Having demonized Lytton Strachey in The Voyage Out (1915) by making the purportedly straight character based on Strachey misogynist, Virginia Woolf treats him rather well in Jacob's Room (1922). Not only is Richard Bonamy, the decidedly gay character based on Strachey, not misogynist, he's the hero Jacob's fondest friend, just as Strachey himself had been to Virginia's brother Thoby. He's also someone with whom Woolf seems to identify: it's Bonamy, after all, who's left alone with Jacob's mother in that suddenly empty room and to whom, holding out a pair of shoes, she poses that suddenly sentimental—and unanswerable—question: "What am I to do with these?" Or at least I find the question sentimental, almost unbearably so—which for me happens to be a good thing, and which is why I cherish it more than any other finale in prose fiction. Read More

As the rest of the speakers greeted each other on stage with warm effusions and European pecks on the cheek, literary critic Michael Hardt, the sole American-born speaker at the London conference, stood apart from the crowd. With folded arms, he gazed out not just into but somehow beyond the audience of the packed lecture hall.

Hardt's behavior seemed to be a defensive performance of self-sufficiency, as if to pre-empt his inevitable failure to fit in with the rest of the "glittering array of Continental academic rockstars," as Terry Eagleton put it, that had assembled that weekend for the conference titled "On the Idea of Communism." Nearly the entire emerging canon of (mostly male) contemporary Continental philosophers—including Alain Badiou, Slavoj Žižek, Jacques Rancière, Eagleton, and Antonio Negri, Hardt's mentor and collaborator—as well as their translators and champions in the English-language academy and a few other European notables less well known outside the Continent joined Hardt at the conference. Hardt's reputation has always been doubled by a secret tendency to diminutivize him in relation to Negri—his more famous (or notorious), frequently jailed co-author on Empire and Multitude—and it was hard not to regard Hardt in this light when one saw him onstage next to the old masters. Yet he seemed even more out of place among the rest the other scholars who, Eagleton quipped, had "married in" to the elite circles of Continental philosophy, a group that included the two Badiou scholars—Bruno Bosteels and Peter Hallward—who joined Hardt in the first panel of the conference. Read More

Like many academics, I attend a lot of conferences. When you're first starting out, there's a certain glamor to these affairs. In a line of work in which infantilization rules—imagine yourself as a 40-year old graduate student anticipating your first good paying job, while your college friends have two kids and a summer house on the shore—traveling on planes to other cities and staying in hotel rooms on a university department's dime can feel very adult indeed.  

Eventually the excitement fades. After a few trips on Southwest, a few nights spent sharing hotel bars with salesmen from Buffalo, and one or one hundred panels on Elizabeth Bowen or L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E poetry, the luster begins to dull. If you are the sort of academic who tries to make his or her work something more than scholarship—something that bears directly on political life—you are bound, usually quite quickly, to encounter a fundamental conundrum. So we can quote Milton on the freedom to publish, and talk about the effects of late capitalism on literary form. Our papers, we tell ourselves, are incisive critiques of the status quo. But how intimidated is the status quo by a rigorous Marxist analysis of  Philip Larkin's "Whitsun Weddings" anyway? It doesn't help that Power, despite our repeated invitations, rarely shows up at events like "Rethinking Modernities" to suffer our blistering remarks. 

One of this novel's minor but telling peculiarities is the narrator's extreme reluctance to resort to proper names, and to describe the book in its own preferred style would be to avoid for as long as possible any mention of the author's name or the title of his book. True, we learn (or seem to learn) from the first sentence that the main character bears the last name of Sorger, but in German this is as good as allegorical—Sorger means one who takes care or has cares—and the man's given name in any case doesn't come up for some fifty pages. Read More