Tom Cohen is professor of literature and media studies at the University at Albany, S.U.N.Y, and co-editor of the Critical Climate Change series at Open Humanities Press. His last book, co-authored with Claire Colebrook and J. Hillis Miller, was Twilight of the Anthropocene Idols (2016).
Today, more than ever before, to think one’s time, especially when one takes the risk or chance o... more Today, more than ever before, to think one’s time, especially when one takes the risk or chance of speaking publicly about it, is to register, in order to bring it into play, the fact that the time of this very speaking is artificially produced. It is an artifact. In its very happening, the time of this public gesture is calculated, constrained, “formatted,” “initialized” by a media apparatus (let’s use these words so that we can move quickly.) This would deserve nearly infinite analysis. Derrida, Artifactualities
If literature, T.S. Eliot said, is a “mug’s game,” one might update such a claim by noting that c... more If literature, T.S. Eliot said, is a “mug’s game,” one might update such a claim by noting that critical theorizing involves a kind of mugging. This would explain why a pairing of critical voices might not hold between them any dialog at all and would even suppress a veritable arena of contest. That would make such an encounter dialogic in another sense, a dialogism that was already at work in Plato, Bakhtin, and de Man, a dialogue that does not pretend to “communication” but reveals a series of traps and anticipatory pre-emptions. First, I would like to congratulate Ranjan Ghosh on his undeniable genius in crafting a “dialog” with Hillis Miller—as if to say across “continents,” as if to say East / West (but not quite)—that manages, somewhat incidentally, to put on display Hillis Miller’s current writings in a new and radically contemporary adaption. It is irrelevant that Ghosh’s genius is less that of critic or theorist than that of a marketer and academic strategist, which makes his own contribution the more remarkable. I would stipulate, at once, that I read this volume as of its moment, that is, of the Trump era, without the latter’s abrupt shifts, reversals, and active de-coupling or demolition of referents. However, the reason I hesitate in my response is my nagging suspicion that I am being played, that this was not so much a gag as a “globalist” version of what the Sokal affair did for critical theory buffs at the time, who were sniffing about too much in the sciences. Ow. Sokal’s Trojan text trolled the critical or cultural studies output with a resentful eye, miming what it desired to hear or see, bloating, mimicking, passing. If a troll army or some software were to hologram a product for the internationalist academic crowd—postpost-colonial, defunded and on the defense—it might look something like what Ghosh ostensibly puts on offer. For the Trump era of reality TV “reality,” in which the real has become bad literature, algorithmic memes, and mnemo-trances, Miller has reason to say that the question of “literature” matters. And Miller blithely sails off into the ecocidal horizons of climate chaos, where the materiality of inscriptions collude with mass extinction
The ban today on “population talk” (Diana Coole) by the liberal western traditions as unethical h... more The ban today on “population talk” (Diana Coole) by the liberal western traditions as unethical has the inverse effect in a post-‘tipping point’ world defined by future population culls of peripheries. It turns out that this ban not only advances the outcome the liberal tradition would most avoid but blinds it from seeing what is now underway before its eyes—a ‘species split’ engineered by the hyper-elite with one eye to the coming climate catastrophism. It turns out that the ban conceals that the western anthropos had from the first been defined as arche-eugenicist and extinctivist. This in turn illuminates the puzzling non-response of global leadership to the prospect of irreversible ecocide.
A TRADEMARK OF JACK BENNY'S COMIC ROUTINE was when he paused, resting his chin on his hand, a... more A TRADEMARK OF JACK BENNY'S COMIC ROUTINE was when he paused, resting his chin on his hand, and uttered the word "Well!" It spoke for itself, and this by not speaking, by accelerating numbing possibilities that would be modified or modulated by an expression mixing surprise, pique, scandal, astonishment, social offense, and cognitive shock-and an awareness that could erase each in turn. Spoken in a monologue, there was no sure way to isolate any contextual ingredient or social response that informed it. A resistance to semantic determinacy left the utterance, we might say, wild--dissolving the particulars of any preceding narrative, overturning the gender of its speaker. It was often embedded in an ambisexual facial pucker, which made its speaker at once seem vulnerable and incapacitated, victimized before an audience itself being handled or seduced.
This essay does not ask what Derrida's use for ‘environmentalism’ might be but rather how the... more This essay does not ask what Derrida's use for ‘environmentalism’ might be but rather how the geomorphic logics released by a dawning era of climate change diagnose what is called ‘deconstruction’ today.
This essay examines Hillis Miller's recent critical use of terms from physics (black holes) a... more This essay examines Hillis Miller's recent critical use of terms from physics (black holes) and mathematics (the zero) as a theoretical strategy that recasts our understanding of his performative aims. It proposes an other Miller to the familiar explicator and pedagogic disseminator of literary deconstruction he is often taken for, putting his work in contact not only with Benjaminian practices but coming horizons in global esthetic politics.
