Heir to the divided aristotelian vision of nonhuman creatures as, alternately, mute foils (Politics 9; BK. 1, Sec. 2) and behavioral mirrors (Parts 138–39, bk. 2, sec. 4) of “man,” the properly “political” animal, animal studies has displayed uncertainty about how and where to draw species boundaries. Among the provinces of this field of inquiry, none is more defined by this tension than laboratory biomedical research, where physiological correspondences underwrite animal models of human maladies, while presupposed ontological distinctions justify the consignment of nonhuman animals to treatment considered improper for human subjects. Conventionally, those distinctions have centered on a cluster of intellectual capabilities—reasoning, speaking, intending, remembering—the dearth or deficiency of which abrogates the nonhuman's right to dissent and legitimates the human claim of priority. “Animal studies” in this sense, designating a wide range of investigative operations employing nonhuman animal bodies, posits material resemblance and metaphysical incompatibility between researcher and the object of research.

In one of his signature reversals of accepted wisdom, Michel Foucault modulated Carl von Clausewitz's well-known aphorism on war and politics to read, “Politics is the continuation of war by other means” (48). That is to say, even in peace, the law is enacted by force. In conditions of state-determined necessity, that force appears as a direct actor in legitimizing what Giorgio Agamben calls “the state of exception.” In English law the term would be “martial law” (Agamben 7). By extension, if globalization has again become the “global civil war” (Arendt, qtd. in Agamben 1) that was the cold war or has created a new state of “permanent war” (Retort 78), then war is global politics. So what kind of war is the war in Iraq (Reid)? It is now being waged by the United States as a global counterinsurgency. In the field manual Counterinsurgency issued by the United States Army in December 2006 at the instigation of General David Petraeus (Bacevich), counterinsurgency is explicitly a cultural war, to be fought in the United States as much as it is in Iraq. Cultural war, with visuality playing a central role, takes “culture” to be the means, location, and object of warfare. In his classic novel 1984, George Orwell coined the slogan “war is peace” (199), anticipating the peacekeeping missions, surgical strikes, defense walls, and “coalitions of the willing” that demarcated much of the twentieth century. In the era of United States global policing, war is counterinsurgency, and the means of counterinsurgency are cultural. War is culture. Globalized capital uses war as its means of acculturating citizens to its regime, requiring both acquiescence to the excesses of power and a willingness to ignore what is palpably obvious. Counterinsurgency has become a digitally mediated version of imperialist techniques to produce legitimacy. Its success in the United States is unquestioned: who in public life is against counterinsurgency, even if they oppose the war in Iraq or invasions elsewhere? War is culture.

Simone De Beauvoir's political writings pose a puzzle. Politics is the stuff of much of her fictional and autobiographical, as well as more philosophical and sociotheoretical, work. Across all these genres she repeatedly explored the ethical and epistemological ambiguities that political action presents. That is, she wrote continually about politics. But she also sometimes wrote to intervene in politics, and when she did so, she wrote in a strikingly different manner. The writings she intended as political interventions are stridently opinionated and judgmental; they do not attend to nuances or complexities, and they stand in stark contrast to her embrace of ambiguity elsewhere. Why, I want to ask, this striking difference? And what is its significance?

The story of what's what in asian american studies is like the story of the profession at large: no one thinks in a vacuum. But the current drift in literary scholarship toward questions of transnationalism and globalization arrives at shores long explored by scholars who work on Asian America and the Pacific. Much of this familiarity has to do with the material history of their subjects, the ways in which questions of diaspora and integration, relations between the flows of people and the flows of things, and the narratives of international politics and imperialist violence constitute the ground of Asian America and indeed of the concept of the Pacific as an ocean, a sea of islands, a limit to westward expansion, and the lubricated surface of a certain transcultural history. The critical insights that unfold from the labor of Asian Americanist thought, like those gained through the study of African America and the Caribbean, do not add ethnographic detail to some larger and fundamentally established picture of the history of the United States or global modernity: they change the picture. They reframe it.

