English

Nobody makes better use of the aesthetic analogy than David Hume in his Enquiry Concerning the Principles of Morals (1751).  Hume argues that the pleasure we feel in the beautiful is analogous to, and continuous with, our pleasure in virtue, a pleasure that clearly demonstrates the “sentiment of humanity,” our common moral feeling.  There is only one problem:  many of Hume’s examples of natural moral feeling draw not from the aesthetics of the beautiful, but from an aesthetics of the sublime, the incongruousness of which goes completely unremarked in both versions of the essay, that in the Treatise and the more elaborate version of the second Enquiry.

It is one thing to take up a much-loved novel and sink into it again, finding all the old familiar faces and visiting again the old familiar places. It is another thing entirely to reread Pride and Prejudice in the company of Patricia Meyer Spacks. In Spacks's hands, the 1813 first edition is glossed, word by word, line by line, through notes that remove it from the shadow cast by one's own pride and prejudice, and set again in the light.

Hina Nazar is associate professor of English and Interpretive eory at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. Her publications cover the elds of eighteenth-and nineteenth-century British ction, Enlighten ment moral and political theory, and critical theory, and include, most recently, Enlightened Sentiments: Judgment and Autonomy in the Age of Sensibility (2012).

This issue of AVANT is dedicated to hauntology, an approach originally defined by Jacques Derrida as a "logic of haunting" that is "larger and more powerful than an ontology or a thinking of Being," and that "harbor[s] within itself, but like circumscribed places or particular effects, eschatology and teleology themselves" (Derrida, 1994, p. 10). At a most general level, hauntology is a study of spectrality and spectres-that is, entities and processes that exceed any definite categorization; accordingly, it inevitably questions the established notions of being, thereby transforming the status of the objects and subjects of knowledge, and contesting the possibility of objectivity. The very idea of spectres-positioned as they are between worlds and times-disrupts the conventional means of measuring time and space, as well as all kinds of dichotomous conceptualizations, including "the sharp distinction between the real and the unreal, the actual and the inactual, the living and the non-living, being and non-being" (Derrida, 1994, p. 11). Significantly for the articles collected in this issue, the figure of the spectre questions the divisions between texts, and the separation between the individual and the social/communal, thus palpably demonstrating the impossibility of examining any concept or text independently of others. Ac cordingly, instead of looking for certainties, the scholar of spectres looks for sites of crossings, borrowings, and contaminations, re-discovering traces of other times, places, and beings in the seemingly solid here and now, and producing somewhat melancholic accounts of a culture that is both already haunted and potentially haunting.

Taking as examples selected gothic works of recent American fiction-Gerald Vizenor's Darkness in Saint Louis Bearheart (1978; 1990); Patricia Highsmith's Tales of Natural and Unnatural Catastrophes (1987) and Leslie Marmon Silko's Almanac of the Dead (1991)-this essay demonstrates how such books fictively accelerate destructive social and economic forces and tip them over into figurations of disaster, in an attempt to liberate the paradoxically productive potential of despair. Write in order not simply to destroy, in order not simply to conserve, in order not to transmit; write in the thrall of the impossible real, that share of disaster wherein every reality, safe and sound, sinks.-Maurice Blanchot, The Writing of the Disaster (1986) isaster," as Eric Cazdyn reminds us in his introduction to a recent special issue of The South Atlantic Quarterly, is contingent, "is that moment when the sustainable configuration of relations fails, when the relation between one thing and another breaks down" (647), as opposed to a crisis: "there is something necessary about a crisis, something true to the larger systemic form. Crises occur when things go right, not when they go wrong" (649). Increasingly, critics have consequently emphasized the paradoxically necessary place of "disaster" rather than "crisis" within globalized systems of capitalist accumulation, most notoriously, perhaps, in Naomi Klein'

