Punctuations

“We tend to think of punctuation—if we think of it at all—as an invisible tool of grammar and writing, a silent orderer with no content or meaning of its own. In Punctuations, Michael Shapiro radically upends that way of thinking. In an exquisitely nuanced and thoughtful reading, Shapiro shows how punctuation—broadly conceived—gives us over to another politics, one that is marked by unresolvedness and contingency rather than determination and order. In this book, voids, interruptions, and other mechanisms of intratextual resistance demand and receive our full attention with critical implications not only for the habits of reading but of how we live in and occupy the world around us.” - James R. Martel, author of The Misinterpellated Subject

“Punctuations offers a distinctly new critical intervention by fleshing out the political and methodological significance of punctuation. Drawing on a broad range of influences from critical theory, the arts, and literature, Michael J. Shapiro gives the reader myriad alternative ways to develop new angles of vision, all of which ultimately ask how we might develop better forms of resistance to the present. I wouldn't have expected anything less from Shapiro, who continues to surprise and push forward the limits others place around the meaning of critical scholarship.” - Brad Evans, coauthor of Disposable Futures: The Seduction of Violence in the Age of Spectacle

"Shapiro threads the needle effectively between different texts, different genres, different scholars' voices, and his own past readings to show us how 'alternative, nondogmatic communities of sense' are created through re-punctuations." - Katherine Goktepe, Perspectives on Politics