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"From the Famine to political hunger strikes, from telling tales in the pub to Beckett's tortured utterances, the performance of Irish identity has always been deeply connected to the oral. Exploring how colonial modernity transformed the spaces that sustained Ireland's oral culture, this book explains why Irish culture has been both so creative and so resistant to modernization. David Lloyd brings together manifestations of oral culture in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, showing how the survival of orality was central both to resistance against colonial rule and to Ireland's modern definition as a postcolonial culture. Specific to Ireland as these histories are, they resonate with postcolonial cultures globally. This study is an important and provocative new interpretation of Irish national culture and how it came into being"--

This essay discusses a remark on the eye and the mouth in Bersani and Dutoit's Caravaggio's Secrets that links Caravaggio to Samuel Beckett. Exploring the idea of the gaze and the voice as "things" rather than objects that confirm the subject in its place, and connecting Bersani's understanding of the thing as escaping the subject-object relation in Beckett to Jacques Lacan's objet petit a, the essay posits this understanding of the thing as the basis of Bersani's interest in the possibility of a nonrelational sociality.

Abstract
This essay addresses Walter Benjamin's "Critique of Violence" to draw out the implications of the paradox he notes, that an exercise of a right, if it calls into question the legitimacy of the legal order, can be perceived by the state as violent, even where it is, strictly speaking, nonviolent. Benjamin theorized this in relation to the general strike, which reveals "an objective contradiction in the legal situation" that is nonetheless fundamental to the problematic constitution-in-violence of the state itself. His meditation on the strike can be extended to boycott, divestment, and sanctions as nonviolent exercises of a right that are understood by the state as destructive acts of violence: they present a challenge to the legitimacy of the state precisely in their will to abolish a condition of exclusion and differential rights that is constitutive of the state. In this respect, the observation that BDS seeks "the destruction of the state of Israel" finds its rationale and its limit within the logic of the "Critique of Violence" but also points beyond the institutions of rights, states, and law.

This essay discusses the three poems that Yeats titled with dates, 'September 1913', 'Easter 1916', and 'Nineteen Hundred and Nineteen', in the context of ongoing centenary commemorations of the period of Irish decolonization. It does so by juxtaposing the historical function of dating and commemorating with the virtual possibility of encounters that never quite happened, establishing a trajectory through Yeats's poems that runs from James Connolly's not meeting Rosa Luxemburg to Paul Celan's commemoration of her murder in the 1919 Spartacist uprising in a poem from the late volume Schneepart. Drawing on Jacques Derrida's reading of Celan and the date, the essay uses this constellation of possibilities to reflect on the stakes of a commemoration that entertains possibility rather than closing off the past.

Nasser Hussain often attended to the relation between law and poetry and this article begins with a reading of his brief paper "Auden's Law like Love." In a famous essay, "Nomos and Narrative," Robert Cover linked the communication and the application of legal norms to narrative. This article presents an alternative, anti-normative, and anti-narrative, notion of the relation between poetry and justice that one might call "a-nomos and lyric." It argues that an alternative conception of "poetic justice" persists in the fundamental, paradoxical sociality of a poetic language that resists consumption and subsumption as it does coercion. In its very redundancy, in both the semantic and economic senses of the word, poetry renders to us an apprehension of what "justice" might be as opposed to law. Where law determines, decides, and pronounces sentence, justice opens the space of attentiveness that necessarily suspends the decision of the law. This idea of poetry unties the knotting of nomos to narrative as it stages the indeterminacy of the sentence and of the bounds of experience. Through its redundancy, condensation and proliferation of meaning through tropes, and its delay of the arrival of sense, poetry offers a different understanding of the relation of law and literature than arguments based on narrative can attain. It offers a model of justice beyond the law.

Discourse on Israel, both propagandistic and analytical, has the peculiar tendency of representing it at one moment as normal---a normal democracy, a normal Western society, a normal state---and at others as exceptional: a democracy uniquely embattled among hostile neighbors, a secular state that historically fulfills the religious destiny of a people, a democracy that defines itself as a state for a single people and religion, the only democracy in the region, and so forth. At times, defenders of Israel lay claim to its normality as the reason to exempt it from the norms of human rights and international law, at others complain that Israel is being 'singled out' for criticism. This paper argues that these apparent contradictions, over and above their value to public relations opportunism, can best be explained by understanding Israel's occupation of Palestine as an exemplary settler colonial project whose contradictions are embedded in the early framing of Zionism and whose unfolding follows a logic long ago analyzed by Albert Memmi and other theorists of settler colonialism.