joint in New York
            City. Yet Mitchell's sympathetic account belies the
            countercurrents that trouble the ostensible progressiveness of
            Spike Lee's ambitious art.
             
            Jerome Christensen teaches in the English department at Johns
            Hopkins University. He is the author of books on Coleridge and Hume
            and one forthcoming on Byron. Currently, he is completing a study
            of the continued pertinence of the romantic turn of mind called
            Romantic Theory, Romantic Practice.
W. J. T. Mitchell
         Seeing Do the Right Thing
         I might as well say at the outset that, although I can return
            Christensen's compliment, and call his response
            "thoughtful," I am most interested in those places
            where the fullness of his thought, and particularly of his own
            language, has paralyzed his thought in compulsively repetitious
            patterns, and led him into interpretive maneuvers (the reduction of
            the film to a single "message"; the equation of this
            message with the views of particular characters in the film) that
            he would surely be skeptical about in the reading of a literary
            text. Even more interesting is the way Christensen's
            antipathy to the film, and the violence of the language in which eh
            expresses the antipathy, has prevented him from registering the
            plainest sensory and perceptual elements of the film text. In a
            rather straightforward and literal sense, Christensen has neither
            seen nor heard Do the Right Thing,but has screened a fantasy film
            of his own projection. To say Christensen has projected a fantasy,
            however, is not to say that his response is eccentric or merely
            private. On the contrary, it is a shared and shareable response, a
            reflex in the public imaginary of American culture at the present
            time. As such, it deserves patient and detailed examination.
             
            W. J. T. Mithcell,editor of ,is Gaylord Donnelly
            Distinguished Service Professor of English and art at the
            University of Chicago. His most recent book is Iconology: Image,
            Text, Ideology (1986).
Jonathan Crewe
         Gerald Bruns's Cavell
         Years ago, before Arnoldian poetic touchstones had become quite as
            unpopular as they are now, I and my fellow college undergraduates
            found a touchstone of sorts in a poem by Edna St. Vincent Millay.
            The cherished line read:
                           Plato alone looked upon beauty bare.
            For us, this line became the touchstone, not of poetic sublimity
            but of being poetic, which is to say of attaining a consummate
            inane pretentiousness in poetic diction and intellectual attitude
            alike. Millay, we thought, had done it once and for all.
            Today, of course, nobody has any use for touchstones, and if we
            erstwhile undergraduates were to reread Millay we might well come
            away feeling ashamed of our former arrogance, juvenile conceit, and
            no doubt sexism. Still, Millay's line has a memorably
            vacuous, oracular ring to it. That is the ring I keep hearing in
            Gerald Bruns's "Stanley Cavell's
            Shakespeare" ( 16 [Spring 1990]: 612-32).
            "Cavell … alone perhaps with Martin Heidegger, has a sense of
            what is at stake in this quarrel [between philosophy and
            poetry]" (p. 612). "Exposure to reality is what happens
            in Hamlet,although it occurs nowhere (anywhere, in any literature)
            so powerfully as in Lear" (p. 615). "This was the later
            Heidegger's idea: poetry … puts everything out of the
            question" (p. 615). "The face, like the world (as the
            world), requires me to forego knowing" (p. 620).
            "Proving the existence of the human proved to be a separate
            problem that did not get clearly formulated until Mary
            Shelley's Frankenstein and E. T. A. Hoffmann's
            &lsquo;The Sandman'" (p. 614). Philosophers and
            cultural historians may make what they will of these vatic
            disclosures, but it may strike those who study Shakespeare that
            Bruns is recycling lugubrious clichés (of the type currently
            favored by the National Endowment for the Humanities) about Hamlet
            and Lear while simultaneously upping the philosophical ante for
            them. This, however, is roughly the procedure that Bruns wants to
            pass off as Cavell's.
             
