In 1986 Leo Bersani published a book entitled The Freudian Body. I love that title. From the first time I heard it, over two decades ago, up through this very moment, I have continued to love that title. To be honest, I wish it were mine—which is why I borrowed it for my essay here. I'm not exactly sure what I take this title to mean—probably something like a definitive delineation of a Freudian theory of the body. I'm not exactly sure what I take it to promise—probably something like a reconceptualization of the body beyond positivism, beyond Christian views of nature, beyond biologistic ideology. It sounds like something I really want. One thing is for sure: the title made me want to read the book.

And so the first time I read this book, I was disappointed, frustrated, and even a little angry. I did not find “the Freudian body” promised by the title. “Bait and switch,” I thought bitterly. “You fucking tease!”

“There is no Sea With Which Our Age is So Imperfectly Acquainted as the Frozen Ocean,” Wrote the Eighteenth-Century Russian hydrographer Gavriil Sarychev, “and no empire which has more powerful motives and resources for extending its information, in this quarter, than Russia” (iii). Russia's Great Northern Expedition of the 1730s and later expeditions, like Sarychev's in 1785, mapped the shores of the Arctic Ocean across continental Asia, an impressive feat by any century's standards. Meanwhile, the American shores of the Arctic Ocean remained entirely unknown to the European empires (England, France, Spain) most interested in passing to and from the Pacific and Atlantic oceans via the Northwest and Northeast passages. Alexander MacKenzie, Samuel Hearne, and John Franklin, each traveling with native people, walked thousands of miles to reach the Frozen Ocean, leaving in their wake the occasional human disaster and an unimpeachable record of publishing successes, like MacKenzie's Voyages from Montreal to the Frozen Ocean (1801) and Franklin's Narrative of a Journey to the Shores of the Polar Sea (1824).

Among other things, photographs are deposits of social relations. To put it another way, they are social relations temporarily hardened into images—figured, captured, frozen. The most obvious of those relations, that between the photographer and the sitter, has been a regular subject of inquiry for art history. Acknowledging but leaving that kind of interest aside for the moment, we may explore other sorts of relations in and around a photograph and pursue a line of inquiry more in keeping with visual culture. Here's a quick example.

Mimic (1982) is an early and much discussed picture by the Canadian photographer Jeff Wall, with the discussion centering largely on two topics: its subject matter and its setting (fig. 1). The subject is racism, and in this regard Mimic is “characteristic,” as Wall's best critic, Michael Fried, has observed, “of Wall's engagement in his art of the 1980s with social issues” (Why 235). Subsequently, as Fried also notes, “Wall has tended to distance himself from the overtly political concerns that are front and center in works like Mimic” (64). Indeed, in recent interviews Wall has insisted on this distance, remarking, for example, that “[t]wenty-five years ago I thought subject matter had some significance in itself” and going on to say that “Mimic was about racism in some way, about hostile gestures between races, but I'm glad the picture itself is good and it doesn't need that to be successful. Now I try to eliminate any additional subject matter—those things are for other people, they're not my problem” (Denes). His point here is not exactly that Mimic isn't antiracist—actually, its antiracism is so obvious and uncontroversial that a recent critic, Régis Michel, has complained that it “verges on political correctness” (63). The idea is rather that the success of the picture—the fact that it's a “good” picture—has nothing to do with those politics. Which leaves open the question of whether the picture's success has nothing to do with any politics or nothing to do with the particular politics of antiracism. In other words, is the picture's success independent of politics as such? Or is there a politics of the good picture?

The Tension Between My Epigraphs' Formulations Might be Taken as The Animating Energy of Queer Theory. If the first provides queers with a vision of our sexuality as flatteringly significant, the second insists with punishing concision that this significance resists translation into social equality. More precisely, the two statements could be seen as mutually constitutive: it is the social abjection of the sexually deviant that makes our sexuality interesting, as it is the excessive symbolic interest of our difference that has made us socially volatile. Or at least this has been one guiding assumption of queer theory, which has leveraged some of its most imaginative work by arrogating to queerness a symbolic centrality out of all proportion to queers' acknowledged numbers or to our social power. It is no accident that Leo Bersani articulates the unpleasant reality principle in this little epigraphic debate. His writing is justly famous for its suspicion of the rhetoric of identitarian dignity and for its refusal of conceptual consolations of all kinds; Bersani's habit of accentuating the negative made his work the inevitable reference point for PMLA's May 2006 Forum on the “antisocial thesis” in queer theory (Caserio et al.). And yet for all Bersani's insistence on exposing the fantasies of transcendence undergirding our culture and our criticism, his writing is perhaps even more remarkable for the way it has managed to combine that scouring sensibility with a sense of ethical and political promise. Refusing the culture of redemption won't, of course, quite save you. But Bersani's work has always suggested that it could be beneficent (a favorite word of his).

