For thirty years the scholarly consensus has been that John Milton was an iconoclast, an idol breaker. I argue that instead of destroying idols, Milton's poems capture and preserve them under judgment. By investing captured idols with poetic care even as he hollows them out from the inside, Milton refashions them as the instruments of their own disenchantment. This alternative response resembles what the theorist Bruno Latour calls “iconoclash.” Even Eikonoklastes, which Milton wrote in refutation of Charles I's Eikon Basilike, is not an iconoclastic tract. I suggest that his late poems gain much of their aesthetic power from the idols they preserve, through a kind of Lucretian experience that I call the “idolatrous sublime.”

Ludwig Wittgenstein's closely related critiques of language, Cartesian skepticism, inner criteria, and hermeneutics have instructive parallels in the work of Samuel Beckett, whose avowed interest in Wittgenstein's philosophy elucidates, for example, the treatment of expectation in Waiting for Godot, of solipsism in Company, and of rule following in Endgame and What Where. Wittgenstein's insistence that interpretation is not compulsory but remedial, resting on a primitive rule-following competence that permeates our “forms of life” and thus our language, endorses the antimetaphysical dramaturgy Beckett developed while directing stage and screen productions of his own writing. Adapting Wittgenstein's concept of “family resemblance” to an exemplary conjunction of philosophy and literature, this essay proposes that Beckett's works are less aporetic scenarios of deferral and undecidability than meticulous representations of the largely unarticulated convergent behaviors constituting forms of life. As a director, Beckett could draw from Wittgenstein clarifying confirmation of an aesthetic practice that, like the Philosophical Investigations, begins “where interpretation comes to an end.”

Cultural theorists interrogating the appropriation of 9/11 through nationalist, capitalist, and media forces have tended to deauthorize the general public's embodied and affective responses to that event. Instead of disavowing claims of mourning unsupported by geographic proximity or material connection, this essay situates such responses in contemporary screen culture to consider how the shifting grounds of materiality complicate the experience of bodily location at every level from the perceptual to the political. Using photographs, fiction, museum exhibits, and survivor accounts, the essay explores how the transformed relation between subjects and objects defines our apprehension of 9/11 in material, technological, and phenomenological terms. The complex dynamics of perception and embodiment unveiled through these representations suggest the need to rethink categories of experience and affect to accommodate new paradigms of proximity and connectedness increasingly liberated from the measures of geography and the borders of the body.

Jonathan Littell's Les Bienveillantes, the fictional autobiography of an incestuous SS officer, is one of the most controversial novels published in the last decade: it received two prestigious French literary awards but was denounced as kitschy, pornographic, and revisionist. This essay explores the intertext of the Oresteia, which makes the book more complex than most critics have acknowledged. The references to Aeschylus permit the narrator to style himself a tragic hero and thereby to trivialize the Nazi crimes. At the same time, the mythical emplotment, together with other intertexts, indicates that Aue's account is a concoction. Far from simply propagating a revisionist ideology, Les Bienveillantes combines much factual information with a high degree of reflexivity, provoking readers to ponder the Shoah and how to do justice to it.

Charting the origin of romantic aesthetics in theories of the symbol, Tzvetan Todorov points to an eighteenth-century author who remains little known outside the field of German studies: Karl Philipp Moritz (1756–93). Todorov locates the birth of the modern aesthetic of “intransitive signification” (162)—the doctrine of aesthetic autonomy, or the idea that works of art signify nothing outside themselves—in Moritz's essay “An Attempt to Unify All the Fine Arts and Sciences under the Concept of That Which Is Complete in Itself” (1785). Surprisingly, even more than a quarter century after the publication of Todorov's book in the United States, Moritz's seminal treatise is not available in a complete English translation.

My aim in this short essay is to make it possible to read these two passages together, but not in the way i think we'd typically do so in the literary humanities. The passage by Walter Benjamin is a canonical instance of left-literary writing that means to ground itself in Marx's account of capital by demonstrating that the struggle of oppressed peoples, even before the rise of capital, leaves traces in texts and in reading practices. Because of his use of the figure of “the Messiah,” it is possible to read the passage as evidence of Benjamin's messianism, though that is exactly what I intend to suggest we shouldn't do.

Much recent thought in the humanities has been devoted to understanding the contours and character of the global economic collapse approaching its fifth year (unless it is approaching its fortieth, a matter to which we will return). The interplay of social arrangements and political economy has of late taken on an urgency and inescapability impossible to overstate-not least because within higher education it is humanities programs that are most readily threatened with amputation, if not elimination, and are expected to prostrate themselves before economic rationales in their struggles for survival.

John Milton only enters Slavoj Žižek's in defense of lost causes through a passing reference—to Satan—but in the history of unlikely attempts to draw victory from the jaws of defeat Milton's response to the Restoration ranks high by any standard (345). In 1660, when almost everyone else associated with the revolutionary government was trying to look as innocuous as possible, Milton instead wrote The Ready and Easy Way, a defense of republicanism, published it, then republished it, even as Charles II was on his way back to England. Why make such a seemingly futile, potentially life-threatening gesture? The most interesting answer might be that The Ready and Easy Way is the political equivalent of Walter Benjamin's stunning assessment of art in “The Task of the Translator”: “No poem is intended for the reader …” (253). From this point of view, all great human gestures and accomplishments belong to eternity: they are enacted or produced because they intersect with truth. We can participate in their truth, but that is our good fortune, not their purpose.

