Mikko Tuhkanen
Biographic Data
| ID | 951947 |
|---|---|
| NAME | Mikko Tuhkanen |
| GIVEN NAMES | Mikko |
| FAMILY NAME | Tuhkanen |
| SIGNATURE | TUHKANEN M |
| AFFILIATIONS | East Carolina University [email protected] |
| VERIFIED | No |
| TOTAL WORKS | 21 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 1 |
| WORKS AS AUTHOR | 19 |
| WORKS AS EDITOR | 2 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 1999 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2025 |
| H-INDEX | 1 |
Shattered Remains
Demonstrating that Richard Wright anticipates the theory of totalitarianism famously outlined by Hannah Arendt in The Origins of Totalitarianism (1951), this article argues that, for both thinkers, fascism offers a compensatory “binding” mechanism by which the lonely, worldless moderns can locate the principle that since Aristotle has been called “the common good” (to koinon agathon). In his later work, including Black Power: A Record of Reaction…
Leaving; or, Wide Awake and Staring into Nothing (with Pet Shop Boys)
This essay identifies two modes of "escape" in the "gay fugues" of Pet Shop Boys, differentiated by their (non)fascist potential. To trace this potential, the essay engages the work of Lee Edelman, Leo Bersani, and Ernesto Laclau, while extracting further lessons from Stefan Zweig, Village People, Russian history, Fourierism, AIDS eulogies, West Side Story, and the mathematics of zero
Before
Can we appear in the world otherwise than seduced by the promise of its suffering? Persistently returning to this question, Leo Bersani seeks the potential for the human subject's nonsadistic reinitiation. He does this by visiting the "ontological laboratories" of Baudelaire, Freud, and Caravaggio, among others. This essay threads the work of this experimentation across his texts, assessing the appeal and anguish of the summons to the undoing-a b…
Leo Bersani
For the past 60 years, Leo Bersani has inspired, resisted, guided, and challenged scholarly work in the fields of literary criticism, queer theory, cultural studies, psychoanalytic theory, and film and visual studies. Moving across an impressive range of sources, Mikko Tuhkanen seeks out the “fundamental notes”—the questions that we find and refind—in Bersani’s extensive oeuvre across the decades.
Accompanying Images
During the half century of his writing, Leo Bersani has worked toward an onto-ethics/aesthetics of fascination in which cinema plays an important part. With the help of Proust, Sade, Caravaggio, Pasolini, and others, he outlines two modes of fascination: the spectator's active exploration and evisceration of an enigmatic world, and his passive receptiveness to the world's nonsignifying forms. Bersani proposes that these modes of cinematic fascina…
Introduction
Introduction:"The Most Fascinating Medium" Mikko Tuhkanen, Guest Editor (bio) Their enchantment is disenchantment. - Theodor W. Adorno, Aesthetic Theory (297) Fascination is our sensation. - Mel & Kim, "Respectable" Speaking to students at the American Film Institute in Los Angeles in 1975, Ingmar Bergman evokes familiar tropes when he enthuses about cinema's ability to prompt a cognition closer to dream logic than to rational thought. "To me, th…
Leo Bersani's Speculative Aesthetics
Leo Bersani's Speculative Aesthetics Mikko Tuhkanen (bio) Our life is an apprenticeship to the truth, that around every circle another can be drawn; that there is no end in nature, but every end is a beginning; that there is always another dawn risen on mid-noon, and under every deep a lower deep opens. --Ralph Waldo Emerson, "Circles" We live in a universe of circulating forms—at once material and spiritual—that, while colliding with and resisti…
Being Fascinated
Being Fascinated: Toward Blanchotian Film TheoryA review of Calum Watt, Blanchot and the Moving Image: Fascination and Spectatorship Mikko Tuhkanen (bio) Watt, Calum. Blanchot and the Moving Image: Fascination and Spectatorship. Legenda, 2017. In The Emergence of Cinematic Time: Modernity, Contingency, the Archive (2002), Mary Ann Doane not only maps the new technology's historical context—masterfully analyzing cinema's place in the constellation…
A Passion for Sameness
The Cambridge History of Gay and Lesbian Literature
The Cambridge History of Gay and Lesbian Literature presents a global history of the field and is an unprecedented summation of critical knowledge on gay and lesbian literature that also addresses the impact of gay and lesbian literature on cognate fields such as comparative literature and postcolonial studies. Covering subjects from Sappho and the Greeks to queer modernism, diasporic literatures, and responses to the AIDS crisis, this volume is …
