Ricardo L. Nirenberg, David Nirenberg
         Badiou's Number: A Critique of Mathematics as Ontology
         When an English translation of Being and Event appeared in 2005,
            Alain Badiou took the opportunity to reminisce about the initial
            French publication some twenty years before: "at that moment
            I was quite aware of having written a &lsquo;great' book of
            philosophy." He located that greatness in four
            "affirmations" and one "radical thesis."
Joseph DeLappe, David Simpson
         Visual Commemoration: The Iraqi Memorial Project
         Except under extraordinary circumstances, most of us do not look
            forward with any eagerness to our own deaths. That said, one of the
            few positive thoughts that can accompany the prospect of dying is
            the possibility of being remembered with affection or respect.
            Those of us living ordinary lives out of the public eye would
            expect to be lamented by our loved ones and commemorated in their
            living memories and perhaps by some modest headstone or plaque in a
            place that had meant something to us or to those we leave behind.
            Few of us anticipate a future in which there are no memories of who
            we were and no record of at least our names.
Sandra Laugier
         Introduction to the French Edition of Must We_Mean_What_We_Say?
         Must We Mean What We Say? is Stanley Cavell's first book, and, in a
            sense, it is his most important. It contains all the themes that
            Cavell continues to develop masterfully throughout his philosophy.
            There is a renewed usage of J. L. Austin's theory of speech acts,
            and, in the classic essay "The Availability of Wittgenstein's
            Later Philosophy," he establishes the foundations of a
            radical reading of Ludwig Wittgenstein (later taken up in The Claim
            of Reason), the connections among skepticism, acknowledgement, and
            Shakespearean tragedy (which one finds in Disowning Knowledge and,
            in a positive form, in Pursuits of Happiness); there is the
            reflection on the ordinary that runs throughout his later works (In
            Quest of the Ordinary and A Pitch of Philosophy); and, finally,
            there is the original aesthetic approach that defines Cavell's
            work, through his objects which range from William
            Shakespeare to Samuel Beckett and pass through Hollywood comedies
            and melodrama, and opera and, above all, through his style
            and method.
Susan Gubar
         In the Chemo Colony
         When I first agreed to undergo chemotherapy, I found myself haunted
            by Franz Kafka's parable "In the Penal Colony." The
            grisly short story was easy to translate into language pertinent to
            my ominous sense of the standard treatment of advanced (and thus
            probably incurable) ovarian cancer. About to be attached to a
            remarkable piece of apparatus, the condemned woman tastes fear
            rising off her tongue as she finds herself led forward into a maze
            of equipment, but is assured that the machinery should go on
            working continuously for six hours or six days. If anything were to
            go wrong, it would only be a small matter that could then be set
            right at once by the uniformed technician. So my variation began.
Stefan Helmreich
         What Was Life? Answers from Three Limit Biologies
         What is life? A gathering consensus in anthropology, science
            studies, and philosophy of biology suggests that the theoretical
            object of biology, "life," is today in transformation,
            if not dissolution. Proliferating reproductive technologies, along
            with genomic reshufflings of biomatter in such practices as
            cloning, have unwound the facts of life.
Gil Anidjar
         The Meaning of Life
         The starting point of this essay is that there is a contradiction
            at the heart of our current and hyperbolic understandings of life.
            To be more precise, on the one hand there is the historical novelty
            of biology as a modern science and set of technologies. On the
            other hand, life is simultaneously understood according to
            biological protocols that seem void of history.
Mark Seltzer
         The Official World
         The great microsociologist of social interaction rituals, Erving
            Goffman, notes, in the opening part of his underknown collection of
            essays Forms of Talk, this little moment in the "gamelike
            back-and-forth process" between a speaker and a respondent:
            "In this case, [the respondent] ignores the immediately
            preceding sentences to which he has probably not paid attention
            since his idea occurred to him, and he interrupts to present his
            idea despite the non-sequitur element of his sentence."
David Antin
         hiccups
Jerome Rothenberg
         A Round of Renshi and the Poet as_Other:_An_Experiment_in_Poesis
         I first heard about renshi from Hiromi Itō, a remarkable and
            justifiably celebrated Japanese poet and writer, who has also been
            our neighbor in Encinitas, California, for most of the last two
            decades. Her presence among us goes back to 1991 and to my first
            visit to Japan, a contact I hadn't had before but have been
            able to repeat six times since then.
Jennifer Scappettone
         Tuning as Lyricism: The Performance of Orality in_the_Poetics_of
            Jerome Rothenberg and David Antin
         Tuning might be the figure best suited to joining this pair of
            apparently incongruous texts, tuning in the sense defined by David
            Antin as "a negotiated concord or agreement based on
            vernacular physical actions with visible outcomes like walking
            together," as opposed to understanding, which is predicated,
            Antin contends, "on a geometrical notion of
            congruence."
Gertrud Koch
         Eulogy for Miriam Hansen
         Miriam and I were born in 1949, only a month apart. The world we
            were born to was deeply marked by then-recent history. Our
            playgrounds were the rubble fields in the streets and the extended
            woods between Frankfurt, where I grew up, and Darmstadt, where
            Miriam grew up, some twenty-five miles apart.
William Connolly
         Critical Response I -  The Complexity of Intention
         Ruth Leys starts with accounts that reduce emotion to a few simple
            states and emphasize the degree to which it is genetically wired
            (see Ruth Leys, "The Turn to Affect," 
            37 [Spring 2011]: 434 72). She then argues that other
            cultural theorists who emphasize the role of affect are driven in
            this direction, too, even when they wish to avoid such a
            trajectory. Much of the argument revolves around the charge of
            "anti-intentionalism" against us. Because of
            limitations of space, my response concentrates on my own thinking
            in this domain, though I suggest some lines of connection to other
            theories of affect. I will not always try to unpack Leys's
            views but will focus more on where mine deviate from her account of
            them.
Ruth Leys
         Critical Response II -  Affect and Intention: A_Reply_to_William_E.
            Connolly
         William Connolly is in error when he remarks that I begin my
            article with a discussion of scientific accounts that reduce the
            emotions to a few genetically wired categories and that I suggest
            that the cultural theorists who are interested in affect are driven
            in the same reductive direction (William E. Connolly, "The
            Complexity of Intention,"  37 [Summer 2011]:
            792 99).
Andrew F. March
         Critical Response - Speaking about Muhammad, Speaking for_Muslims
         In a recent article, Saba Mahmood has presented an intriguing
            account of what was at stake morally and emotionally for a large
            number of Muslims in the Danish cartoon controversy (Saba Mahmood,
            "Religious Reason and Secular Affect: An Incommensurable
            Divide?"  35 [Summer 2009]: 836 62). In
            doing so, she offers a framework for thinking about such instances
            that takes the place of accounts that portray the conflict as one
            between a liberal, secular commitment to free speech and a
            religious commitment to combating blasphemy.
