Restating Things, Again

Abstract

Restating Things, Again John Mowitt (bio) and Cesare Casarino (bio) Jochen Schulte-Sasse, in memoriam Difference and repetition: such is, at best, the celebration of an anniversary, of a recurrence. This special issue of Cultural Critique marks a recurrence and aspires to repetition with difference: it collects the papers delivered at the symposium on “The State of Things” that took place at the University of Minnesota in October 2015 to celebrate the thirtieth anniversary of the foundation of the journal. We celebrated with a symposium, an event that precisely in restating and restaging the inexhaustible encounter between historical materialism and psychoanalysis effectively predicted our appeal here to the friction within and between difference and repetition. Recall that Plato’s remarkable dialogue “The Symposium” begins with a street scene. Let’s be more precise. It is a moment of interpellation. Apollodorus, interrupted in medias res, reports that while out earlier Glaucon had hailed him demanding to know about the dinner that had “recently” occurred at Agathon’s during which guests, including Socrates and Aristophanes, discoursed about love. Plato has Glaucon call out: “Hey, I say, Apollodorus, can’t you wait for me?” Barely slowing, Apollodorus somewhat breathlessly explains that Glaucon is deluded, having apparently forgotten that the event in question took place years earlier and that what he, Apollodorus, knows about it he has learned second or third hand. It is common now to point to the self-defeating deployment of myth by Plato as evidence of the tragic entanglement of philosophy and literature, but if we insist on the peculiar opening of the symposium—the spirals of reported speech, the echoing delays—it is because we want to remind ourselves that what has been called “literary technique” operates within and on philosophy in far more tenacious ways. In this spirit one might also wish to point, within “The Symposium” [End Page 1] in particular, to the morphological cliché of Diotima—whose Irigarayan affirmation of the “between two” effectively crashes what is otherwise a stag party. But why linger over such details? When one of us assumed his position at Minnesota in 1985 (having visited earlier), this was the entanglement in which he found himself. It was a situation about which he was largely quiet—quiet until the advent of Cultural Critique, an academic journal launched by his colleague in English, Donna Przybylowicz, and her partner Abdul Jan-Mohamed. As is typical of such inaugural gestures, it was tied to an international conference convened at the University of Minnesota during which many provocative papers were read and debated, several of which later appeared in the first issue of the journal. Listening to these, and even more importantly, witnessing new colleagues listening to them, made it less daunting to whisper of such entanglements, to take them seriously as more than personal failings. Or, to suddenly recognize the hidden rigors of personal failings. Whatever. The point is that in tandem with the Theory and History of Literature series at the University of Minnesota Press, Cultural Critique, this indestructible orange but black box, was pinging the hope that led several of us to this university, including the other one of us, who had started reading the journal in the late 1980s while struggling with similar entanglements as a graduate student and who eventually made his way westward and landed at the University of Minnesota first and then onto the flight deck of the journal itself. Another reason for lingering over the textual details of “The Symposium” now suggests itself–namely, to invoke Michel Foucault’s invocation of René Magritte: this was not a conference, and these are not conference proceedings. If Cultural Critique was born with a conference, the symposium commemorating this birth thirty years later was an attempt to do something different: to commemorate publicly not exactly love (though love did come up) but the coming together of wisdom lovers to think, in common, about the “state of things.” This thinking was a bit more staged than the event at Agathon’s—we did task particular individuals with stirring our thought—but the goal remained the same, at once serious yet festive (in all its connotations). When not translated as “The Symposium” this...