New essays from Mohamed-Salah Omri and Miriam Cooke follow up on Omri’s first paper and continue the work of The Tunisian Dossier, these two interested in the “re-packaging and marketing of a ‘moderate’ Islamist leader” and the building of the Qatari empire. We invite you to read and comment on these materials and to place your comments on this topic here and elsewhere on the site.
“The most famous slogan chanted in Tunisia in January, then in Egypt, Yemen, Libya, and Syria, is a reincarnation of opening lines of the poem “The Will of Life,” written in 1933 by the Tunisian poet Abou el-Kasem Chebbi (1909–1934), which now form the closing part of Tunisia’s national anthem and have been sung by some of the most influential Arab stars, written on protest banners, and shouted by students in the face of French and English occupiers and their own governments.” Continue reading, boundary 2 volume 39, number 1
Our friends in France–please try to be there, especially to hear Tony Bogues on The Collective Memory of Slavery in the US . . . .
Follow Stathis’ careful examination of “Idolatry, Prohibition, Unrepresentability,” here, for free download from the Duke UP site and from the last issue of boundary 2, Antinomies of the Postsecular.
This is a meditation on the assertion by Cornelius Castoriadis that “every religion is idolatry.” Idolatry here is configured beyond the conventional understanding of the idol as a concrete object of worship which works within the logic of representation. In monotheism, even the unrepresentable—or, perhaps, especially the unrepresentable—is an idol, an object of worship that is otherwise silenced by a language that claims to worship a nonobject. In this sense, the prohibition of images in monotheism (Bildverbot) is a highly sophisticated mode of idolatry.
Duke UP has its annual sale of books and journals. Great deals on some of b2‘s best and most popular issues .
On the 40th anniversary of Harold Bloom’s Anxiety of Influence, Dan O’Hara organized a one day meeting to discuss the merits and place of the book and Bloom’s theory. Here is link to the audio recording of the days events. Speakers included Dan O’Hara, Jonathan Arac, Susan Balée, and Paul Bové with lots of discussion.
Utrecht, April 15 – 17. Here’s the link.
With all that’s happening now to the European Project, nothing will be more timely and important than this special issue. Wlad Godzich and Anita Starosta have been working at it for some time and it’s all coming together now. So, watch this space for news of its availability. And please offer any thoughts you might have. And share, too.
Here is the video of those debates, with Don continuing his long meditations on America and President Obama.