A Poem that Renders the Sea as Pedagogical History, Lorna Goodison's “Arctic, Antarctic, Atlantic, Pacific, Indian Ocean” depicts Caribbean schoolchildren learning “the world's waters rolled into a chant.” After shivering through the “cold” Arctic and Antarctic, the class “suffered [a] sea change” in the destabilizing Atlantic, abandoning the terrestrial stability of their benches to enter an ocean in which only their voices orient them in time and space as they “call out across / the currents of hot air.” In fathoming what Derek Walcott has called “the sea [as] history,” their “small bodies” are “borrowed / by the long drowned” (Goodison). While colonial narratives of maritime expansion have long depicted the ocean as blank space to be traversed, these students enter Atlantic stasis, a place occupied by the wasted lives of Middle Passage modernity. This Atlantic is not aqua nullius, circumscribed and mapped by the student oceanographer, but rather a place where the haunting of the past overtakes the present subject. Édouard Glissant has described the Atlantic as a “beginning” for modernity, a space “whose time is marked by … balls and chains gone green” (Poetics 6): a sign of submarine history and its material decay. Thus, Atlantic modernity becomes legible through the sign of heavy water, an oceanic stasis that signals the dissolution of wasted lives. After the poem's irruptive consonance of the “bodies borrowed,” the vowels lengthen to mimic a “long drowned” history of the Atlantic, and the narrative is transformed. Reminding us that the Middle Passage “abyss is a tautology” that haunts ocean modernity (Glissant, Poetics 6), the poem traps the students (and readers) in the violent corporeal history of the Atlantic. Instead of moving on to the next ocean of the lesson, the class repeats the word “Atlantic, as if wooden pegs / were forced between our lips; Atlantic, as teacher's / strap whipped the rows on.” Only in the last two lines of the poem do we catch a glimpse of other oceans, trapped as we are in “learn[ing] this lesson: / Arctic, Antarctic, Atlantic, Pacific and then Indian.”

Starting with two twentieth-century lectures (both titled “What Is a Classic?”), delivered by T. S. Eliot and J. M. Coetzee forty-seven years apart, this essay looks at the ontology of the classic in particular and canon formation in general in the globalized and multicultural field of twenty-first-century English studies. It focuses on the agonistic process through which the classic assumes form and coherence and on the position of the critic making a claim about the classic. The essay evaluates the importance of this contestation of literary value for interlopers and latecomers to the Western canon, concluding that the “perduring” classic is, perhaps, the invention of the outsider. With close attention to the unstable relation between the classic as preeminently European or national and the classic as trans- or international, the essay seeks to reclaim the foundational concept of the classic for world literature, postcolonial studies, and literary criticism in an international frame.

Readers of PMLA Recognize 26 Broadway, in New York City, as the Headquarters of the Mla, One of the Major Hubs of Intellectual work in literary and cultural studies in North America. But in the summer of 1840, 26 Broadway was a commercial hub that connected the world of the Atlantic Ocean with the world of the Indian Ocean. Here, in the offices of the New York firm Barclay and Livingston, Ahmad Bin Na'aman, special envoy of the sultan of Zanzibar, Sayyid Said, offered for sale merchandise that had been brought to the United States from Muscat and Zanzibar. The merchandise included “1,300 bags of dates, 21 bales of Persian wool carpets and 100 bales of Mokha coffee” that had been acquired at Muscat and “108 prime ivory tusks, 81 cases of gum copal, … 135 bags of cloves and 1,000 dry salted hides” from Zanzibar (Eilts 32). The cargo had come to New York on 30 April 1840 aboard the Sultanah, a bark owned by the sultan and commanded by William Sleeman, an Englishman. Except for two Frenchmen whose identities are uncertain and two Englishwomen who had sought passage to London, where the ship was headed, most of those on board were African slaves belonging to the ship's officers and hired lascars, Muslim seamen from the lower Konkan and Malabar coasts of India who had been signed on in Bombay, where the ship had been refitted for the transatlantic voyage and from which it first embarked (3). The slaves, we are told, were dressed in garments made of coarse cotton cloth “called merikani, after the country of its manufacture” (4). In his account of the voyage of the Sultanah, Hermann Frederick Eilts writes of “the pungent vapors of cloves, gum copal and coffee (from the ship's cargo), of tar and pitch, of open-hearth cooking in deep, acrid sheep tail's fat, called ghee, of primitive shipboard sanitation and of coconut oil” (4). This account of the “first Arab emissary and the first Arab vessel to visit American shores” is a rich reminder of the historical interconnections in the world (6).

