Jennifer Greiman

This essay reviews four new books, each of which assesses the prospects of contemporary democracy in the face of wide-ranging crises—from the legacies of settler colonialism to the resurgence of right-wing nationalism—and finds possibilities for democratic renewal in aesthetic orientations and practices. Taken together, Jason Frank’s The Democratic Sublime (2021), Andrés Fabián Henao Castro’s Antigone in the Americas (2021), Michael Steinberg’s The Afterlife of Moses (2022), and Elisabeth Anker’s Ugly Freedoms (2022) suggest that the aesthetic turn in democratic theory most closely associated with the work of Jacques Rancière has been decisive. But if democratic theorists now fully embrace the centrality of creativity, performative assembly, and affective attachment and aversion to democratic renewal, they do not fully agree on the more fundamental question of whether democracy is a stable form that has aesthetic features or whether it is constitutively aesthetic—in other words, whether its people comes into being in moments of materialization with no prior referent.If contemporary political theorists . . . have found better prospects for the revitalization of democratic politics in collective performance and creative resistance than in . . . legal and political institutions, this shows how seriously . . . democratic thought has come to take democracy’s aesthetic dimensions.

This essay reviews four new books, each of which assesses the prospects of contemporary democracy in the face of wide-ranging crises—from the legacies of settler colonialism to the resurgence of right-wing nationalism—and finds possibilities for democratic renewal in aesthetic orientations and practices. Taken together, Jason Frank’s The Democratic Sublime (2021), Andrés Fabián Henao Castro’s Antigone in the Americas (2021), Michael Steinberg’s The Afterlife of Moses (2022), and Elisabeth Anker’s Ugly Freedoms (2022) suggest that the aesthetic turn in democratic theory most closely associated with the work of Jacques Rancière has been decisive. But if democratic theorists now fully embrace the centrality of creativity, performative assembly, and affective attachment and aversion to democratic renewal, they do not fully agree on the more fundamental question of whether democracy is a stable form that has aesthetic features or whether it is constitutively aesthetic—in other words, whe...

This essay argues that Melville’s late writings mark a turn in his thinking about democracy, but not in the direction that critics have often claimed. Rather than a deepening cynicism about revolutionary transformation or democratic political possibilities, Melville’s work, from Battle-Pieces and Clarel through Billy Budd, is instead animated by the paradox of democracy’s groundlessness. Drawing on the work of Hannah Arendt and Jacques Rancière, this essay tracks Melville’s engagement with the absence of a constituted people or polis through the aesthetic motifs of floods, storms, landslides, and earthquakes that appear throughout his late poetry and prose. Ultimately, it argues, one of the great achievements of Melville’s later work is the gravity with which he contends with the absence of democracy’s foundation in a presupposed territory, subject, or institution.

Melville stands—not unlike the democratic god in “Knights and Squires”—at both the center and circumference of Sianne Ngai’s stunning and original study of the negative affects she terms “ugly feelings,” providing the book’s point of departure, the focus of its afterword, as well as a significant portion of the eclectic archive in between. Neither a book about Melville nor a series of readings in Melville, Ugly Feelings is in many ways a sustained reading-through Melville, a book that has less to do with Melville’s body of writing, as such, than with what that writing does and—more to the point—with what one can do with it. From its opening pages, Ugly Feelings unfolds “in Melvillean fashion,” in Ngai’s phrase, seeking out “affective gaps and illegibilities, dysphoric feelings, and other sites of emotional negativity,” which she first roots in the affective and political “equivocality” of “Bartleby, the Scrivener” (Ngai 1). Naming both a “Bartlebyan affect” and a “Bartlebyan aesthetic,” Ngai then tracks what becomes a kind of Bartleby-effect through a wide-ranging archive of modern and postmodern fiction, poetry, film, television, and philosophy, all of which shares a fundamental preoccupation with the “suspended agency” and “emotional negativity” of the small subject: a figure epitomized in both Bartleby himself and in the Sub-Sub Librarian of Moby-Dick’s “Extracts.” In taking up the cause of “the administered world’s many Sub-Subs” (10), Ngai passes over the “rage-driven” Moby-Dick for what she describes as Melville’s more emotionally ambiguous works—Pierre, The Confidence-Man, “Bartleby”—to identify in them the thematic fixations and formal features that unite the affective and aesthetic registers of Melville’s work, while also developing out of these texts something more. Writing “in Melvillean fashion,” Ngai ultimately finds in Melville, not only her study’s chief aesthetic model, but also one of its principle theorists of affective ambiguity and—crucially—the unexpected political efficacy to be found in constructions of feelings that appear improper, fake, or simply ugly. Envy, irritation, anxiety, paranoia, and disgust, along with two feelings she names herself—“animatedness” and “stuplimity”—make up what Ngai calls her “bestiary” of weak and petty affects (Ngai 7). Distinguished by their nastiness as well as their seeming impotence, she argues, these feelings

