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Late-Roman Post-Futures: The Spectral Planets of Derrida and Gene Wolfe

  • Ben Radcliffe (author)
Chapter of: The Before and the After: Critical Asynchrony Now(pp. 51–67)

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Metadata
TitleLate-Roman Post-Futures
SubtitleThe Spectral Planets of Derrida and Gene Wolfe
ContributorBen Radcliffe (author)
DOIhttps://doi.org/10.53288/0446.1.04
Landing pagehttps://punctumbooks.com/titles/the-before-and-the-after-critical-asynchrony-now/
Licensehttps://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/4.0/
CopyrightBen Radcliffe
Publisherpunctum books
Published on2025-01-29
Long abstractThis chapter examines Gene Wolfe’s science-fiction tetralogy, The Book of the New Sun, alongside other literary and philosophical texts from the waning of the Cold War, including Jameson’s The Geopolitical Aesthetic and Derrida’s Specters of Marx. Wolfe repurposes classical imagery and tropes of late Roman decadence to construct a fictional world in which the archaic, the modern, and the futuristic coexist in a single picture. I interpret Wolfe’s anachronic classicism in light of other late 20th-century authors who diagnosed the temporal disorientation of capitalist globalization and the “end of history.” Wolfe and his contemporaries explore the ethical and political affordances of “world-pictures,” totalizing depictions of an interconnected planetary reality that might orient the subjects of globalization within its intractable crises. In Wolfe’s novels, the untimeliness of Greco-Roman antiquity serves as a productive resource for constructing such pictures. I conclude by considering the dilemmas that Wolfe’s sci-fi speculations raise regarding the temporality of classical receptions.
Page rangepp. 51–67
Print length17 pages
LanguageEnglish (Original)
Keywords
  • Gene Wolfe
  • classical receptions
  • Jacques Derrida
  • Karl Marx
  • aesthetics
Contributors

Ben Radcliffe

(author)
lecturer in Classics at Loyola Marymount University

Ben Radcliffe is a lecturer in Classics at Loyola Marymount University. His research and teaching focus on Homer, ancient Greek literature, ancient and modern political thought, utopianism, and aesthetic theory. His work has recently appeared in the American Journal of Philology, Ramus, and Classical Antiquity, and he co-organized a seminar on paranoia in Greek and Roman literature at the 2022 American Comparative Literature Association conference. He is currently working on a project about the aesthetics of surplus in archaic Greek poetry.