Even Though the Range of Aesthetic Objects that Have Captured Leo Bersani's Attention Over the Years is Wide, The Novel remains one of the more privileged objects among them and could arguably be taken as the point of departure for many of his reflections. His attention has been on the modern French novel in particular, from Honoré de Balzac to Marcel Proust and Samuel Beckett—Proust and Beckett being two of the writers to whom Bersani has returned with the most frequency and inventiveness over the years. In the 1960s Bersani began elaborating a critical agenda for the reading of novels in books such as Marcel Proust: The Fictions of Life and Art (1965) and Balzac to Beckett: Center and Circumference in French Fiction (1970). His critical references in these books are also mainly French or francophone. He positions himself in various kinds of opposition to literary critics of the time like Jean Starobinski, Georges Poulet, and Jean-Pierre Richard, as well as the early Roland Barthes. This is also the moment when a certain number of other now familiar French thinkers were beginning to be read in the United States, and so Balzac to Beckett opens with a favorable reference to Michel Foucault, the author of The Archaeology of Knowledge, and Jacques Derrida, the author of Of Grammatology. Bersani notes that these two books represent “in recent years … the most brilliant analyses of the history and consequence of those habits of thought” that believe that “significance precedes experience, which is both expressive and deceptive and which therefore needs to be decoded or interpreted” (4). For Bersani it is a failure of critical imagination to assume that present experience comes to be meaningful solely or primarily in relation to prior structures of meaning, which are simply rehearsed or repeated, instantiated or exemplified, by way of new experience. One could do worse than imagine that at the core of all Bersani's work is an effort to challenge the priority or precedence given by many writers and critics to significance over experience, and it is in this light that an association with some of the critical impulses (impulses that strive after yet-to-be-determined futures) of Derrida and Foucault makes a certain sense. Starobinski, Poulet, and Richard are often grouped together as “phenomenological critics,” critics who view a literary work as the expression of the patterns and structures by means of which a particular consciousness apprehends the world and who view the critical task as that of revealing the patterns or structures of apprehension that characterize a particular artistic subjectivity and allow it to produce a particular image of the world. Bersani's disagreement with these critics had to do with their focus on the “secret thematic selves which inform the writer's work but which the language of the work does not explicitly express.” Thus, “the writer's self” is equated to the work's “principal theme,” and such criticism places an emphasis on “centers … from which particular performances ‘radiate’ and back to which the critic draws the work” (Balzac 16–17). Bersani's preference, in opposition to this “centripetal” critical impulse, has been for “centrifugal” forces, both in art and in criticism: “My commitment to … open-ended, projective, and self-contesting art … will be expressed by a critical emphasis on those occasions in fiction which tend to disintegrate theme” (19).

If I were to choose a single image to represent the interest and challenge of working with visual materials, I think it would be the rather outlandish bit of kitsch in figure 1 and not a more attractive or impressive example. Part of the appeal for me, I would have to admit, is the visual humor of the situation, for this image of Oscar Wilde appears on a collectible cigar card, one that adult smokers were apparently meant to save, just as young baseball fans now save and cherish the cards of their heroes. In fact, this must have been one of the first such cards, which had only been in use for a few years when it appeared sometime around 1882. The novelty of the enterprise of collectible cards might explain Wilde's unexpected appearance here, where it is surprising to find a literary subject.