There is a surprising coherence between the human self-understanding and worldview that underpin the theoretical program of the Austrian marginalist economist Carl Menger (1840–1921), first articulated in his 1871 Grundsätze der Volkswirthschaftslehre (Principles of Economics), and Sigmund Freud's psychoanalytic project. Both are grounded in a Hobbesian-Darwinian emphasis on monadic individuals guided by egoistic drives, self-interest, and a competitive struggle for individual advantage (Birken, Consuming Desire 1–39). Both, moreover, are steeped in a kind of Malthusian pessimism that invokes increasing scarcity of resources as the underlying cause of human existential anxiety and as the defining feature of human interactions with the “real” world of commodities (Riesman 3). For the Mengerian marginalist as for the Freudian psychoanalyst, the driving forces behind human life are existential need, the instinct for self-preservation and self-improvement, and the development of successful strategies for managing and satisfying needs.

When the subject is the relation between capitalism and American literature, few novels come more readily to mind than William Dean Howells's 1885 The Rise of Silas Lapham. “Published at the height of America's industrial expansion,” writes Wayne Westbrook in a typical assessment, it “pictures an era and personifies a type. The Era is the Gilded Age. The type is the American businessman” (59). But for a novel self-consciously focused on business, The Rise of Silas Lapham is surprisingly interested in the gift. Counter to Howells's famous later assertion that “[a]t present business is the only human solidarity,” the gift turns out to be the sole “chain” uniting Howells's characters against whatever interests, tastes, and principles separate them. Hidden in plain sight, the main plot of the novel delineates the awkward yet ultimately binding relations between the Brahmin Coreys and the rising Lapham family, which come about not because the Laphams “buy their way into society” (Michaels 40) but because they give the Coreys a gift so true and so large that it must be recognized and reciprocated. When the women of both families happen to be staying at a Canadian resort, Mrs. Lapham spontaneously comes to Mrs. Corey's rescue and, as a French doctor later makes uncomfortably explicit, saves Mrs. Corey's life. “A certain intimacy inevitably followed,” Howells writes, as the Coreys are “gratefully recognizant” of the gift and their “singular obligation” to the Laphams (24–25). This gift has received no critical attention even though it engenders the main plot of the novel as the initial “helplessly contracted” (172) obligation leads to further contact between the families, from dinner to business dealings to marriage. None of these consequences are comfortable; indeed, each of them is excruciating and poses one of the text's central questions: how does one reciprocate such an impossibly large gift when one shares no interests or tastes with the people to whom one is now bound by gratitude and debt? Mrs. Lapham's gift to Mrs. Corey not only transforms the Coreys' life forever (in a way, they pay with their son for the mother's life), but it also transforms Howells's novel from a novel about business to a narrative about gifts. This is far from incidental. Howells doubles the Corey-Lapham plot as Silas Lapham, in turn, believes that he owes his life to Jim Millon, who, during the Civil War, took a bullet for Lapham and died. The Laphams equally struggle with their own uncomfortable obligation to the working-class Deweys. While neither the Coreys nor the Laphams can figure out how to respond to impossibly large gifts given to them by people with whom they share nothing else, they do know instinctively that they must do so and reciprocate in one way or another. Howells's novel tells the story of these gifts and their confusing, maddening, and binding obligations. Indeed, Howells's supposed business novel can only spin itself out on these gifts, given and recognized as such.

In a scene in the novel Los Bandidos de río Frío (the bandits of RíO Frío [1888–91]), by the Mexican writer manuel payno, one of the characters, a businessman named Manuel Escandón, tells his friends that he gained four hundred pesos from being robbed by a group of bandits led by Mariano Evaristo, an artisan turned murderer. Bernardo Couto, a victim of the same robbery, tells Escandón he doesn't believe the claim. Escandón shows him a piece of paper where he has scribbled some numbers and tells him, “In these double entries there is no mistake” (415). Joaquín Pesado, another friend, sides with Escandón and compares the results of double-entry bookkeeping to theological truths.

For three months in the spring and summer of 2010, almost five million gallons of crude oil gushed uncontrollably from a broken BP well into the Gulf of Mexico, in what is thus far the worst petroleum spill in history. At the moment the spill occurred, the world was still reeling from the largest international financial disaster the world has yet known, one that reverberated from Iceland to the United States to the outer edges of the European Union in Greece and Spain. If the financial crisis was characterized by the sudden disappearance of intangible and invisible financial value, the horrific spectacle of oil-drenched seascapes, birds, fish, and coastlines resulting from the BP spill was a tangible reminder that capitalism had still not been able to emancipate itself from its material body. Even more troubling was the fact that the first several attempts by the multi-billion-dollar company to stanch the broken well were stunning failures: daily news broadcasts brought into public consciousness terms like top kill and kill mud, as hydraulic engineers armed with golf balls and sundry varieties of foam tried to kill the sea monster created by BP.