{"title":"Impossible Labour History: Solidarity Dreams and Antiblack Subsumption","authors":"Sara-Maria Sorentino","doi":"10.3366/olr.2024.0428","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.3366/olr.2024.0428","url":null,"abstract":"Labour, for capitalist critique, is not just slavery analogised; it is slavery materialised and expanded. Across the Marxist terrain, class struggle is presupposed by the struggle not to be a slave: the struggle of ‘the worker’ combats a slavery simultaneously more complex, because it is more mediated, and implicitly more emancipatory, because it materialises what has been called ‘objective possibility’. In this article, I track symptoms of the sublation of slavery by labour in the telling of ‘new labour history’ and counter with ‘objective impossibility’ as a more open and efficacious diagnostic for the slave’s political position. Though the sentences of United States labour history are alive with promises of solidarity, the field also remains an unstable landmine of antagonism, death, failure, limit. I argue that this labour history, despite its gestures towards the problem ‘race’, is grammatically caught in a web of desires that Sylvia Wynter names ‘the hegemony of the labour conceptual frame (i.e., the frame of the struggle against capitalism)’. The labour conceptual frame is hegemonic because the relation between race and class already presupposes a latent Marxist orientation to subjects, objects, consciousness, and history that renders perfect the slave’s objective impossibility and culminates, at the nexus of race and class, in an uncritical conversion of labour’s objective possibility into pure, unmediated possibility. This article tracks how the black worker remains stubbornly impossible throughout this theoretical convergence, bending the apparatus of labour history, the purchase of Marxist theory, and the salience of class-first politics through the excess of blackness to labour.","PeriodicalId":43403,"journal":{"name":"OXFORD LITERARY REVIEW","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.2,"publicationDate":"2024-07-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"141707513","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":4,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"On Drawing on Blackness: Theory and Crisis","authors":"Linette Park","doi":"10.3366/olr.2024.0425","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.3366/olr.2024.0425","url":null,"abstract":"","PeriodicalId":43403,"journal":{"name":"OXFORD LITERARY REVIEW","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.2,"publicationDate":"2024-07-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"141705612","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":4,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Word.Afterward: On the Blackness of Thoreau's Thinking","authors":"Jared Sexton","doi":"10.3366/olr.2024.0426","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.3366/olr.2024.0426","url":null,"abstract":"This essay surveys Henry David Thoreau’s extensive commentary on slavery and freedom in the 1840s and 50s, tracking the ways he toggles between the literal (i.e., the institutions of racial chattel and capital’s value-form resisted by civil disobedience and reconfigured by civil war) and the figurative (i.e., the existential and spiritual slavery evaded by the individual and collective attainment of ‘real values’), and how his natural philosophy at once illuminates and obscures the true stakes of his abolitionism and that of his fellow Transcendentalists. It notes that there is much to be said for and much yet to be done on the burgeoning intersectional critique of Transcendentalism, one that highlights both its strengths and limitations—or, at times, its outright problems—regarding race, nation, class, gender, sexuality et al. So too for the literature celebrating Thoreau ‘as much for his politics as his aesthetics,’ avowing how his ‘reform writings and lectures alone have earned him the reputation of being a social activist who didn’t rest on high-minded principles.’ The focus here is adjacent and complementary: to consider the prospects of a Black Transcendentalism that is coeval with and prior to Thoreau's articulation of the principles of ‘Elevation’ and ‘Emancipation.’ Beyond that, it speculates about something like the blackness of Thoreau’s own evolving relation to the political-intellectual movement of Transcendentalism itself.","PeriodicalId":43403,"journal":{"name":"OXFORD LITERARY REVIEW","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.2,"publicationDate":"2024-07-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"141694060","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":4,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"The Crisis of Truth","authors":"David Marriott","doi":"10.3366/olr.2024.0429","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.3366/olr.2024.0429","url":null,"abstract":"This essay explores various meanings of the word crisis ( krisis): in philosophy, law, and psychoanalysis; but also in relation to truth, law, judgement, and thinking. In various axioms—on truth and negation; and on being and reproduction—the essay asks why blackness is often excluded from crisis theory. I then go on to explore the unintended consequences and complications of this exclusion in respective works by Donald Winnicott (on tolerance and contraception), and then only through what is deemed to be neither an object nor a relation, neither a negation nor a phantasy. In the wake of these lacunae I conclude: blackness is an example of an unthought, and that this n’est pas cannot be thought, or determined, as krisis.","PeriodicalId":43403,"journal":{"name":"OXFORD LITERARY