AN ENTRY FOR THE INCOMPREHENSIBILITY PRIZE. J.C., the proprietor of the NB column which appears on the back page of each issue of the TLS, conducts an annual competition for the “Incomprehensibility Prize”, which goes to the author who “has succeeded in perfecting the difficult task of being completely incomprehensible.” In the February 12 TLS, J.C. identifies Sidonie Smith, the Director of the Institute for the Humanities at the University of Michigan, as “an early contender” and quotes one “possibly prizewinning passage” from her new book:
“Writing this book, I came to see the new scholar subject as a performative of passionate singularity, hybrid materiality and networked relationality. This is one sense in which the humanities scholar is becoming possibly posthuman, and a posthumanist scholar. The locus of thinking, for the prosthetically extendable scholar joined along the currents of networked relationality, is an ensemble affair.”