            Jonathan Crewe,professor of English at Dartmouth College, is the
            author of Trials of Authorship: Anterior Forms and Poetic
            Reconstruction from Wyatt to Shakespeare (1990).
James Conant
         On Bruns, on Cavell
         Gerald Bruns's "Stanley Cavell's
            Shakespeare" ( 16 [Spring 1990]:612-32) is a
            consistently sympathetic and thoughtful response to Cavell's
            difficult essays on Shakespeare.1 Nevertheless, while Bruns's
            exposition of Cavell's thought places it in a pertinently
            complex region of philosophical and literary concerns, it is
            hampered by its relative isolation from much of Cavell's
            other work and from certain abiding conflicts within contemporary
            philosophy which inform that work. The resultant misunderstandings
            of Cavell's thought are perhaps as inevitable as they are
            widespread a function of the way in which the modern American
            university carves up and compartmentalizes the world of humanistic
            learning and are on the verge of becoming entrenched among
            commentators on his work. Much of Cavell's work has been
            concerned (as has Bruns's, I gather) to resist some of the
            costs of this process of compartmentalization or
            professionalization. The problems this resistance poses for the
            reception of the work are perhaps nowhere more pervasive than in
            the case of Cavell's collection of essays on Shakespeare,
            Disowning Knowledge in Six Plays of Shakespeare,in part because of
            Cavell's sense of the figure of Shakespeare, of what this
            corpus of writing represents. In light of, and in appreciation of,
            Bruns's serious and resourceful effort to get Cavell's
            thought on these matters straight, it is worth trying to get it
            clearer.
             
            James Conant,assistant professor of philosophy at the University of
            Pittsburgh, is currently a fellow at the Michigan Society of
            Fellows. His "Kierkegaard, Wittgenstein and Nonsense"
            is included in Pursuits of Reason: Essays in Honor of Stanley
            Cavell (1991).
Gerald L. Bruns
         Reply to Crewe and Conant
         I am impressed by how angry Jonathan Crewe is, but I found his
            remarks confused and unclear and so I'm uncertain how to
            reply. Whatever the matter it, he wants "to forestall a sense
            of academic obligation on anyone's part (for example, on the
            part of students) to work back to Cavell through Bruns" (p.
            612). God knows this might be a good idea, judging from what James
            Conant says.
            Conant's criticisms are directed at the section of my paper
            called "The Moral of Skepticism," which he cannot help
            wanting to rewrite, since he has a much more intimate grasp of
            Cavell's thinking than I have. I imagined myself on the
            outside of Cavell's texts, trying to characterize them in a
            certain way, not on the inside, giving an account of their genesis.
            Obviously my paper is neither philosophy nor literary criticism but
            a crossdressing of the two that is bound to make someone like Crewe
            bite his teeth. I appreciate Conant's forbearance.
             
            Gerald L. Bruns is William and Hazel White Professor of English and
            Comparative Literature at the University of Notre Dame. His most
            recent book is Heidegger's Estrangements: Language, Truth,
            and Poetry in the Later Writings(1989).
Toril Moi
         Reading Kristeva: A Response to Calvin Bedient
         I must confess that I found [Calvin] Bedient's account of
            Kristeva's theories quite shocking. Since, on the whole,
            critical essays rarely upset me, my own reaction was quite puzzling
            to me. What is there in Bedient's prose to unsettle me so? It
            certainly can't be his style or tone: he has produced a
            perfectly even-tempered essay. Refraining from imputing selfish or
            dishonest motives to the theorist he wants to disagree with,
            Bedient never argues ad feminam,and takes much trouble lucidly to
            explain why he disagrees with Kristeva. There is every reason to
            commend him for his honest style of argumentation. There can be no
            doubt that his essay is produced purely by his concern to take
            issue with a theory he truly believes to be incapable of accounting
            for the way in which poetry and particularly modern
            poetry actually works.
            What causes my unease must therefore be something else. It may of
            course be the fact that Bedient's account of Kristeva's
            theory of language in Revolution of Poetic Language is wrong. His
            is not a somewhat skewed, or slanted, or one-sided presentation of
            her views, but as far as I can see a total misreading.
            Briefly put, Bedient's mistake consists in taking
            Kristeva's account of the sentence process in language for a
            complete theory of poetic language.He does not seem to have noticed
            Kristeva's account of the symbolic, her repeated insistence
            that language the signifying process is the product of
            a dialectical interaction between the symbolic and the semiotic, or
            even her definition of the "thetic."
             
