Theory,Culture & Society

The weathered stone, collapsed lintels and hollow roofs of the ruin have long evoked a sense of pathos, standing as monuments to the disastrous contours of history and the possibility of alternative futures. In this article, I ask: What is the meaning of the ruin in the postcolonial context of the Caribbean? There are few physical ruins in the Caribbean, resulting in a feeling of lack: the architectural landscape fails to speak to the catastrophes of slavery and colonialism. Dub, a subgenre of Jamaican reggae, responds to this sense of deprivation. The dub producers of the 1970s decomposed reggae songs, creating ruinous constructions where crucial elements of the original version are missing. Fragmented dub compositions act as icons of the traumatic history of the Caribbean and a utopian pique to the imagination, forcing the listener to fill in the gaps and imagine the world remade.

This paper engages with the theme of disgrace from a Bourdieusian point of view. Starting out from a specific definition of ‘grace’ in terms of misrecognition, it goes on to consider some of the ways in which disgrace can be generated and some of the ways it can be handled by the disgraced party. While there are certainly many intra-field modalities of the genesis of disgrace, including violation of the rules of the game, the paper also emphasizes that disgrace can be generated by cross-field events, necessitating a switch of perspective from individuals in one field to individuals in multiple fields. This is also true of strategies for coping with disgrace.

This article offers a reading of Jean-Paul Sartre’s phenomenology in light of Jean-Luc Marion’s more recent phenomenology. It may seem odd to compare Sartre to Marion, given that Sartre is well-known for his avowed atheism and his account of intentionality while Marion is primarily known for his work on religious phenomena and counter-intentionality. However, this article shows that there are many ways in which Sartre anticipates Marion’s work on phenomenological reduction and excessive phenomenality. By reading Sartre’s phenomenology in light of Marion’s, and particularly Sartre’s analysis of the viscous slime in Being and Nothingness in relation to Marion’s account of ‘saturated phenomena’, this article presents a fresh interpretation of Sartre as a phenomenologist who has invaluable insights not only on the structures of consciousness and phenomenality, but also for the contemporary theoretical interest in the relationship between human and nonhuman entities.

The recent history of finance has been widely portrayed, by both critics and practitioners, as a story about risk. As pointed out by Mary Poovey, focusing on risk entails forgetting uncertainty. In this paper, I argue forgetting uncertainty leads to an inability to distinguish between rational and mystical modes of financial thinking. Using literary-theoretical analysis, I read three exemplary texts across each other: Frank Knight’s seminal 1921 treatise, Risk, Uncertainty, and Profit, which helped justify the modern corporate financial form; Elie Ayache’s 2010 The Blank Swan, a philosophical account of derivatives trading that exemplifies more recent developments in finance; and Don DeLillo’s 2013 Cosmopolis, a novel that remediates the structures of thought implied by the other texts’ philosophical commitments. This textual nexus allows me to explicate the characteristic form of financial mysticism, rendering it visible against claims that derivatives and financial theory have fully rationalized finance.

An anthropological perspective on biosemiosis raises important questions about sociality, ecology and communication in contexts that encompass many different forms of life. As such, these questions are important for understanding the problem of religion in relation to social theory, as well as understanding our collective, biosocial animal history and the development of human culture, as an articulation of power, on an evolutionary time scale. The argument presented here is that biosemiotics provides a framework for extending Talal Asad’s genealogical critique of religion to culture more broadly, providing an important perspective on power in relation to communication and in relation to the ‘supernatural’ attributes of language in a multi-species environment of signs and sign relationships.

I investigate the contemporary problem of obedience through an exploration of Michel Foucault and Étienne de La Boétie, showing how the former drew on the latter’s concept of voluntary servitude as a way of thinking through the paradoxical relationship between power, freedom and subjectivity. My argument is that Foucault’s theory of government as the ‘conduct of conduct’ may be understood as a reflection on the question of voluntary servitude. My aim here is twofold. First, it is to show that obedience is an ethical and political problem just as relevant today as it was in La Boétie’s time. Secondly, it is to suggest that voluntary servitude should be interpreted in an emancipatory way, as a problematic that reveals the ontological primacy of freedom and the fragility and instability of power. ‘Voluntary inservitude’ is something that can be expressed in acts of civil disobedience, and alternate modes of ethical conduct and association.