Are “Culture Studies” doomed by the coming ecocide? Or have they already become or made themselve... more Are “Culture Studies” doomed by the coming ecocide? Or have they already become or made themselves zombies in academia and in the struggles against our possible extinction as a species? Are they complicit in that ecocide? What, if anything can be done to remedy or ameliorate the degradation of the planet’s economies, environments and intellectual life? Instead of looking backwards to the past or only studying cultures in the now conventional sense, we may need to look with urgency at what humanity has done to its world in new ways.
The era of climate change involves the mutation of systems beyond 20th century anthropomorphic mo... more The era of climate change involves the mutation of systems beyond 20th century anthropomorphic models and has stood, until recent-ly, outside representation or address. Understood in a broad and critical sense, climate change concerns material agencies that im-pact on biomass and energy, erased borders and microbial inven-tion, geological and nanographic time, and extinction events. The possibility of extinction has always been a latent figure in textual production and archives; but the current sense of depletion, decay, mutation and exhaustion calls for new modes of address, new styles of publishing and authoring, and new formats and speeds of distri-bution. As the pressures and re-alignments of this re-arrangement occur, so must the critical languages and conceptual templates, po-litical premises and definitions of ‘life. ’ There is a particular need to publish in timely fashion experimental monographs that redefine the boundaries of disciplinary fields, rhetorical invasions, the ...
Today, more than ever before, to think one’s time, especially when one takes the risk or chance o... more Today, more than ever before, to think one’s time, especially when one takes the risk or chance of speaking publicly about it, is to register, in order to bring it into play, the fact that the time of this very speaking is artificially produced. It is an artifact. In its very happening, the time of this public gesture is calculated, constrained, “formatted,” “initialized” by a media apparatus (let’s use these words so that we can move quickly.) This would deserve nearly infinite analysis. Derrida, Artifactualities
If literature, T.S. Eliot said, is a “mug’s game,” one might update such a claim by noting that c... more If literature, T.S. Eliot said, is a “mug’s game,” one might update such a claim by noting that critical theorizing involves a kind of mugging. This would explain why a pairing of critical voices might not hold between them any dialog at all and would even suppress a veritable arena of contest. That would make such an encounter dialogic in another sense, a dialogism that was already at work in Plato, Bakhtin, and de Man, a dialogue that does not pretend to “communication” but reveals a series of traps and anticipatory pre-emptions. First, I would like to congratulate Ranjan Ghosh on his undeniable genius in crafting a “dialog” with Hillis Miller—as if to say across “continents,” as if to say East / West (but not quite)—that manages, somewhat incidentally, to put on display Hillis Miller’s current writings in a new and radically contemporary adaption. It is irrelevant that Ghosh’s genius is less that of critic or theorist than that of a marketer and academic strategist, which makes his own contribution the more remarkable. I would stipulate, at once, that I read this volume as of its moment, that is, of the Trump era, without the latter’s abrupt shifts, reversals, and active de-coupling or demolition of referents. However, the reason I hesitate in my response is my nagging suspicion that I am being played, that this was not so much a gag as a “globalist” version of what the Sokal affair did for critical theory buffs at the time, who were sniffing about too much in the sciences. Ow. Sokal’s Trojan text trolled the critical or cultural studies output with a resentful eye, miming what it desired to hear or see, bloating, mimicking, passing. If a troll army or some software were to hologram a product for the internationalist academic crowd—postpost-colonial, defunded and on the defense—it might look something like what Ghosh ostensibly puts on offer. For the Trump era of reality TV “reality,” in which the real has become bad literature, algorithmic memes, and mnemo-trances, Miller has reason to say that the question of “literature” matters. And Miller blithely sails off into the ecocidal horizons of climate chaos, where the materiality of inscriptions collude with mass extinction
The ban today on “population talk” (Diana Coole) by the liberal western traditions as unethical h... more The ban today on “population talk” (Diana Coole) by the liberal western traditions as unethical has the inverse effect in a post-‘tipping point’ world defined by future population culls of peripheries. It turns out that this ban not only advances the outcome the liberal tradition would most avoid but blinds it from seeing what is now underway before its eyes—a ‘species split’ engineered by the hyper-elite with one eye to the coming climate catastrophism. It turns out that the ban conceals that the western anthropos had from the first been defined as arche-eugenicist and extinctivist. This in turn illuminates the puzzling non-response of global leadership to the prospect of irreversible ecocide.