In Cities of the Dead, Joseph Roach speculates that "Modernity itself might be understood as a new way of handling (and thinking about) the dead" (1996, p. 48). Roach (following Foucault) argues that a whole array of rationalized spatial practices emerged during the Enlightenment designed to enforce policies of segregation and hygiene, demarcating the social and metaphysical lines that were necessary to distinguish black from white, civilization from nature, citizen from foreigner, past from present, reason from supernatural or folk forms of knowing, and-ultimately-living from dead. In this sense, "gothic" romanticism represented the development of a sort of unnatural chiaroscuro effect, whereby such boundaries and lines of distinction became blurred, where dead flesh becomes re-animated, where corpses risen from graves come to contaminate the spaces of the living. In contradistinction to formations that "view the dead as hermetically sealed off from contemporaneous life, quarantined into the past," gothic cultural productions, as Eric Anderson et al. have argued recently in Undead Souths, reveal "how the dead contain cultural vibrancy in the present" (2015, p. 2). This essay, rethinking traditional understandings of "Southern Gothic" by emphasizing the world-making power of the dead, explores texts about burial grounds by modernist writers from the American South, William Faulkner's As I Lay Dying (1930) and Frances Newman's Dead Lovers are Faithful Lovers (1928). En route, I consider Freudian and other understandings of mourning from a spatial perspective, focusing on variously abortive or failed funereal dramas of interment and burial.

A rthur Redding begins Radical Legacies by noting the increasing distrust and alienation faced by public intellectuals. Redding argues that today's intellectuals are too often pressed into advancing the popular will of the era. Redding advocates that intellectuals embrace uselessness, meaning to generate thought unmotivated by profit or reward. The book situates key U.S. intellectuals and their perspectives on various cultural debates by noting how these perspectives transcend single moments in history. A U.S.-trained English professor, Redding regularly writes about twentieth-century U.S. public intellectuals, Cold War culture and politics, and anarchism. Immigrating to Canada has given Redding a standpoint from which to critique how U.S. neoliberal thought has been used to rationalize, defend, or advance practices that are antithetical to the liberal ethos. The book's six chapters are framed by an introduction and conclusion and feature 12 intellectuals whose careers span the end of the nineteenth century to end of the Cold War. Redding's introduction effectively identifies

The link between memory and place has historically attended the study of memory in every sense: in its contents (our attachment to memories of home); in its practices (place as an aid to rote memorization); in its externalizations (monuments and museums); in its linguistic expressions (“I can’t quite place you”); and, in its psychological and physiological theorizations (the conscious and unconscious brain as the loci of memory, firing across well- or little-used synaptic gaps). As Natalie Zemon Davis and Randolph Starns put it, “Proust’s petite Madeleine, Maurice Halbwachs’s seminal work on the ‘social frames’ of collective memory, and even cognitive studies and biological research on the ‘location’ of memory in the brain are all reminders that memory seeks its local habitations.” The contributors to Memory and Migration explore this crucial observation about the locations of memory in relation to a pressing contemporary question: How do we understand memory that has migrated or has been exiled from its local habitations? It would be a simpler question if mobility and distance weren’t generally understood to produce “artificial” memory, or something akin to history. But, in this volume we argue that migration rather than location is the condition of memory. Between times, places, generations and media, from individuals to communities and vice versa, movement is what produces memory—and our anxieties about pinning it to place. How then do we understand the fixity of place in memory, intensified in an age of mass migrations?

Review of Memory and Migration: http://migration.oxfordjournals.org/content/early/2013/02/13/migration.mns009.short

The deictic, as place of ethical and aesthetic encounter, has been taken up for its play across various forms, including film, painting, and photography. ‘‘Calling on Witnesses’’ explores the particular case of the ethical appeal of the deictic in Charlotte Delbo’s memoir Auschwitz and After and Michael Redhill’s drama Goodness, two texts that exemplify the tensions between first- and second-hand witnesses. The deictic, best known as an ethics of exchangeability, operates differently here, where second-hand witnesses are rebuked for not knowing the experience of the other. In a new formulation of the ethics of the deictic, ‘‘Calling on Witnesses,’’ argues that second-person, second-hand witnesses are called upon to pay attention to their own future capacity for ethical and/or unethical action rather than the immediate details of testimony, which can only be transmitted as history.