Age of the World Target

Chow Rey Chow

Description

Martin Heidegger once wrote that the world had, in the age of modern science, become a world picture. For Rey Chow, the world has, in the age of atomic bombs, become a world target, to be attacked once it is identified, or so global geopolitics, dominated by the United States since the end of the Second World War, seems repeatedly to confirm. How to articulate the problematics of knowledge production with this aggressive targeting of the world? Chow attempts such an articulation by probing the significance of the chronological proximity of area studies, poststructuralist theory, and comparative literature-fields of inquiry that have each exerted considerable influence but whose mutual implicatedness as postwar U.S. academic phenomena has seldom been theorized. Central to Chow's discussions is a critique of the predicament of self-referentiality-the compulsive move to interiorize that, in her view, constitutes the collective frenzy of our age-in different contemporary epistemic registers, including the self-consciously avant-garde as well as the militaristic and culturally supremacist. Urging her readers to think beyond the inward-turning focus on EuroAmerica that tends to characterize even the most radical gestures of Western self-deconstruction, Chow envisions much broader intellectual premises for future transcultural work, with reading practices aimed at restoring words and things to their constitutive exteriority.

Sujets

• History of philosophy
• Cultural studies
• Literary theory

Informations

• Publié par: Duke University Press
• Date de parution: 05 avril 2006
• Nombre de lectures: 0
• EAN13: 9780822387589
• Langue: English

Extrait

the age of the world target

next wave provocations

A series edited by Inderpal Grewal, Caren Kaplan, and Robyn Wiegman

the age of the world target

Self-Referentiality in War, Theory,

Duke University Press

and Comparative Work

rey chow

durham and london 2006

∫2006 Duke University Press

All rights reserved

Printed in the United States of

America on acid-free paper$

Designed by Katy Clove

Typeset in Scala by Keystone Typesetting, Inc.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication

Data appear on the last printed page of this book.

For Harry Harootunian

I

I

I

III

Preface

ix

Introduction. European Theory in America

The Age of the World Target:

Atomic Bombs, Alterity, Area Studies

The Interruption of Referentiality;

or, Poststructuralism’s Outside

45

25

1

contents

The Old/New Question of Comparison in Literary Studies:

A Post-European Perspective

Notes

Index

93

117

71

preface

I am indebted to the coeditors of Duke University Press’s new seriesNext Wave Provocations—Inderpal Grewal, Caren Kaplan, and Robyn Wiegman— for the opportunity to produce this book. I also want to take this oppor- tunity to thank all the readers and audiences in the field of Women’s Stud- ies who, over the years, have given my work consistently warm, intelligent, and open-minded reception. Their magnanimity makes me believe that it would be possible to explore my topics in the critical spirit of feminist inquiry even as the discussions involved do not immediately coincide with the objectification of women and genders. In that non-coincidence, then, lies the provocation of the following pages: what power relations of knowl- edge production can be articulated by a feminist cultural critic juxtaposing war, theory, and comparative work, without necessarily folding these events back into feminism’s self-referential frame? Indeed, as the chapters collec- tively ask, how might a critique of self-referentiality as such be part of an exercise to restore contemporary Western academic and intellectual phe- nomena to their constitutive exteriority, their relations with things that are repeatedly expelled and excluded (even in moments of radical Western self-deconstruction)? Di√erent parts of the book have benefited from the attention of col- leagues and friends—Iain Chambers, Jonathan Goldberg, Elizabeth Har- ries, Michael Moon, Naoki Sakai, Kenneth Surin, and Dorothea von Mücke —who at various stages o√ered my arguments space, time, comments,