Two of the nineteenth century’s most significant and prolific thinkers on the idea and practice of democracy, Alexis de Tocqueville and Herman Melville both invoke the shape of a circle to foreground the representational challenges of a self-originating and self-defining political form. In this, they identify democracy with the tautologies of absolute sovereign power, but they also find in the circles of democracy a form and an art of common action through which democracy might be transformed. The circles that first appear in Democracy in America and Moby-Dick as figural responses to the tautology of self-grounding authority provide both a history and a corrective to recent political theory that tends to describe democracy as reducible to sovereignty. By casting the problem of representing democracy as a formal one, Tocqueville and Melville identify it with artifice and art as well, imagining alternative possibilities for democratic political action, while revealing how fully the formal structures of their own works are implicated in the art of democracy.

Introduction: Deadwood and the Forms of Empire --Jennifer Greiman and Paul Stasi Part I - No Law at all in Deadwood: Statelessness, Violence, and Sovereignty Chapter 1: A Terrible Beauty? Deadwood, Frontier Rhetoric, and U.S. Hegemony in the Post-9/11 Era --Erik Altenbernd and Alex Young Chapter 2: Listen to the Thunder:' Deadwood and the Extraordinary Depiction of Ordinary Violence --Justin A. Joyce Chapter 3: Vile Task: Founding and Democracy in Deadwood's Imperial Imagination --Ronald Schmidt Part II -Taking people's money: Agency, Identity and Political Economy Chapter 4: It's all f***ing amalgamation and capital, ain't it?: Deadwood, the Pinkertons, and the Closing of the Frontier -- Jeffrey Scraba and John David Miles Chapter 5: The Gothic Frontier of Modernity: The 'Invisible Hand' of State-Formation in Deadwood --Julia M. Wright Chapter 6: Securing the Color: The Racial Economy of Deadwood -- Daniel Worden Part III - A Sovereign F***ing Community: Sexuality and the Frontiers of the Social Chapter 7: The Return of the Father: Deadwood and the Contemporary Gender Politics of Complexity -- David Greven Chapter 8: The World is Less Than Perfect: Nontraditional Family Structures in Deadwood -- Paul Zinder Chapter 9: Messages from Invisible Sources: Surveillance and the Public Sphere in Deadwood -- Mark Berrettini

This essay argues that Melville' s late writings mark a turn in his thinking about democracy, but not in the direction that critics have often claimed. Rather than a deepening cynicism about revolutionary transformation or democratic political possibilities, Melville' s work, from Battle-Pieces and Clarel through Billy Budd, is instead animated by the paradox of democracy' s groundlessness. Drawing on the work of Hannah Arendt and Jacques Rancière, this essay tracks Melville' s engagement with the absence of a constituted people or polis through the aesthetic motifs of fl oods, storms, landslides, and earthquakes that appear throughout his late poetry and prose. Ultimately, it argues, one of the great achievements of Melville' s later work is the gravity with which he contends with the absence of democracy' s foundation in a presupposed territory, subject, or institution.