Milton scholarship has long regarded chaos in Paradise Lost as hostile to God and creation. This judgment identifies Milton with traditional Western attitudes toward matter and material disorder—evident as early as the Babylonian creation epic, the Enuma elish. In contrast to such attitudes, modern science conceives of chaos as dynamically productive of order, and postmodern cultural studies sees chaos as a relevant principle of ironic indeterminacy. Milton anticipates the postmodern endorsement of chaos in his theology of matter and in the symbolic reflections and allegorical representations of chaos in Paradise Lost. Appreciation of chaotic disorder and of indeterminacy and disapproval of the tyrannical suppression of these qualities distinguish Milton's idiosyncratic theology, political theory, and aesthetics. Even Milton's God contains the potency of chaotic matter, a womblike virtue essential to God's creative power.

In Black Skin. White Masks, Frantz Fanon transposes psychoanalysis from its gender-based framework of subject formation in order to interrogate racial subjectivity in the colonial context. Though the work inaugurates a psychoanalytic discourse of racial identity, Fanon—like Freud—takes the male as the norm. Women are implicitly present, nonetheless, in Fanon's conception of colonial identity—a mirroring relationship between white men and black men that is mediated through the bodies of women. This colonial dynamic suggests a sex-gender economy circulating women among men to construct and maintain racial categories. Though Fanon's analysis of black women's sexual desire has been dismissed as obviously sexist, the terms of his critique reveal norms of gender, class, and sexuality by which black women are bound and against which he formulates black masculinity. Analyzing gender in Fanon's text works to broaden the outline of black women's subjectivity and to delineate the interdependence of race and gender.

In 1931 the mathematician Kurt Gödel published a treatise establishing the inherent incompleteness and inconsistency of that order of logical system used in Alfred North Whitehead and Bertrand Russell's Principia Mathematica. Gödel's work has proved an attractive reference in diverse fields, particularly in postmodern literary-critical theory, which often seems intent on logical impasse and which sees a protodeconstructive corroboration in Gödel's theorem. Such analogizing is not without informative substance, but a closer look at the philosophical and mathematical theory surrounding Gödel's practice reveals that Gödelian undecidability emerges from a theoretical framework—a mathematical Platonism—with extensive metaphysical commitments regarding subject position and the objects of thought. Gödel's explorations of logical undecidability do not so much undermine logocentric suppositions as exploit them all the more consequentially. The analogy between Gödel's theorem and postmodern theory underscores the metaphysical operations of any criticism that finds in Gödel a “postmetaphysical” ally. (DWT)

The thirteenth-century French text Le roman de Silence is the story of a count's daughter, Silence, brought up as a boy because the king has prohibited female inheritance. Whereas previous readings emphasize the gender politics of the heroine's success as a male and the explicit thematization of issues of textuality, I focus instead on the work's representation of the feudal institutions of marriage, lineage, and the transmission of property. Under the cover of Silence's cross-dressing and refeminization, the text renegotiates the way bodies mattered in the thirteenth-century imaginary, redefining the function of the medieval nobility as genealogical reproduction rather than military service. While the story of the protagonist's parents euphemizes this politics of lineage, by the end of the tale the king's only recourse is Silence.

This essay theorizes an aspect of colonial discourse omitted from most critiques of orientalism by focusing on an array of Western male writers whose representations of an eroticized Arabic Orient cannot be disentangled from their imagined and real encounters abroad with male homosexuality. Suggesting that the historical possibility of sexual contact with and between Near Eastern men has often covertly underwritten the appeal of orientalism as a Western mode of perception and control. I examine three homoeroticizing strands of colonialist discourse: depictions of Egypt as a symbol of polymorphous desire, accounts of masquerading as the foreign other, and narratives of the colonial trade in boys. The contingency of Western conceptions of “homosexuality”—as identity category, sexual practice, and site of theoretical speculation—becomes apparent when they are brought into contact with the sexual epistemologies of non-Western cultures and crossed by issues of colonialism, race, nation, and class.