During the launching of the university of São paulo, The 1930s added another distinguished chapter to the storied history of Franco-Brazilian intellectual and artistic collaborations. Starting in 1934 several promising French scholars began teaching at this new academic institution. Among the most prestigious were the cultural anthropologist Claude Lévi-Strauss, the historian Fernand Braudel, the geographer Pierre Monbeig, the classicist Michel Berveiller, and the Portuguese-literatures specialist Pierre Hourcade (Riedinger 443).

In October 1912 the first issue of Harriet Monroe's new journal, Poetry: A magazine of verse, appeared. The last has yet to come. In an era when little magazines came and went like mayflies, Poetry came and has refused to go. The journal had it all—in its early years it was at the forefront of debates about imagism, vers libre, and other issues concerning the “proper” form and content for poetry. Monroe, its editor, is still insufficiently appreciated as a major figure in literary modernism. We hope to change that. Supported by a grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities, the Modernist Journals Project (MJP) has completed a digital edition of the first eleven years of this distinguished journal, using original copies provided by the University of Chicago Library, supplemented in some instances by copies from the University of Wisconsin, Madison, and the University of Tulsa's McFarlin Library. Those of us working on this edition have discovered many interesting things, including the first publication of Joyce Kilmer's “Trees,” which Cleanth Brooks and Robert Penn Warren later used as the primary example of bad poetry in their New Critical textbook, Understanding Poetry (274–78).

Simone De Beauvoir, France's most famous woman intellectual, was born in paris on 9 January 1908. Exactly one hundred years later, Paris gave her a birthday party: an international conference presided over by another famous woman intellectual, Julia Kristeva. The conference, held during 9–11 January in the remains of a Franciscan convent that the city bequeathed to the University of Paris, attracted a large crowd despite the rainy weather and the drafty Gothic hall, where you had to sit in your winter coat. At the opening and closing sessions, two of Nicolas Sarkozy's female ministers made an appearance; in between, the speakers included celebrities who had known Beauvoir (most notably the maker of the film Shoah, Claude Lanzmann, who was her young lover in the 1950s and who now edits the journal she and Sartre founded, Les temps modernes), well-known writers and journalists, activists in the women's movement who had worked with Beauvoir in the last years of her life, and old friends, who shared their reminiscences, as well as translators of her works and scholars young and old from all over the world. Beauvoir's adopted daughter and literary executor, Sylvie Le Bon de Beauvoir, was in attendance throughout the proceedings; all in all, more than fifty people participated in the program. The first Simone de Beauvoir Prize for Women's Freedom was awarded to two women writers known for their courageous critiques of Islamic fundamentalism: the Somalian Ayaan Hirsi Ali and the Bangladeshi Taslina Nasreen, who could not be there in person but who sent greetings. There were film screenings in the evenings, a “cocktail” at City Hall, and a concluding banquet at La Coupole, where Beauvoir had lunched with Sartre every day for many years.

Histories of race and empire have shaped the field imaginary of species studies from its inception. Politically, the field's animal-activist heritage models its critique on movements for racial justice. Historically, this move links to Enlightenment conceptions of animals that relied on the same objectifying methods used to represent slaves and the poor: sentimentality, representations of cruelty, humane manifestos. Epistemologically, the taxonomic tools that name the objects of analysis have been deployed to define non-Europeans as subspecies or independent species. Geographically, the field's intellectual production is centered in the United States, Australia, and Britain, tied to neocolonial institutions of animal advocacy, and slow in recognizing internal critiques of animal and ecological movements by activists of color.