            Toril Moi,professor of comparative literature at the University of
            Bergen and professor (adjunct) at Duke University, is the editor of
            The Kristeva Reader (1986) and the author of Sexual/Textual
            Politics: Feminist Literary Theory (1985). Her most recent book is
            Feminist Theory and Simone de Beauvoir (1990).
Calvin Bedient
         How I Slugged It out with Toril Moi_and_Stayed_Awake
         [Toril] Moi says that my misunderstanding of Kristeva lies in
            taking the "semiotic process" (more specifically, what
            Kristeva calls "the drives borne by vocalic or kinetic
            differences")1 for the whole of "poetic
            language": "He does not seem to have noticed
            Kristeva's account of the symbolic, her repeated insistence
            that language the signifying process is the product of
            a dialectical interaction between the symbolic and the
            semiotic" (p. 639). But how could I not notice what Kristeva
            herself reiterates over and over? Not notice that "textual
            practice is that most intense struggle toward death, which runs
            alongside and is inseparable from the differentiated binding of its
            charge in a symbolictexture" words I quoted on page 814
            (emphasis added)? The reader will find in my essay many other
            statements (both mine and Kristeva's) to the same effect. I
            noticed, I noticed, but Moi did not notice I noticed. She's
            so certain Kristeva's book is difficult that she may
            underestimate the ability of others to grasp its essential points.
            But despite the pine-knot paroxysms of grotesqueness in the
            Englished version (samples of which so repulsed the editor who
            commissioned the essay that he rejected it), Kristeva makes herself
            understood well enough through her sharp logicality and by dint of
            repetition.
             
            Calvin Bedient is professor of English at the University of
            California, Los Angeles. His most recent book is He Do the Police
            in Different Voices (1986), a study of The Waste Land.
Heinz Ickstadt
         A Letter from Berlin
         The last kilometers of the Berlin Wall were finally torn down
            during this last week before Christmas, but mentally, socially,
            economically it continues to exist, and for some in what used to be
            East Berlin (and I am not even thinking of hard-liners and former
            party members) it isn't so clear anymore whether the actual
            wall made of concrete wasn't easier to bear. To be sure, the
            wall that once separated the largest cities in each of the two
            Germanys is still present as a scar of empty space; but distances
            have shrunk, and old views of the city have been
            reestablished at least geographically, Berlin, no doubt, is
            slowly becoming one again. However, the social and economic
            differences as well as the mental walls erected in forty years of
            separate existence still divide the eastern from the western part.
            Now that the euphoria of unification has finally subsided, gains
            and losses are being counted, and many East Germans are beginning
            to ask themselves whether the price they paid for political freedom
            was not too high after all. The moral and economic bankruptcy of
            the old regime daily becomes more apparent: its structures of
            corruption and repression, its system of total surveillance that
            had become a part of everyday life and made use of even those whom
            the state had marginalized. And yet that system, corrupt as it was,
            had also provided a measure of stability, a predictable life that,
            although it had restricted individual choice, can now evoke
            nostalgic memories of warmth and security.
             
            Heinz Ickstadt is professor of American literature at the John F.
            Kennedy Institute for North American Studies at the Free University
            in Berlin. He has written and edited books on Hart Crane, Thomas
            Pynchon, and the 1930s, and has published widely on American
            literature and culture in the late nineteenth century, American
            modernism, postmodern fiction, and on the relation of literature
            and painting. A book on the changing functions of the American
            novel, coauthored with Winfried Fluck, is forthcoming.
