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Historical Style' connects the birth of eighteenth-century British consumer society to the rise of historical self-consciousness. Prior to the eighteenth century, British style was slow to change and followed the cultural and economic imperatives of monarchical regimes. By the 1750s, however, a growing fashion press extolled, in writing and illustration, the new phenomenon of periodized fashion trends. As fashion fads came in and out of style, and as fashion texts circulated and obsolesced, Britons were forced to confront the material persistence of out-of-date fashions. Timothy Campbell argues that these fashion texts and objects shaped British perception of time and history by producing new curiosity about the very recent past, as well as a new self-consciousness about the means by which the past could be understood. In a panoptic sweep, 'Historical Style' brings together art history, philosophy, and literary history to portray an era increasingly aware of itself. Burgeoning consumer society, Campbell contends, highlighted the distinction between the past and the present, created an expectation of continual change, and forged a sense of history as something that could be tracked through material objects. Campbell assembles a wide range of writings, images, and objects to render this eighteenth-century landscape: commercial dress displays and David Hume's ideas of novelty as historical form; popular illustrations of recent fashion trends and Sir Joshua Reynolds's aesthetic precepts; fashion periodicals and Sir Walter Scott's costume-saturated historical fiction. In foregrounding fashion to trace eighteenth-century historicism, 'Historical Style' draws upon the interdisciplinary, multimedia archival impressions that fashionable dress has left behind, as well as the historical and conceptual resources within the field of fashion studies that literary and cultural historians of eighteenth-century and Romantic Britain have often neglected

This essay is dedicated to exploring a number of consequences of Roberto Esposito's "The Dispositif of the Person" for contemporary critiques of neo-liberalism. After an initial discussion of the significance of the term, dispositif (apparatus), for contemporary thought, especially in Giorgio Agamben's recent work, Esposito's articulation of person as apparatus is discussed in the context of Christian and Roman understandings of personhood. The role of grace comes in for careful scrutiny, especially for how it functions in Esposito's argument as the mode by which thanatopolitics operates. According to Esposito, the "gift" of grace allows the subject to dominate his or her animal half and so will be awarded the adjective personal. Such a reading of person as dispositif has enormous consequences for critiques of neo-liberalism. When seen in tandem with Max Weber's and Simone Weil's perspectives on grace, it increasingly appears that the market today awards grace to those populations that it will count as persons, while at the same time refusing to make such a gift to many others. A number of dispatches from the front-lines of neo-liberalism follow to show how profoundly complicit personhood is in contemporary biopower. In the final pages the essay moves towards a fuller discussion of Esposito's philosophy of the impersonal to provide more details on how the impersonal might act as a countermeasure to the thanatopolitics of contemporary neo-liberalism. Associating Esposito's affirmative biopolitics of the impersonal with Friedrich Nietzsche's philosophy of perspectivism, the essay concludes with some considerations of the affirmative potential of the impersonal as a "planetary movement" in Nietzsche's words; as a previously ignored mode for resisting contemporary biopower operating under neo-liberal cover.

In much that is written about Sergio Leone's "spaghetti westerns" – that genre of Italian cinema characterized by hyper-violence or cartoon-like formal properties or both – most critics invoke an Italian cultural rubric for deciding the films' ultimate meaning. From the earliest critical readings of the "spaghetti western" that focused on Leone's films as derived, cut-out copies of the mythic American westerns of Ford, Hawks, and Anthony Mann to the more recent attempts to locate Leone's cinema within a more encompassing framework of native Italian visual tropes, Italian culture remains the final arbiter of acceptable interpretations. In the following essay, I take issue with that view by arguing for another perspective on Leone's cinema, especially with regard to his first two westerns, Fistful of Dollars and For a Few Dollars More. I do so by associating the conflict and violent acquisition of power depicted in the films with a semantic chain that needs to be thought through a notion of the Mediterranean. The Mediterranean functions as a kind of unconscious in Leone's cinema, one that operates both visually and diegetically. The visual impact is made most clear in the barren mise-en-scene of these films, shot in southern Spain, which offers a dramatic counterpoint to the monumentality of the American Western. Diegetically, the Mediterranean figures in the ultimate dénouement of these films: the destruction of towns and the lives that inhabit them. This destruction is linked to the centrality of technology in Leone's oeuvre, which, when inserted into a depoliticized setting such as the Mediterranean, leads to a radical discounting of life. Thus the Mediterranean appears in my reading of Leone not simply as hybridity or as "common inheritance" of all mankind as some would have it, but rather as fundamentally destabilizing for all political order.

In much that is written about Sergio Leone's "spaghetti westerns" – that genre of Italian cinema characterized by hyper-violence or cartoon-like formal properties or both – most critics invoke an Italian cultural rubric for deciding the films' ultimate meaning. From the earliest critical readings of the "spaghetti western" that focused on Leone's films as derived, cut-out copies of the mythic American westerns of Ford, Hawks, and Anthony Mann to the more recent attempts to locate Leone's cinema within a more encompassing framework of native Italian visual tropes, Italian culture remains the final arbiter of acceptable interpretations. In the following essay, I take issue with that view by arguing for another perspective on Leone's cinema, especially with regard to his first two westerns, Fistful of Dollars and For a Few Dollars More. I do so by associating the conflict and violent acquisition of power depicted in the films with a semantic chain that needs to be thought through a notion of the Mediterranean. The Mediterranean functions as a kind of unconscious in Leone's cinema, one that operates both visually and diegetically. The visual impact is made most clear in the barren mise-en-scene of these films, shot in southern Spain, which offers a dramatic counterpoint to the monumentality of the American Western. Diegetically, the Mediterranean figures in the ultimate dénouement of these films: the destruction of towns and the lives that inhabit them. This destruction is linked to the centrality of technology in Leone's oeuvre, which, when inserted into a depoliticized setting such as the Mediterranean, leads to a radical discounting of life. Thus the Mediterranean appears in my reading of Leone not simply as hybridity or as "common inheritance" of all mankind as some would have it, but rather as fundamentally destabilizing for all political order.

Has biopolitics actually become thanatopolitics, a field of study obsessed with death? Is there something about the nature of biopolitical thought today that makes it impossible to deploy affirmatively? If this is true, what can life-minded thinkers put forward as the merits of biopolitical reflection? These questions drive Improper Life, Timothy C. Campbell's dexterous inquiry-as-intervention. Campbell argues that a "crypto-thanatopolitics" can be teased out of Heidegger's critique of technology and that some of the leading scholars of biopolitics-including Michel Foucault, Giorgio Agamben, a

Has biopolitics actually become thanatopolitics, a field of study obsessed with death? Is there something about the nature of biopolitical thought today that makes it impossible to deploy affirmatively? If this is true, what can life-minded thinkers put forward as the merits of biopolitical reflection? These questions drive Improper Life, Timothy C. Campbell's dexterous inquiry-as-intervention. Campbell argues that a "crypto-thanatopolitics" can be teased out of Heidegger's critique of technology and that some of the leading scholars of biopolitics-including Michel Foucault, Giorgio Agamben, a