Trying to give an overview of the burgeoning area known as animal studies is, if you'll permit me the expression, a bit like herding cats. My recourse to that analogy is meant to suggest that “the animal,” when you think about it, is everywhere (including in the metaphors, similes, proverbs, and narratives we have relied on for centuries—millennia, even). Teach a course or write an article on the subject, and well-intentioned suggestions about interesting material pour in from all quarters. In my field alone, there's not just, say, the starring role of bear, deer, and dog at the heart of William Faulkner's Go Down, Moses and the futility of trying to imagine Ernest Hemingway without his fraternity of bulls, lions, and fish or Marianne Moore without her menagerie of pangolins and jellyfish. There's also King Kong, Babe, Charlotte's Web, Seabiscuit, The Silence of the Lambs, The Horse Whisperer, and The Fly. There's the art of Damien Hirst, Joseph Beuys, Sue Coe, William Wegman, Bill Viola, Carolee Schneeman, Lynn Randolph, and Patricia Piccinini. And all those bird poems, from Percy Shelley's skylark and John Keats's nightingale to Edgar Allan Poe's raven and Wallace Stevens's blackbird. As any medievalist or early modern scholar will tell you, the question of the animal assumes, if anything, even more centrality in earlier periods; indeed, recent and emerging scholarship suggests a picture in which the idea of the animal that we have inherited from the Enlightenment and thinkers such as Descartes and Kant is better seen as marking a brief period (if the formative one for our prevailing intellectual, political, and juridical institutions) bookended by a pre- and posthumanism that think the human/animal distinction quite otherwise. So there's also William Hogarth and Hieronymus Bosch, The Faerie Queene and Beowulf. And, of course, there is the central place of the animal in non-Western literature and culture, written and oral, which would require another essay altogether.

As part of poetry magazine's annual poetry day, wealthy patrons of the arts gathered in chicago on 19 november 1960 for a private auction of books and manuscripts that benefited the Modern Poetry Association. Among the items available for bidding were handwritten fair copies of W. H. Auden's “The Shield of Achilles,” “Musée des Beaux Arts,” and “The Unknown Citizen,” all on 8½-by-11-inch sheets of unlined white typing paper, the poet's signature conspicuously appended to the bottom right corner of each page. Having been recognized earlier in the day as Poetry's “Poet of Honor,” Auden had written the copies for the charity event. Hyman J. Sobiloff, a successful industrialist and published poet, purchased the collection for one thousand dollars. In January 1961, he donated the pieces to the Library of Congress, where they remain to this day. At the time, the collection proved somewhat newsworthy: Poetry, the Chicago Tribune, the Washington Post and Times-Herald, and the Library of Congress Information Bulletin all ran brief articles on the auction and donation. Since then, however, the documents have been essentially lost to history. Few, if any, other written records of them remain, Auden's biographers have ignored the manuscripts, and no critical analysis of their content has yet been published.

Julia Kristeva's recent interest in the work of Simone De Beauvoir stems from a concern to identify transformative possibilities in the “society of the spectacle”—a term Kristeva appropriates from Guy Debord to diagnose contemporary society's reduction of personal identity, sociality, and meaning to the status of mere representation. Over the last fifteen years, the spectacle constitutes one of the central notions employed by Kristeva to measure the significance of twentieth-century figures as diverse as Sigmund Freud, Marcel Proust, Jean-Paul Sartre, Louis Aragon, and Roland Barthes (discussed in The Sense and Non-sense of Revolt and Intimate Revolt), as well as the three women she addresses in her biographical trilogy on female genius—Hannah Arendt, Melanie Klein, and Sidonie-Gabrielle Colette. In 1996, in The Sense and Non-sense of Revolt, Kristeva promised to return to the work of Beauvoir in the light of her analyses of Sartrean revolt. The past several years have begun to fulfill that promise. In 2002 Kristeva dedicated the conclusion to her trilogy on female genius to Beauvoir, and in 2003 she presented a lecture entitled “Beauvoir présente,” subsequently included in La haine et le pardon in 2005. The essay published here was presented in January 2008 as the keynote lecture at a conference in celebration of Beauvoir's centenary, which was initiated by a committee from the University of Paris 7 chaired by Kristeva.

Can I claim to have known albert camus? I only saw him once, almost in passing; he was leaving Claude Gallimard's office at the publishing house as I was going in. We were introduced, I looked at him in awe, he smiled at me, we shook hands, and I never saw him again. This was at the end of 1949.