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The world of international politics has recently been rocked by a seemingly endless series of scandals involving auditory surveillance: the NSA’s warrantless wiretapping is merely the most sensational example of what appears to be a universal practice today. What is the source of this generalized principle of eavesdropping?All Ears: The Aesthetics of Espionage traces the long history of moles from the Bible, through Jeremy Bentham’s “panacoustic\" project, all the way to the intelligence-gathering network called “Echelon.\" Together with this archeology of auditory surveillance, Szendy offers an engaging account of spycraft’s representations in literature (Sophocles, Shakespeare, Joyce, Kafka, Borges), opera (Monteverdi, Mozart, Berg), and film (Lang, Hitchcock, Coppola, De Palma). Following in the footsteps of Orpheus, the book proposes a new concept of “overhearing\" that connects the act of spying to an excessive intensification of listening. At the heart of listening Szendy locates the ear of the Other that manifests itself as the originary division of a “split-hearing\" that turns the drive for mastery and surveillance into the death drive.

This book investigates what Bataille, in \"The Pineal Eye,\" calls mythological representation: the mythological anthropology with which this unusual thinker wished to outflank and undo scientific (and philosophical) anthropology. Gasché probes that anthropology by situating Bataille's thought with respect to the quatrumvirate of Schelling, Hegel, Nietzsche, and Freud. He begins by showing what Bataille's understanding of the mythological owes to Schelling. Drawing on Hegel, Nietzsche, and Freud, he then explores the notion of image that constitutes the sort of representation that Bataille's innovative approach entails. Gasché concludes that Bataille's mythological anthropology takes on Hegel's phenomenology in a systematic fashion. By reading it backwards, he not only dismantles its architecture, he also ties each level to the preceding one, replacing the idealities of philosophy with the phantasmatic representations of what he dubs \"low materialism.\" Phenomenology, Gasché argues, thus paves the way for a new \"science\" of phantasms.

The Naked Communist argues that the political ideologies of modernity were fundamentally determined by four basic figures: the world, the enemy, the secret, and the catastrophe. While the \"world\" names the totality that functioned as the ultimate horizon of modern political imagination, the three other figures define the necessary limits of this totality by reflecting on the limits of representation. The book highlights the enduring presence of these figures in the modern imagination through detailed analysis of a concrete historical example: American anti-Communist politics of the 1950s. Its primary objective is to describe the internal mechanisms of what we could call an anti- Communist \"aesthetic ideology.\" The book thus traces the way anti-Communist popular culture emerged in the discourse of Cold War liberalism as a political symptom of modernism. Based on a discursive analysis of American anti-Communist politics, the book presents parallel readings of modernism and popular fiction from the 1950s (nuclear holocaust novels, spy novels, and popular political novels) in order to show that, despite the radical separation of the two cultural fields, they both participated in a common ideological program.

Since psychoanalysis is one of the most prominent theoretical discourses that have always insisted on the difference between truth and knowledge, this articles will start by evoking a well-known moment of its history involving a significant act of translation. The argument is the following: James Strachey's invention of the term \"parapraxis\" sometime around 1916 constitutes an event of translation.

The Naked Communist argues that the political ideologies of modernity were fundamentally determined by four basic figures: the world, the enemy, the secret, and the catastrophe. While the \"world\" names the totality that functioned as the ultimate horizon of modern political imagination, the three other figures define the necessary limits of this totality by reflecting on the limits of representation. The book highlights the enduring presence of these figures in the modern imagination through detailed analysis of a concrete historical example: American anti-Communist politics of the 1950s. Its primary objective is to describe the internal mechanisms of what we could call an anti-Communist \"aesthetic ideology.\" The book thus traces the way anti-Communist popular culture emerged in the discourse of Cold War liberalism as a political symptom of modernism. Based on a discursive analysis of American anti-Communist politics, the book presents parallel readings of modernism and popular fiction from the 1950s (nuclear holocaust novels, spy novels, and popular political novels) in order to show that, despite the radical separation of the two cultural fields, they both participated in a common ideological program.

The article argues for a revaluation of the politics of traumatic historical narratives by reconsidering the structure of the Freudian death drive. It claims that the drive is best understood in terms of the mutual imbrication of nostalgic and traumatic repetitions. This theoretical argument provides the foundation for an analysis of the structure of the so-called “post-Communist subject.” Relying on Giorgio Agamben's eschatological definition of photography, the article concludes with a discussion of a photograph that captures a symbolically significant moment of the 1956 Hungarian revolution: the destruction of Stalin's statue in Budapest on October 23, 1956.

The starting point for this article is a Greek sentence by the one whom Plato called \"father Parmenides,\" which is so important that it can serve as an exemplum. The goal of this essay is to show that this sentence is the product of a series of interpretive operations whose final peak is and is nothing but translation. The most appropriate name for this series of operations is fixion, spelled with the Lacanian x to emphasize that the fact is a fabrication, the factum is a fictum one decides to fix. Translation--in this case, the translation of this sentence by Parmenides--regularly (as a rule and every time) violates the principle of noncontradiction to the degree that it must account for ambiguities and homonymies.

The relation of modernism to immigrant literatures should not be conceived in terms of an opposition between universalistic and particularistic discourses. Rather, we should explore what can be called a modernist transnationalism based on a general universalist argument. Two examples of this transnationalism are explored side by side: Ezra Pound's and Anzia Yezierska's definitions of the aesthetic act in terms of translation. The readings show that the critical discourses of these two authors are structured by a belief in universalism while showing opposite possibilities, both generated by modernist transnationalism. The essay concludes that we now need to interpret the cultures of modernism in their variety as contesting political universalities.