Homomonadology
Homomonadology" outlines the emergence and elaboration of Leo Bersani's onto-ethics/aesthetics over the past half a century, focusing particularly on his interest in the shared references to Leibnizian metaphysics in twentieth-century philosophical and literary texts. The essay begins by detailing Bersani's early engagement, in Balzac to Beckett: Center and Circumference in French Fiction (1970), with Marcel Proust and Samuel Beckett, as well as …
Scattering Being
Scattering BeingLeo Bersani and Diasporic Modernity Mikko Tuhkanen (bio) In The Practice of Diaspora: Literature, Translation, and the Rise of Black Transnationalism, Brent Hayes Edwards introduces a term to diaspora studies that has since the book’s publication gained considerable traction: décalage (2003). Borrowing it from Léopold Sédar Senghor, Edwards mobilizes the French term to render visible the varied practices that African-descended int…
Queer Times, Queer Becomings
Becoming Unbecoming
Richard Wright's Oneiropolitics
Tuhkanen argues that Richard Wright, with his references to dreaming in Native Son, Black Power, and elsewhere, develops a theory of postcolonial becoming, where the world's extant realities are challenged by the different “speeds” of the oneiric realm. In the controversial travel narrative Black Power, Wright figures the movement of decolonization in terms of dreaming and waking. Here, his engagement with oneirocriticism continues the work of th…
Performativity and Becoming
Performativity and Becoming Mikko Tuhkanen (bio) In her recent work, the Deleuzian feminist critic Rosi Braidotti suggests that, because of a reduction of flesh to discourse and "psychic foreclosure" to "social repression" (Metamorphoses, 42), Judith Butler's work not only loses sight of "the embodied nature of the subject" (43) but also, more important, is unable to theorize the kinds of radical "metamorphoses" that Braidotti seeks to think. Suc…
The Wager of Death
The Wager of Death: Richard Wright With Hegel and Lacan Mikko Tuhkanen (bio) Review of JanMohamedAbdul R., The Death-Bound-Subject: Richard Wright'sArchaeology of Death. Durham: Duke UP, 2005. Ginger: Listen, we'll either die free chickens or die trying. Babs: Are those the only options? --Chicken Run All that [the slave] has is at stake; and even that which he has not, is at stake, also. The life which he has, may be lost, and the liberty which …
James Baldwin on the American Express and the Queer Underground
Research Article| September 01 2007 James Baldwin on the American Express and the Queer Underground Mikko Tuhkanen Mikko Tuhkanen East Carolina University [email protected] Mikko Tuhkanen is assistant professor of English at East Carolina University and has published essays in American Literature, diacritics, Modern Fiction Studies, GLQ, African American Review, and elsewhere. Search for other works by this author on: This Site Google English Lan…
Out of Joint”
Research Article| June 01 2007 “Out of Joint”: Passing, Haunting, and the Time of Slavery in Hagar's Daughter Mikko Tuhkanen Mikko Tuhkanen Search for other works by this author on: This Site Google American Literature (2007) 79 (2): 335–361. https://doi.org/10.1215/00029831-2007-004 Cite Icon Cite Share Icon Share Facebook Twitter LinkedIn MailTo Permissions Search Site Citation Mikko Tuhkanen; “Out of Joint”: Passing, Haunting, and the Time of …
Binding the Self
Research Article| October 01 2001 BINDING THE SELF: Baldwin, Freud, and the Narrative of Subjectivity Mikko Tuhkanen Mikko Tuhkanen Search for other works by this author on: This Site Google GLQ (2001) 7 (4): 553–591. https://doi.org/10.1215/10642684-7-4-553 Cite Icon Cite Share Icon Share Facebook Twitter LinkedIn MailTo Permissions Search Site Citation Mikko Tuhkanen; BINDING THE SELF: Baldwin, Freud, and the Narrative of Subjectivity. GLQ 1 Oc…
Ä [B]igger's Place
In 1947, casting backward glance of a recent expatriate, Richard Wright observes in an interview, To be American in United States means to be white, protestant, and very rich. This excludes almost entirely people and anyone else who can be easily identified (I Feel 126; emphasis added). In United States, Wright suggests, such things as citizenship are determined to a large extent through subject's - more precisely, his or her body's - relation to…
Binding the Self