A TRADEMARK OF JACK BENNY'S COMIC ROUTINE was when he paused, resting his chin on his hand, a... more A TRADEMARK OF JACK BENNY'S COMIC ROUTINE was when he paused, resting his chin on his hand, and uttered the word "Well!" It spoke for itself, and this by not speaking, by accelerating numbing possibilities that would be modified or modulated by an expression mixing surprise, pique, scandal, astonishment, social offense, and cognitive shock-and an awareness that could erase each in turn. Spoken in a monologue, there was no sure way to isolate any contextual ingredient or social response that informed it. A resistance to semantic determinacy left the utterance, we might say, wild--dissolving the particulars of any preceding narrative, overturning the gender of its speaker. It was often embedded in an ambisexual facial pucker, which made its speaker at once seem vulnerable and incapacitated, victimized before an audience itself being handled or seduced.
This essay does not ask what Derrida's use for ‘environmentalism’ might be but rather how the... more This essay does not ask what Derrida's use for ‘environmentalism’ might be but rather how the geomorphic logics released by a dawning era of climate change diagnose what is called ‘deconstruction’ today.
This essay examines Hillis Miller's recent critical use of terms from physics (black holes) a... more This essay examines Hillis Miller's recent critical use of terms from physics (black holes) and mathematics (the zero) as a theoretical strategy that recasts our understanding of his performative aims. It proposes an other Miller to the familiar explicator and pedagogic disseminator of literary deconstruction he is often taken for, putting his work in contact not only with Benjaminian practices but coming horizons in global esthetic politics.
Are “Culture Studies” doomed by the coming ecocide? Or have they already become or made themselve... more Are “Culture Studies” doomed by the coming ecocide? Or have they already become or made themselves zombies in academia and in the struggles against our possible extinction as a species? Are they complicit in that ecocide? What, if anything can be done to remedy or ameliorate the degradation of the planet’s economies, environments and intellectual life? Instead of looking backwards to the past or only studying cultures in the now conventional sense, we may need to look with urgency at what humanity has done to its world in new ways.
The era of climate change involves the mutation of systems beyond 20th century anthropomorphic mo... more The era of climate change involves the mutation of systems beyond 20th century anthropomorphic models and has stood, until recent-ly, outside representation or address. Understood in a broad and critical sense, climate change concerns material agencies that im-pact on biomass and energy, erased borders and microbial inven-tion, geological and nanographic time, and extinction events. The possibility of extinction has always been a latent figure in textual production and archives; but the current sense of depletion, decay, mutation and exhaustion calls for new modes of address, new styles of publishing and authoring, and new formats and speeds of distri-bution. As the pressures and re-alignments of this re-arrangement occur, so must the critical languages and conceptual templates, po-litical premises and definitions of ‘life. ’ There is a particular need to publish in timely fashion experimental monographs that redefine the boundaries of disciplinary fields, rhetorical invasions, the ...
This text forms the second part of an homage to J. Hillis Miller, using his "China lectures" as a... more This text forms the second part of an homage to J. Hillis Miller, using his "China lectures" as a point of inquiry into deconstructing "the Anthropocene" as a distracting and narcotic conceit. The longer paper is titled "Ghosting Hillis Miller, 'China,' and the Panic of Reference in the Anthropocene." Hillis Miller's "China" lectures form a unique folio of Miller's-as Andrzej Warminski notes, among Miller's five writing careers (Jameson makes a similar remark about these lectures resisting any deconstructive definition). There would be one other folio, a sixth in Miller's work, which Claire Colebrook names the "Anthropocene" Miller-attuned to the shift to extinction logics, climate chaos, the suicidal "auto-co-immunity" he paints in from Derrida, albeit without mourning. Miller seems to pivot in these lectures-but one must ask, from a decade and more away, after China has closed and an East-West schism become palpable; after Covid (which took Miller); after "Trump" (or not quite); after the hilarious eruption of devastating climate non-anomalies of summer "2022" (or not quite "after")-which is to say, once tipping points are glimpsed as past; after exponential accelerations of A.I., surveillance totalization, financial war.. . That is, why summon Hillis in China to interrogate our mutant and derealized "present"? What one gleans across Miller's China lectures, from a rare period of opening, now past, is anything but a defense of "literature"-but rather, a pre-site and mirthful farewell to an era of "literary studies" in the academy (and broadly), a mutation in and of reading that replaces the era of the book and alphabeticism with video and bot driven mnemotechnics, digital tsunamis that stupefy and re-proletarianize (Stiegler) without outside-an implicitly spectral totalization and de-coupling. Updating de Man's materiality of inscription as a reversal of Heidegger's "language," Miller absorbs all media and digital traces. This "materiality" is spectral, outside any binary concept terms, since the panic of climate chaos, for which the reaction formation of today's rampant nationalisms-resource wars incipit-inverts liberal identity politics and ushers in, for him, the displacement of fiction ("literature") into screen gaming, mutating in turn into a promised metaverse whose real estate market is booming:
