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Volume 29, Number 1, Fall 2015 • Marxism Refracted Published twice yearly, Mediations is the journal of the Marxist Literary Group. We publish dossiers of translated material on special topics and peer-reviewed general issues, usually in alternation. General inquiries and submissions should be directed to [email protected]. We invite scholarly contributions across disciplines on any topic that engages seriously with the Marxist tradition. Manuscripts received will be taken to be original, unpublished work not under consideration elsewhere. Articles should be submitted electronically in a widely-used format. Manuscripts should not exceed reasonable article length, and should be accompanied by an abstract of up to 300 words, including six keywords. Articles will be published in MLA endnote format, and should be submitted with the author’s name and affiliation on a separate cover page to facilitate blind peer review. Photographs, tables, and figures should be sent as separate files in a widely- used format. Written permission to reproduce copyright-protected material must be obtained by the author before submission. Books for review should be sent to: Mediations Department of English (MC 162) 601 South Morgan Street University of Illinois at Chicago Chicago IL 60607-7120 USA Articles published in Mediations may be reproduced for scholarly purposes without express permission, provided the reproduction is accompanied by full citation information. For archives and further information, visit http://www.mediationsjournal.org Cover image: Photo by Aeou This selection © 2015 by Mediations Mediations 29.1 Fall 2015 Marxism Refracted 1 Editors’ note 3 Jim Holstun: Antigone Becomes Jocasta: Soha Bechara, Résistante, and Incendies 43 James Christie: Jameson Among the Contras: Third-World Culture, Neoliberal Globalization, and the Latin American Connection 69 Malcolm K. Read: What We Talk About When We Talk About Marxism: Juan Carlos Rodríguez, Althusser, and the Ideological Unconscious 101 Alexander Bove: “Why does the other want to destroy me?”: The Face of the Other, the Death Drive, and $urplus Jouissance in the Time of Late Capitalism Book Reviews 123 Brent Ryan Bellamy: Tropics of Finance 129 Ryan M. Brooks: The Struggle is Real 139 Jen Hedler Phillis: The Last Western’s Missing Piece 147 Contributors “Editors’ Note.” Mediations 29.1 (Fall 2015) 1-2. www.mediationsjournal.org/articles/editors-note-vol-29-no-1 Editors’ note This issue of Mediations is broadly concerned with the ways Marxism is reflected and refracted in the lives and ideas of activists, philosophers, and citizens as a way of thinking about and acting in the world. Jim Holstun’s “Antigone Becomes Jocasta” introduces us to Soha Bechara, a Lebanese political prisoner and activist whose prison memoirs resist the tropes and conventions expected of a Middle Eastern woman engaged in violent revolution: Bechara, Holstun argues, refused to engage in sectarian conflict during the Civil War, resisted being made a female martyr by the Lebanese Communist Party after her attempted assassination of SLA leader Antoine Lahad, and remained committed to revolutionary praxis during her eleven-year imprisonment. Bechara’s perspective on Middle Eastern geopolitical conflict offers readers a startling new perspective on what is at stake in the region and, more important perhaps for the Marxist Literary Group, what is at stake in literary presentations of the region. When her story is taken up by non-Marxists, all that makes it exceptional disappears; Incendies, the play (perhaps) based on her life, turns her from an active communist revolutionary to a passive victim of senseless Middle Eastern violence. As she is transformed from Antigone — a woman whose ethical and political practices might reshape the world — to Jocasta — a victim of the whims of powerful forces over which she has no control — all that is revolutionary about Bechara’s life is lost. The next article also points to the expansive potential of global Marxism, both as it is practiced and as it is represented. In “Jameson Among the Contras,” James Christie undertakes a new reading of Fredric Jameson’s seminal “Third-World Literature in the Era of Multinational Capital.” By considering biographical details of Jameson’s life — his trips to Cuba and Nicaragua, and his relationships with artists and activists in those nations — Christie provides us a new way of thinking about a first-world critic’s relationship to the art and politics of the Global South. The article periodizes Jameson’s encounter with the Third World at the inception of the Reagan doctrine and, thus, at the beginning of a new phase of US imperialism to go with a new phase of global capitalism. Christie’s periodization is an insightful reading of an essay that has never ceased to be a touchstone (and lightning rod) for Marxist and postcolonial critics. Further, like Holstun, Christie understands the work of Marxism — here, Marxist criticism — as life’s