The study of textual evolution, or revision as a textual phenomenon, requires a form of fluid-text editing that not only gives readers access to the textual identities that constitute the versions of a work but also makes the revision process witnessable by generating revision sequences and revision narratives for every revision event. Traditional editorial approaches that mix versions in the editing of a work compromise the integrity of textual identities, and the problem of mixing versions is demonstrated in three examples of the way editors and critics (in the context of orientalist and colonialist discourses) have changed the text of, or rewritten, Herman Melville's Moby-Dick: Edward Said's mistaking John Huston and Ray Bradbury's film ending for Melville's, the British expurgations that modulate Queequeg's homosexuality to preclude the idea of homosexual domesticity and marriage, and the British editors' conversion of Queequeg's Christianity (and modern editors' perpetuation of the unwanted conversion). These historical and modern cases show that readers, sometimes despite themselves, revise texts materially in ways that mirror their desire and the ways of power. Editing the rewriting of a text like Moby-Dick in a digital critical archive would preserve all versions and generate revision narratives that textualize the otherwise invisible dynamics of revision in a culture. With its capacity to edit fluid texts, digital humanities scholarship is well situated to expand the discourse on the dynamics of textual evolution into the literary and cultural criticism of the twenty-first century.

When Ralph Waldo Emerson writes in “Experience” (1844) that “men seem to have learned of the horizon the art of perpetual retreating and reference,” he means that we see through our current moment by looking forward. The “art” that Emerson evokes to describe the restlessness and expansiveness of the nineteenth century is the art of perspective: we gain perspective, in other words, when we project for ourselves an image of the world in which everything takes shape in relation to something else. “All our days are so unprofitable while they pass,” says Emerson, because we orient our present toward our prospects; taking the long view “degrade[s] today” by distancing us from where we are. We retreat from our momentary positions to be part of the big picture. We want to stay relevant, but Emerson looks askance at our constant need to look toward the emerging pattern of events. “The men ask, ‘What's the news?‘” he says, “as if the old were so bad” (472).

In 1966 Auguste Toussaint, the Mauritian Archivist, Wrote One of the First Histories of the Indian Ocean, a Topic he Described as “neglected” (1). Four decades on, circumstances have shifted, and the Indian Ocean now compels our attention. Audacious Somali pirates astound international media audiences. The new economic superpowers, India and China, exert palpable global influence. Their internecine competition plays itself out in the Indian Ocean, where the two Asian powers squabble for control of shipping lanes and oil supplies and for dominance of African markets and minerals (Vines and Oruitemeka; Broadman). Al-Qaeda continues to operate around the Indian Ocean littoral: its targets have included United States interests in Tanzania, Kenya, Comoros, Indonesia, and Yemen. United States imperialism itself persists in the Indian Ocean world, waning in Iraq but entrenched in Diego Garcia, the United States-occupied atoll from which bombing raids on Afghanistan and Iraq were launched.

The branch of literary history occupied with generic evolution customarily views masterworks as the drivers of formal change: their success causes later writers to follow their innovations. This article considers the case of the comtesse de Lafayette's La princesse de Clèves, which broke from received Aristotelian ideas on the use of history by focusing on an invented heroine; because the princess was invented, she blocked traditional reading strategies and allowed instead for readerly identification. It is tempting to conclude from this that the novel's innovations made it a harbinger of the future, an ancestor of the nineteenth-century novel. Yet writers of Lafayette's time did not follow her cue, and no trail leads from the princesse de Clèves to later fictive protagonists. Theories of literary evolution must take into account that in many cases there may be no reassuring causal relation between masterworks and broader literary practice.

I chose the title of this essay in part because I will be discussing Leo Bersani's work on painting and cinema, and Doing so as a friend rather than a rival or adversary. But the three words in my title also describe how Bersani himself approaches the visible world: when he sees something, he looks with it, not at it. He is drawn to artists who look in the same way—artists who challenge the notion that seeing is a one-way action, which a seer performs on a visual object. Terrence Malick is a particularly good example of this type of artist, since he not only looks with the world but also makes this action the center of his films. As Bersani and Ulysse Dutoit put it in their discussion of The Thin Red Line, Malick shows us both “the world his characters are registering” and “the imprint of the act of looking on the subject of the looking” (Forms 146).