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Responding to the ongoing \"objectal turn\" in contemporary humanities and social sciences, the essays inSubject Lessons present a sustained case for the continued importance- indeed, the indispensability-of the category of the subject for the future of materialist thought. Approaching matters through the frame of Hegel and Lacan, the contributors to this volume, including the editors, as well as Andrew Cole, Mladen Dolar, Nathan Gorelick, Adrian Johnston, Todd McGowan, Borna Radnik, Molly Anne Rothenberg, Kathryn Van Wert, and Alenka Zupancic-many of whom stand at the forefront of contemporary Hegel and Lacan scholarship-agree with neovitalist thinkers that material reality is ontologically incomplete, in a state of perpetual becoming, yet they maintain that this is the case not in spite of but, rather,because of the subject. Incorporating elements of philosophy, psychoanalysis, and literary and cultural studies,Subject Lessons contests the movement to dismiss the subject, arguing that there can be no truly robust materialism without accounting for the little piece of the Real that is the subject.

This article interprets Poe’s tales of perversity as Hegelian critiques of the antebellum culture of sentiment. Whereas progressive author-activists like Emerson and Stowe honored the benign impulses of the moral sentiment theorized by eighteenth-century philosophers, Poe, in such tales as The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym, “The Black Cat,” and “The Imp of the Perverse,” ventriloquized this discourse of “sensus communis” to insist instead upon the malignity of the so-called “sixth sense.” Replacing Adam Smith’s sympathetic “man within the breast” with Descartes’s “evil genius,” Poe held that the man within the breast is an agonistic “Arch-Fiend,” a demonic “imp” who prompts us to do violence to both self and other. Thus, although Poe was in many respects sympathetic to contemporaneous sentimental critiques of reason—critiques that challenged Kant’s association of morality with reason alone—he also sought to complicate their frequently monological understanding of affective morality. In so doing, Poe not only articulated a conservative skepticism regarding the putatively benign nature of humans; he also posited that liberal subjectivity is, paradoxically, self-annihilating—a point that renders the “imp of the perverse” a poetical correlative of the Hegelian process of “tarrying with the negative,” one illustrative of the cunning of unreason.

[...]continual interrogations represent what I am here terming Emerson's revisionings of the self, and I interpret these revisionings as quintessentially ethical maneuvers-ones which help to account for Emerson's frequent contradiction of himself not only from essay to essay but often within single essays themselves. Since Emerson's writing, much like Montaigne's, represents an ongoing attempt to, as he says of the wise man in \"History,\" \"describe to each reader . .. his unattained but attainable self\" (239), we should, therefore, read his essays as exercises in a type of performative skepticism.4 For Emerson, however, the relation to both self and other is not constituted through skepticism alone. [...]although Emerson is most often, and quite justifiably, read in light of his engagement with Kant, it is important to note that whereas Kant's deontological ethics depends solely upon obeying the categorical imperatives set forth by the law, thus forcing him to reject theories of the moral sentiment, for Emerson, as for Hume, Smith, and Herder, it is by identifying-sympathizing or empathizing-with those in pain, \"changing places in fancy with the sufferer\" (10) as Smith puts it, that we are called to fulfill our ethical obligation.\\n Cavell himself poignantly connects dialectical transcendence to dramatic catharsis when he posits that \"skepticism concerning other minds is not skepticism but is tragedy\" (Claim xxii-iii).

Challenging the long-held assumption that the early American literary and cultural imagination was ineluctably liberal in political orientation, this dissertation aims at tracing a genealogy of conservative thought throughout antebellum American letters—an anti-capitalist, communitarian tradition of conservatism skeptical about liberal individualism and perfectionism. Looking in particular at the writings of Edgar Allan Poe, Nathaniel Hawthorne, and Frank J. Webb, the project demonstrates that far from being universally championed, the ascendant liberal tradition in America was frequently contested during the American Renaissance. In so doing, it seeks to step outside the logic of liberal consensus that has long dominated the study of classic American literature, from the Myth and Symbol scholarship of the Cold War era to the identitarian and transnational scholarship of the current neoliberal era. Chapter One investigates the eighteenth-century tradition of Common Sense philosophy out of which early national and antebellum American conservatism developed. Tracing the influence that the commonsensism of Thomas Reid and Edmund Burke had upon the fiction of Charles Brockden Brown, the moral philosophy of Samuel Stanhope Smith and Levi Frisbie, and the literary criticism of Edward Tyrrel Channing, the chapter provides an overview of an early national conservative epistemology that influenced Poe, Hawthorne, and Webb. Chapter Two reads Poe's tales of perversity (The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym, “The Black Cat,” and “The Imp of the Perverse”) as critiques of the antebellum culture of sentiment, demonstrating that although Poe was sympathetic to sentimental critiques of reason, he nonetheless complicated progressives' frequently monological understanding of affective morality by placing not a benevolent “man within the breast” but, rather, a malignant “imp of the perverse” at the heart of subjectivity. Chapter Three reads Hawthorne's The Life of Franklin Pierce alongside The Blithedale Romance, contrasting both books' “monstrous skepticism” regarding antebellum reformism (especially abolitionism) with the liberal perfectionism informing Lincoln's Civil War speeches. Finally, Chapter Four reads Webb's The Garies and Their Friends both for its communitarian critique of liberal identitarianism (represented by the practice of “passing”) and its Marxist critique of laissez-faire morality, according to which sympathetic disinterestedness is an inevitable byproduct of economic self-interest.

The sublime has been the focus of a number of analyses of Herman Melville’s MobyDick to date. Though varied in their approach—some of them, like Barbara Glenn’s, attend to the vestiges of the Burkean sublime throughout the novel, while others, like Bryan Wolf’s, attend to the novel’s resonances with the Kantian sublime—what unites virtually all of them is their primary focus on the novel’s garrulous first-person narrator, Ishmael—and with good reason.¹ In one of the novel’s most pivotal chapters, “The Whiteness of the Whale,” Ishmael enumerates the various attributes of whiteness that render it a harbinger of

When it comes to materialism, the humanities and social sciences are currently undergoing a transition. From the 1980s up to the present, materialist inquiry across a number of different disciplines has been predominantly “culturalist” in nature.¹ Informed above all by Louis Althusser’s and Michel Foucault’s respective theories of ideological interpellation and discursive formation, cultural materialism holds that subjects are by-products of their respective cultural milieus—epiphenomena of socio-symbolic networks and matrices, ideological state apparatuses, and disciplinary techniques and epistemes. As Fredric Jameson long ago pointed out, the result of this deconstruction of “the autonomous bourgeois monad or ego or individual”