Acknowledgments ix

Part One: “Now Being”: Slavery, Speculation, and the Measure of our Time

1. Liverpool, a Capital of the Long Twentieth Century 3

2. “Subject $”; or, the “Type” of the Modern 35

3. “Madam Death! Madam Death!”:Credit, Insurance, and the Atlantic Cycle of Capital Accumulation 80

4.”Signum Rememorativum, Demonstrativum, Prognostikon”: Modernity and the Truth Event 113

5.”Please decide”: The Singular and the Speculative 141

Part Two: Specters of the Atlantic: Slavery and the Witness

6. Frontispiece: Testimony, Rights, and the State of Exception 173

7. The View from the Window: Sympathy, Melancholy, and the Problem of “Humanity” 195

8. The Fact of History: On Cosmopolitan Interestedness 213

9. The Imaginary Resentment of the Dead: A Theory of Melancholy Sentiment 242

10. “To Tumble into It, and Gasp for Breath as We Go Down”: The Idea of Suffering and the Case of Liberal Cosmopolitanism 265

11. This/Such, for Instance: The Witness against “History” 297

Part Three: “The Sea is History”

12. “The Sea is History”: On Temporal Accumulation 309

Notes 335

Index 377