REVIEW","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.2,"publicationDate":"2024-07-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"141692487","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":4,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Blackness, Repetition, and Non-Philosophy","authors":"Anthony Paul Farley","doi":"10.3366/olr.2024.0427","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.3366/olr.2024.0427","url":null,"abstract":"This essay considers the spectacle of slavery that is death, and death only which continually persists as slavery-to-segregation-to-neosegregation or otherwise understood as a system of white-over-black. By observing the motionless movement of death perfecting itself (neither as life nor as historical time, progress, the human, or development), I argue that law makes death sovereign. The essay pursues this line of inquiry by considering a. capitalism as a system of spectacular relationships, a system of legal relationships, that places death atop everything and as a faith expressed in the gospel of legal method and its false promise of perpetual progress. And b. law as a structure analogous to the unconscious since it exists outside of time. In placing these two concerns together, it considers a sort of magical thinking of law—a make-believe realm in which rules appear to somehow govern themselves and an ‘us’ that seemingly masks over and absolves the system of white-over-black. Such banishment, whereby the system of white-over-black banished from the realm of the spectacle, is by that act repatriated to and given sovereignty over the world of the real, the world of historical time.","PeriodicalId":43403,"journal":{"name":"OXFORD LITERARY REVIEW","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.2,"publicationDate":"2024-07-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"141705351","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":4,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"An ‘Inhumanist’ School?","authors":"Timothy Clark","doi":"10.3366/olr.2023.0408","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.3366/olr.2023.0408","url":null,"abstract":"This review article offers an introductory overview of a distinctive broadly ‘deconstructive’ body of work which deserves to be more widely known. Two books in particular, by Claire Colebrook, Tom Cohen and J. Hillis Miller, are an especial focus, with their uncompromising readings of many of the assumptions and evasions in the environmental humanities. These are Theory and the Disappearing Future: On de Man, On Benjamin (London, Routledge, 2012), and Twilight of the Anthropocene Idols (Open Humanities Press, 2016).","PeriodicalId":43403,"journal":{"name":"OXFORD LITERARY REVIEW","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2023-07-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"69623213","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":4,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Even the Plague Journal: Everything Is Happening Extracts (1)","authors":"T. Morton, N. Royle","doi":"10.3366/olr.2023.0407","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.3366/olr.2023.0407","url":null,"abstract":"These are the first published extracts of a Covid-19 diary, co-written over two years (2020–22). The authors are concerned to both record and analyse the ways in which the Covid-19 pandemic altered the sense and experience of inside and outside, home and world, self and other. Grief—both personal and ecological—is uncircumventable. At the same time, the virus provokes critical thinking on how ‘another life is possible’. Literature and music are key forces in the authors' shared and interweaving reflections.","PeriodicalId":43403,"journal":{"name":"OXFORD LITERARY REVIEW","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2023-07-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"46882183","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":4,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"The House That Jacques Built (Goes up in Flames); or, Mal d’Écologie","authors":"Adam Koutajian","doi":"10.3366/olr.2023.0404","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.3366/olr.2023.0404","url":null,"abstract":"Although much headway has been made since the Derridean notion of the ‘general text’ was recuperated by eco-critics to imbue the philosophy of life with deconstructive rigor, the recent publication of Jacques Derrida’s Life Death seminar provides an opportunity for a renewed engagement. Parallel to his sustained elaboration of a non-dialectical reckoning with life (death) were a series of developments in the study of thermodynamic complex systems that similarly sought to demystify the pervasive vitalism within the life sciences. Derrida’s grammatological interrogation of the life/death dialectic takes the ‘textualization’ of genetic life as a starting point for articulating a logic of supplementarity that reorients our position in relation to our lived environments. ‘Writing’, however, cannot help but invoke the archive along with all its destructive impulses ( Destruktionstrieb). If the archive invokes the law of the house ( oikos), then the archive perhaps names the archive of the archive, which Derrida was all too aware of as the site for the annihilation of memory and the release of pure loss. A grammatological reading of this entropic textuality would thus consider how the irreducibility of absolute destruction might nevertheless offer a path ‘toward the incalculability of another thought of life.’","PeriodicalId":43403,"journal":{"name":"OXFORD LITERARY REVIEW","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2023-07-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"41268988","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":4,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
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