Promotional Information

This follow-up volume to our book The Age of the World Target collects interconnected 'entangled' essays of major literary and cultural theorist Rey Chow. The essays take up ideas of violence, capture, identification, temporality, sacrifice, and victimhood, engaging with theorists from Derrida and Deleuze to Agamben and Ranciere. In the introduction Chow describes the concept of entanglement as a set of overlapping enfolded concerns, meetings not designed by affinity but pulled together into relation - a scene where new thinking might occur.

Table of Contents

Note on Translations vi
Acknowledgments vii
Introduction 1
1. When Reflexivity Becomes Porn: Mutations of a Modernist Theoretical Practice 13
2. On Captivation: A Remainder of the "Indistinction of Art and Nonart" (written with Julian Rohrhuber) 31
3. Fateful Attachments: On Collecting, Fidelity, and Lao She 59
4. Sacrifice, Mimesis, and the Theorizing of Victimhood 81
5. "I insist on the Christian dimension": On Foregiveness . . . and the Outside of the Human 107
6. American Studies in Japan, Japan in American Studies: Challenges of the Heterolingual Address 133
7. Postcolonial Visibilities: Questions Inspired by Deleuze's Method 151
8. Framing the Original: Toward a New Visibility of the Orient 169
Postscript. Intimations from a Scene of Capture 183
Index 187

About the Author

Rey Chow is Anne Firor Scott Professor of Literature at Duke University. She is the author and editor of numerous books, including The Age of the World Target, also published by Duke University Press.

Reviews

"Rey Chow is a superb stager of theoretical scenes. To see the film Lust, Caution, for example, grow ever more radiant as it is approached through a series of seductive theoretical frames is to find yourself in the presence of a dramatist of rare intellectual power. Chow's performances leave you 'captivated' - one of the theoretical terms she develops so unpredictably. I can't think of an academic who's been so impious or so enticing on the subject of domination and submission. It's a show you can't miss." Bruce Robbins, Columbia University "Few authors master the art of enticing readers with imaginative titles, and then fulfill their promises. Few manage to make a collection of disparate essays more attractive than a monograph. There is nothing really disparate, since Rey Chow is in the middle of it all. And she knows so much, and brings it all together: modernism, art, transnationalism, philosophy - she makes it all coherent and important. At the heart of the book is an ongoing, labyrinthine, but deeply engaging discussion and demonstration of montage - cutting and re-assembling as an aesthetic and ethic principle; the one through the other, and back." Mieke Bal, University of Amsterdam "In Rey Chow's own terms, entanglements are 'the linkages and enmeshments that keep things apart; the voidings and uncoverings that hold things together.' Chow's entanglements are prefaced by her rare command of and facility with the literature of contemporary critical theory. In turning her incisive scrutiny to a broad range of contemporary artifacts, she exemplifies the currency of theoretical rigor amid cultural conditions of radical new alignments and medial reconfigurations." - Henry Sussman, author of Around the Book: Systems and Literacy "These lucid, beautifully astute, and critically persuasive meditations and mediations open the folds, tangles, and paradoxical reversals lurking inside what we mean and might mean by victimhood, enslavement, capture, and captivation; the underside of Christian forgiveness, coloniality, and 'life'; and the outside of the human, visibility, utopianism, and the indistinctness of art and non-art. Articulated in relation to the writings of a swath of European figures - Brecht, Benjamin, Ranciere, Derrida, Agamben, Foucault, Deleuze, and others - Rey Chow's thought is wonderfully educative and provocative." - Brian Rotman, author of Becoming Beside Ourselves: The Alphabet, Ghosts, and Distributed Human Being