work, as inseparable from one’s writing and politics as it is from one’s ethics. Malcolm Read presents another thread of global Marxism in his essay-review 2 Editors’ Note of Juan Carlos Rodríguez’s De que hablamos cuando hablamos de marxismo. Detailing Rodríguez’s career from the 1970s to the present and offering some explanation for why he remains largely unknown in Anglophone Marxism, Read reveals why Rodríguez’s Marxism — inflected both by the political situation in Spain and his commitment to Althusser — should be considered a major contribution to Marxist thought in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. The breadth of the article is consonant with the breadth of Rodríguez’s work, ranging over Spanish history, encounters with British Marxism and Critical Realism, and literary figures like Góngora, Quevedo, and Brecht. At its heart, Read’s contribution articulates the way that national and historical specificity — in this case, the specificity of Spain after fascism — cannot be ignored when we talk about Marxism. We turn, finally, to Alexander Bove’s elaboration of A. Kiarina Kordela’s 2008 $urplus: Spinoza, Lacan. Through a careful reading of Kordela’s use of the death drive, jouissance, the gaze, and the Other, Bové posits a new way of understanding the relationship between contemporary capitalism, geopolitics, and ethics. Bove’s piece builds on the work of Kordela, Spinoza, Lacan, Žižek, and Levinas to make a startling claim: the mechanisms of late capitalism have transformed the death drive into a narcissistic drive to consume. But the foreclosure of the death drive has a surprising consequence: it is through its disappearance that the violent culture of terrorism emerges, so that what is at stake in any encounter with the Other turns out to be our lives. Jen Hedler Phillis, for the Mediations editors Jim Holstun. “Antigone Becomes Jocasta: Soha Bechara, Résistante, and Incendies.” Mediations 29.1 (Fall 2015) 3-42. www.mediationsjournal.org/articles/antigone-becomes-jocasta Antigone Becomes Jocasta: Soha Bechara, Résistante, and Incendies Jim Holstun For the secret of a human being is not his Oedipus complex or his inferiority complex. It is the very limit of his freedom, his ability to resist torture and death.1 Torture preoccupied her because she saw in it, or rather in the person who could resist it, the summit of human courage.2 Those who broke down, or became informers, were those who did not understand the reality of occupation and resistance, those who could not grasp the radicality of freedom…. For me, the fact that I was a girl, that I put my family in danger, that I was incarcerated — none of this mattered. To have stopped fighting would have been to turn my back on what it means, for all of us, to be human.3 Introduction: Resisters and Tragedians In March 1978, the Israeli Defense Forces (IDF) invaded Lebanon in “Operation Litani,” named after the southern Lebanese river coveted by Israelis and pre-state Zionists as far back as Chaim Weizmann in 1919.4 They withdrew later that year, leaving behind a proxy militia later called the South Lebanon Army. The SLA established a buffer state in the south. It expanded after the IDF’s 1982 invasion, which culminated on September 15, when the Phalange (a Maronite militia), the SLA, and the IDF coordinated a massacre of Palestinians in Sabra and Shatila Camps, West Beirut. The next day, Leftist groups, including the Lebanese Communist Party (LCP), founded the Lebanese National Resistance Front (LNRF), a small but effective force.5 The SLA fought Palestinians and their allies in the LNRF at first, then the Shia forces of Amal 4 Jim Holstun and Hezbollah. In 2000, Hezbollah drove the IDF out of Lebanon. Some SLA veterans stayed. Others fled abroad. In June 1967, Soha Bechara was born in Beirut to an Eastern Orthodox family. She joined the LCP. In 1988, posing as an exercise instructor, she shot SLA leader, General Antoine Lahad. Without charges or trial, the SLA interned her for ten years in Khiam Camp, near the Israeli border, supervised and funded by Israel. Released in September 1998, she moved to Paris, then to Geneva, where she married a Green politician, had two children, taught mathematics, and began work with Collectif Urgence Palestine– Genève. In 2000, with Gilles Paris, she published a memoir titled Résistante, with translations into Arabic (2000) and English (2003). Three film biographies appeared in 2000.6 In 2011, with former Khiam internee Cosette Ibrahim, she published a second memoir, translated as La fenêtre: camp du Khiam (2014).7 In 2001, the Lebanese-Canadian playwright Wajdi Mouawad learned about Khiam Camp, saw Sabbag’s documentary, read Bechara’s book, and met her in Paris. In 2003, he mounted productions of Incendies: a play that turns Bechara into “Nawal Marwan,” a political prisoner raped by her unrecognized, long-lost son. 2009 saw a revised edition and an English translation.8 In 2010, Canadian director Denis Villeneuve premiered a film adaptation in Bechara’s Geneva.