The Hand and the Dog-Hillis Miller's secret power It was Claire Colebrook's second Lassie-dog tha... more The Hand and the Dog-Hillis Miller's secret power It was Claire Colebrook's second Lassie-dog that pierced the veil. The dog-but what does that word mean-is an empath, the afterthought added to her family to make Milton, her favored first, company. Young Milton would cry, so Shelley showed up, who immediately took over the sleepcrib. Milton proceeded to become a narcissistic fratboy, while Shelley, smarter and strategic, would play second for him while guiding the show. Whatever you think about Milton or Shelley, this is a story about Shelley the Collie and Hillis Miller, or about Shelley and Hillis' secret power, I don't know what else to call it. I had the incalculable honor and fun of knowing Hillis since Yale grad school in Comp Lit and saw him first at the MLA when he went up against M.H. Abrams-who set Hillis up to take down decon. It's a well-known story: Abrams preceded Hillis and ended by predicting point for point what Hillis would supposedly now say, implying it was predictable, packaged, and dismissable. Abrams was pleased with himself. But what I recall was the undesignable Hillis tone of reply, not defensive, not bothering to play or not play the game, acceding (as if there were no attack underway) that he accurately described the paper he was about to read, which he then did (a version of "The Critic as Host"), and seemed to glide over the whole thing, celebrating the "joy" of unshackled reading modes and their exfoliation. I had never seen Hillis angry, reactive, resentful, or other than curious about everything and genial and generous beyond any humility. And yet utterly unshakeable. At his retirement conference at Irvine, titled merely "J.," Derrida addressed and circled the idea of Hillis. He toyed with the furtive "J.," hiding as if guilty yet evoking Joseph the Interpreter. He would anoint Hillis with a rare honor and moniker, calling him "Hillis the Just." One understood-though it fed Hillis a bit too much into Derrida's thematic at the time (with the regrettable overshoot that deconstruction "is" justice, with which de Man would disagree, for one), and I later scribbled an obverse piece titled "Hillis le Mal." Le Mal in the sense of Baudelaire, but also his role in the critical unfolding of the era as what I elsewhere termed a flaneur of the archive-for whom the "task of the critic" is a transformation preparatory to an event, translation, or bifurcation (to use Stiegler's term). Derrida also asked, in his unique and astonishing way, what it must be or feel like to even say, "I, Hillis Miller," reminding everyone with ears what abysses may be spoken from and for with Hillis.
Tom Cohen On Ranjan Ghosh & J. Hillis Miller, Thinking Literature Across Continents (Duke Univers... more Tom Cohen On Ranjan Ghosh & J. Hillis Miller, Thinking Literature Across Continents (Duke University Press, Fall 2016)
The Battlefield of the Anthropocene. Limits, Responsibilities and the Duty of Flight, 2017
This essay suggests that what we call the ‘Anthropocene’ marks less a geological period hypothesi... more This essay suggests that what we call the ‘Anthropocene’ marks less a geological period hypothesis than the last fifteen years or so of its viral entry into discourse, and that this opening phase of ‘Anthropocene talk’ has abruptly shifted to Phase 2: the Trumpocene. That shift corresponds roughly to a date, 2016 or so, when tipping points in the current ecocidal acceleration would essentially pass, and when the proleptic mode of warning and speculation that comprised the rhetoric of Phase 1 – an ‘Anthropocene talk’ that, Jedediah Purdy notes, accomplished nothing and produced no ‘we’ to correspond to it or act – becomes past tensed, irreversible, and accelerating mega-extractivism and extinction events. The unexpected nature of Phase 2, that takes the form of a cancellation of the ‘Anthropocene’ by fiat, a banning of mention of ‘climate change’ (Trump regime moves), suggests it must be read from the perspective of this key event. Rather than accept the dismissal of ‘climate change’ at face value or serving fossil-fuel interests, it must be read as a strategy fully aware of the ecocidal acceleration. The Trumpocene is about separating out winners from disposable losers as the latter unfolds in the next generations, and comprises what amounts to an imaginary ‘escape’ strategy. I call on Bernard Stiegler’s work on ‘escaping the Anthropocene’, itself a break within the paralyzing spell of Anthropocene
talk, to assist in situating some of the starker and transformational impasses that are emerging for Phase 2 – which corresponds to the accelerated mutations of climate chaos.
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talk, to assist in situating some of the starker and transformational impasses that are emerging for Phase 2 – which corresponds to the accelerated mutations of climate chaos.