Research Article| October 01 2001 BINDING THE SELF: Baldwin, Freud, and the Narrative of Subjectivity Mikko Tuhkanen Mikko Tuhkanen Search for other works by this author on: This Site Google GLQ (2001) 7 (4): 553–591. https://doi.org/10.1215/10642684-7-4-553 Cite Icon Cite Share Icon Share Facebook Twitter LinkedIn MailTo Permissions Search Site Citation Mikko Tuhkanen; BINDING THE SELF: Baldwin, Freud, and the Narrative of Subjectivity. GLQ 1 Oc…
Ä [B]igger's Place
In 1947, casting backward glance of a recent expatriate, Richard Wright observes in an interview, To be American in United States means to be white, protestant, and very rich. This excludes almost entirely people and anyone else who can be easily identified (I Feel 126; emphasis added). In United States, Wright suggests, such things as citizenship are determined to a large extent through subject's - more precisely, his or her body's - relation to…
Binding the Self
Research Article| October 01 2001 BINDING THE SELF: Baldwin, Freud, and the Narrative of Subjectivity Mikko Tuhkanen Mikko Tuhkanen Search for other works by this author on: This Site Google GLQ (2001) 7 (4): 553–591. https://doi.org/10.1215/10642684-7-4-553 Cite Icon Cite Share Icon Share Facebook Twitter LinkedIn MailTo Permissions Search Site Citation Mikko Tuhkanen; BINDING THE SELF: Baldwin, Freud, and the Narrative of Subjectivity. GLQ 1 Oc…
James Baldwin on the American Express and the Queer Underground
Research Article| September 01 2007 James Baldwin on the American Express and the Queer Underground Mikko Tuhkanen Mikko Tuhkanen East Carolina University [email protected] Mikko Tuhkanen is assistant professor of English at East Carolina University and has published essays in American Literature, diacritics, Modern Fiction Studies, GLQ, African American Review, and elsewhere. Search for other works by this author on: This Site Google English Lan…
Out of Joint”
Research Article| June 01 2007 “Out of Joint”: Passing, Haunting, and the Time of Slavery in Hagar's Daughter Mikko Tuhkanen Mikko Tuhkanen Search for other works by this author on: This Site Google American Literature (2007) 79 (2): 335–361. https://doi.org/10.1215/00029831-2007-004 Cite Icon Cite Share Icon Share Facebook Twitter LinkedIn MailTo Permissions Search Site Citation Mikko Tuhkanen; “Out of Joint”: Passing, Haunting, and the Time of …
The Wager of Death
The Wager of Death: Richard Wright With Hegel and Lacan Mikko Tuhkanen (bio) Review of JanMohamedAbdul R., The Death-Bound-Subject: Richard Wright'sArchaeology of Death. Durham: Duke UP, 2005. Ginger: Listen, we'll either die free chickens or die trying. Babs: Are those the only options? --Chicken Run All that [the slave] has is at stake; and even that which he has not, is at stake, also. The life which he has, may be lost, and the liberty which …
Performativity and Becoming
Performativity and Becoming Mikko Tuhkanen (bio) In her recent work, the Deleuzian feminist critic Rosi Braidotti suggests that, because of a reduction of flesh to discourse and "psychic foreclosure" to "social repression" (Metamorphoses, 42), Judith Butler's work not only loses sight of "the embodied nature of the subject" (43) but also, more important, is unable to theorize the kinds of radical "metamorphoses" that Braidotti seeks to think. Suc…
Richard Wright's Oneiropolitics
Tuhkanen argues that Richard Wright, with his references to dreaming in Native Son, Black Power, and elsewhere, develops a theory of postcolonial becoming, where the world's extant realities are challenged by the different “speeds” of the oneiric realm. In the controversial travel narrative Black Power, Wright figures the movement of decolonization in terms of dreaming and waking. Here, his engagement with oneirocriticism continues the work of th…
Queer Times, Queer Becomings
Becoming Unbecoming
Scattering Being
Scattering BeingLeo Bersani and Diasporic Modernity Mikko Tuhkanen (bio) In The Practice of Diaspora: Literature, Translation, and the Rise of Black Transnationalism, Brent Hayes Edwards introduces a term to diaspora studies that has since the book’s publication gained considerable traction: décalage (2003). Borrowing it from Léopold Sédar Senghor, Edwards mobilizes the French term to render visible the varied practices that African-descended int…
The Cambridge History of Gay and Lesbian Literature
The Cambridge History of Gay and Lesbian Literature presents a global history of the field and is an unprecedented summation of critical knowledge on gay and lesbian literature that also addresses the impact of gay and lesbian literature on cognate fields such as comparative literature and postcolonial studies. Covering subjects from Sappho and the Greeks to queer modernism, diasporic literatures, and responses to the AIDS crisis, this volume is …
