LITMIR.BIZ

      CONTENTS

      Acknowledgments

      Essay OneInterpretive Politics: Reading Systemic Oppressions with Eve Sedgwick, Stephen Best and Sharon Marcus

1.Reading the Lines

Obsolete Suspicions

Bad Faith

2.Paranoid Projects

Conspiracy Theory

Superman Cape

Narcissistic Rebellion

3.Defining the Opposition

       Bad Religion

       Noninterference and Neoliberalism

       Privilege and Self-Censorship

      Essay TwoDevotional Scholarship: Reading Academic Reaganism with Edward Said, Stanley Fish and Walter Jackson Bate

       1.Neoliberalism and Religious Intellectualism Neoliberalism and Religious Intellectualism

       Culture and Legacy

       Emulation Pedagogy

       2.Neoconservatism as Negative Devotion

       Bate’s Trivial Titles

       Indifferent Opponents

       3.Professional Privilege

       Mirrored Positions

      Essay ThreeNegative Moralism: Reading Literariness, Materiality and Revolution with Paul de Man and J. Hillis Miller

       1.The Disqualification of de Man

       Singular Circumstances

       2.Reference to Nothingness

       Discrepancies of Desire

       Negative Moralism

       3.Misreading Materialism

       Culture and Soil

       Overturning and Displacement

       Progress and Determination

       Index

       Acknowledgments

      For all my teachers, whether I encountered them as allies or as opponents.

       Essay One

       INTERPRETIVE POLITICS: READING SYSTEMIC OPPRESSIONS WITH EVE SEDGWICK, STEPHEN BEST AND SHARON MARCUS

      We can say of the eighties what Orwell could say of the forties: “In our age there is no such thing as ‘keeping out of politics.’”

      W. J. T. Mitchell, “The Politics of Interpretation” (1982)

      The current era of political polarization and culture war in the United States is often measured against a fantasy, an imaginary era of nonpartisan harmony in the wake of a war that established “The American Century.”¹ And yet this depoliticized image signifies the same age Orwell describes as inescapably political, in an essay written to span the ocean between allies.² Like the forties, the eighties is now often mythologized as a time of American triumph, when good struggled against an Evil Empire, and freedom overcame tyranny. This mythological narrative of holy war is presaged by Ronald Reagan’s depoliticized image of the 1962 election in “A Time for Choosing”: “There is no left or right [...] only an up or down—up to man’s age-old dream, the ultimate in individual freedom consistent with law and order, or down to the ant heap of totalitarianism.”³ Reagan is apparently undeterred by the manifest contradiction between his disavowal of partisanship and the ostentatiously partisan occasion of his speech, televised in support of Republican presidential candidate Barry Goldwater. That disavowal itself also depends on Reagan’s image of the Democratic Party as drifting toward a Stalinist authoritarian version of socialism. The bad faith of his trope is undeniable, especially when one recognizes that Reagan ostensibly refuses partisanship only to immediately define his own party as agents of “man’s age-old dream” of freedom, and dehumanize the other party as a mindless colony of insects bent on dystopian oppression. We will see homologous rhetorical gestures repeated throughout this book, as various characters deny or conflate the differences of left and right, claiming for themselves universality and agency, while objectifying others as mere negations of universal value, truth and right.

      Reagan’s frame and premises—defining the struggle between left and right in the United States in terms of individualism, freedom or liberty, the same terms used to define the reasons for US opposition to the USSR—have essentially been accepted as the default explanation for the national

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