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A veteran reflects on the circumstances that have caused his own path to diverge so widely from that of another brother-in-arms.

In the 1960s, camp's ironic register expanded to many of the decade's cultural and artistic discourses, becoming hegemonic in historical accounts. This essay examines the response of two queer diasporic Puerto Rican artists, the filmmaker José Rodríguez-Soltero and the drag performer "superstar" Mario Montez, who were members of New York's artistic underground, to such an expansion. While Puerto Rican and Latino migrants to the city were associated in the works of underground artists with a seamlessly unfractured culture of fervor and belief that often made their cultural practices illegible as "art," queer diasporic Puerto Rican artists, who were the product of multiple colonial and metropolitan displacements, promoted an aesthetics of mediation that combined calculation with surrender, and self-conscious dismantling of cinematic and artistic conventions with exaltation and belief. The essay further examines the recent comeback of Montez in contemporary queer debates on camp, failure, and shame in light of this diasporic aesthetics.

Acknowledgements -- Abbreviations -- Apologia -- Introduction -- 1. Sham of authenticity -- 2. Ta megala panta eisphale -- 3. Only such art is under consideration here -- 4. Still far from pondering the essence of action -- 5. In a lofty sense ambiguous -- 6. Only a god can still save us -- Post-scriptum -- Bibliography

What does privatization really mean? It depends on who is speaking and the specific language game in use. This article borrows an interpretive device, originally developed by Roland Barthes and further articulated by Jean Baudrillard, which lays waste to the assertion that a word has a single denotative meaning. Such an interpretation (that words represent, or correspond to, reality) is but the first step of a progressively unreal simulacrum that moves to skepticism, through masking (where a word connotes the radical absence of the object it points toward) to hyperreality. Hyperreality is the domain of self-referential imagery, where words and symbols refer only to themselves but provide titillation and visceral gratification in the process. The authors conclude that the very term privatization lacks foundational stability.

Franco 'Bifo' Berardi concludes his analysis of tragedy in late capitalism with a bold call to arms: post-liberal dystopia must be faced and dissolved by irony. He argues for a renewed ironic autonomy, which emphasises the independence of mind from knowledge and the excessive nature of the imagination. Developing Berardi's argument, I suggest there are three obstacles to theorising irony as a form of politics. The first is that a politics of irony is often accused of being either a fraudulent or amoral form of politics, which has itself allowed a post-liberal malaise to fester and grow. The second problem is that irony may no longer be simply an ambivalent tool of critique from the edges of political discourse, but instead a tool which perpetuates its very centre. The third problem is that theorising the performance and place of irony in relation to political critique often results in a slippage from the complexity of the second problem to the impasse of the first. I argue that Berardi's 'ironic autonomy' is entirely possible, so long as the politics of irony is understood as depending on the different forms and media of interpretative space through which contemporary politics takes place.

While an emerging group of scholars has made productive inroads investigating emotion's role in politics, the way in which scholars face these emotions remains an issue in need of updated study. While no article can provide definitive conclusions on such a topic, the current effort posits one narrative device that IR scholars might utilise in order to cope with the realities of politics — irony. Irony is useful in that it allows us a 'critical distance' from our subject without requiring us to abandon our emotions. The article briefly reviews several scholarly positions or practices, from objectivism to verstehen, which confront, quarantine or accommodate scholarly emotionality in varied ways, before articulating the benefits of irony. It proposes two forms of ironical study drawn, respectively, from the work of Reinhold Niebuhr and Richard Rorty.