Homomonadology
Homomonadology" outlines the emergence and elaboration of Leo Bersani's onto-ethics/aesthetics over the past half a century, focusing particularly on his interest in the shared references to Leibnizian metaphysics in twentieth-century philosophical and literary texts. The essay begins by detailing Bersani's early engagement, in Balzac to Beckett: Center and Circumference in French Fiction (1970), with Marcel Proust and Samuel Beckett, as well as …
A Passion for Sameness
Leo Bersani's Speculative Aesthetics
Leo Bersani's Speculative Aesthetics Mikko Tuhkanen (bio) Our life is an apprenticeship to the truth, that around every circle another can be drawn; that there is no end in nature, but every end is a beginning; that there is always another dawn risen on mid-noon, and under every deep a lower deep opens. --Ralph Waldo Emerson, "Circles" We live in a universe of circulating forms—at once material and spiritual—that, while colliding with and resisti…
Being Fascinated
Being Fascinated: Toward Blanchotian Film TheoryA review of Calum Watt, Blanchot and the Moving Image: Fascination and Spectatorship Mikko Tuhkanen (bio) Watt, Calum. Blanchot and the Moving Image: Fascination and Spectatorship. Legenda, 2017. In The Emergence of Cinematic Time: Modernity, Contingency, the Archive (2002), Mary Ann Doane not only maps the new technology's historical context—masterfully analyzing cinema's place in the constellation…
Leo Bersani
For the past 60 years, Leo Bersani has inspired, resisted, guided, and challenged scholarly work in the fields of literary criticism, queer theory, cultural studies, psychoanalytic theory, and film and visual studies. Moving across an impressive range of sources, Mikko Tuhkanen seeks out the “fundamental notes”—the questions that we find and refind—in Bersani’s extensive oeuvre across the decades.
Accompanying Images
During the half century of his writing, Leo Bersani has worked toward an onto-ethics/aesthetics of fascination in which cinema plays an important part. With the help of Proust, Sade, Caravaggio, Pasolini, and others, he outlines two modes of fascination: the spectator's active exploration and evisceration of an enigmatic world, and his passive receptiveness to the world's nonsignifying forms. Bersani proposes that these modes of cinematic fascina…
Introduction
Introduction:"The Most Fascinating Medium" Mikko Tuhkanen, Guest Editor (bio) Their enchantment is disenchantment. - Theodor W. Adorno, Aesthetic Theory (297) Fascination is our sensation. - Mel & Kim, "Respectable" Speaking to students at the American Film Institute in Los Angeles in 1975, Ingmar Bergman evokes familiar tropes when he enthuses about cinema's ability to prompt a cognition closer to dream logic than to rational thought. "To me, th…
Leaving; or, Wide Awake and Staring into Nothing (with Pet Shop Boys)
This essay identifies two modes of "escape" in the "gay fugues" of Pet Shop Boys, differentiated by their (non)fascist potential. To trace this potential, the essay engages the work of Lee Edelman, Leo Bersani, and Ernesto Laclau, while extracting further lessons from Stefan Zweig, Village People, Russian history, Fourierism, AIDS eulogies, West Side Story, and the mathematics of zero
Before
Can we appear in the world otherwise than seduced by the promise of its suffering? Persistently returning to this question, Leo Bersani seeks the potential for the human subject's nonsadistic reinitiation. He does this by visiting the "ontological laboratories" of Baudelaire, Freud, and Caravaggio, among others. This essay threads the work of this experimentation across his texts, assessing the appeal and anguish of the summons to the undoing-a b…
Shattered Remains
Demonstrating that Richard Wright anticipates the theory of totalitarianism famously outlined by Hannah Arendt in The Origins of Totalitarianism (1951), this article argues that, for both thinkers, fascism offers a compensatory “binding” mechanism by which the lonely, worldless moderns can locate the principle that since Aristotle has been called “the common good” (to koinon agathon). In his later work, including Black Power: A Record of Reaction…
Art (17 works) · Literature (12 works) · Philosophy (12 works) · Psychology (11 works) · Epistemology (10 works) · History (10 works) · Psychoanalysis (10 works) · Aesthetics (9 works) · Art history (9 works) · Sociology (9 works)