Rey Chow's The Age of the World Target is an important invective demonstrating how scholarship in the humanities is effectively connected to the current world picture of US imperialism, where, she says, "the world has come to be grasped and conceived as a target—to be destroyed as soon as it can be made visible" (12). Chow grants poststructuralist literary theory the legacy of high modernism and indicates its embroilment in dissident politics. She then critically defines its linguistic project in contrast to area studies, demonstrating that any attempt to pose its objects as outside of Western theory ends up using the tools of Western theory, destroying its oppositionality the moment it is adopted. The result, she says, is an "aporia between the mode of address (well-informed and often self-conscious academic language) and the harsh, downtrodden worlds it purports to be concerned about" (11). This contrast, she argues, is a condition of possibility for poststructuralism's "linguistic turn"—its self-reflection, its bracketing of reference, its resistance to linguistic instrumentalism, its radicalization of the object of study, its temporal deferment, and its compulsive interiorization of the Other.

Chow next applies her analysis to the field of comparative literature, positioning herself as refreshingly distinct from a surge of recent criticism that advocates a shift towards compulsory philological study of pre-colonial indigenous languages and dialects or other nativist and multilinguilist trends. Disputing comparative literature's practice as constructing an expandable literary grid that infinitely includes examples and categories from elsewhere as more of the same, she suggests a solution in area studies' attention to non Western writings as already entangled in spatio-temporal differencing, "an interlingual, intercultural, and international historicity that exposes the positivistic limits of the (Western) human sciences" (85).

The conclusions Chow makes about poststructuralist theory are drawn from a series of readings from what she identifies as key moments in its development. Starting with Foucault's The Order of Things, Chow's main points of reference move through Roland Barthes' Mythologies and Paul de Man's writings before working through some comparativist ideas—like those of Harry D. Hartoonian, Johannes Fabian, Samuel Weber, Naoki Sakai, Partha Chatterjee, Olakunle George, Carlos Alonso, Mitsuhiro Yoshimoto, and Gregory Jusdanis, among others—to construct alternative analytical methods. Instead of a spatial ordering of difference based on taxonomical classifications where identities are infinitely added on to the knowledge-base of privileged centers, Chow starts to flesh out a time-based approach where histories of violation and issues of historiography, by deferring comparability, surface as challenges and disturbances to the material conditions of global inequality.

Chow derives from Foucault an interpretation of modernity as when language is "cut off from its previous kinship to the world" and begins to reflect back on itself, creating the "appearance of literature" as "resistant and transgressive" (7). De Man also positions literary language as "a special kind of alterity" (47), an autonomized sphere of language use that turns its hitherto subordinated and under-recognized form into a central problematic for critical investigation (though acknowledging de Man's contentual relationship with the [End Page 381] literary left, his calling attention to the production and materiality of language resembles, for Chow, a politics that notices the productive value of alien guest-workers whose work has, as a result, gained visibility). For Chow, poststructuralism's attention to the literariness of language leads to a division between certain types of language that reflect back on themselves and others that employ language as transparent communication: "those who pursue poststructuralist theory in their critical writings find themselves permanently at war with those who expect, and insist on, the transparency—that is, the invisibility—of language as a tool of communication" (48).

Even as poststructuralist theory has done the important work of "its systematic unsettling of the stability of meaning" (46), Chow is wary of the way that poststructuralism has absorbed all identities inescapably into mobile signification because...