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This introduction begins with Hortense J. Spillers’s return to the ordinary in her essay “Interstices: A Small Drama of Words,” first delivered as an address at the 1982 Barnard Center Conference on Sexuality. For Spillers, recovering the vernacular language and everyday experiences of Black women unsettles the exclusions of mainstream feminist theory, yet attending to ordinary grammar means not relinquishing theoretical critique but recognizing the ordinary as itself a domain of injustice and obfuscation. By starting with Spillers, rather than Ludwig Wittgenstein, this introduction questions who counts as a theorist of “ordinary language.” It then shows how Wittgenstein’s own return to the ordinary displays an ambivalence similar to that of Spillers. For Wittgenstein, many seemingly philosophical problems are undone by noticing language as it is ordinarily used, yet the ordinary poses new problems as much as it dissolves old ones. Summarizing the disciplinarily diverse contributions to this special issue and surveying a surge of recent scholarship on the ordinary, this introduction proposes the orthogonal term ordinariness to capture the plural and diffuse way that language, people, or social, economic, and political conditions might be ordinary.

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This is a new English translation of “De l’ordinaire au quotidien,” originally published in French in 2023. In paragraph 116 of Philosophical Investigations Wittgenstein seems to outline the fundamental goal of his philosophy: “What we do is to bring words back from their metaphysical to their everyday use.” The everyday use to which Wittgenstein constantly refers is far from self-evident: it is just as elusive and indeterminate as our forms of life. The project of Philosophical Investigations is not to replace disqualified logic with the study of use, finding therein a new foundation or new convictions, even purely practical ones. The study of everyday language use presents new problems, arduous in a different way from those of logical analysis, as J. L. Austin and the Oxford School later showed—the same school that, in coining the term Ordinary language philosophy, formalized the Ordinary rather than the Everyday as a central concept. The present article considers several reasons for returning to the concept of the Everyday, Wittgenstein’s point of departure, in the philosophy of language.

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Wittgenstein’s claims against private language and the existence of riddles have consolidated his reputation as a philosopher of the ordinary. This article makes a case for Wittgenstein as a thinker of enigma. His understudied remarks on riddles configure the ordinary and the transcendent in a novel and counterintuitive dynamic. This constitutes Wittgenstein’s most significant contribution to the study of the ordinary: a demarcation between language as the domain of the ordinary and mystery as the realm of meaning. The intricate interrelationship of these realms animates Wittgenstein’s abiding interest in the “limits” of knowledge and his pursuit of finely calibrated modes of analysis. The leitmotif of the riddle leads us through an exploration of Wittgenstein’s mottled oeuvre and serves as an occasion to ponder the question of “the question” in philosophy (as a matter of discursive form) as well as philosophy’s approach to “answers.” Acts of reading and interpretation, associated etymologically with “riddling,” are imbued with a special urgency in Wittgenstein’s thought, which this article brings to bear on recent debates on surface reading and close reading. To scholars of the ordinary, this article offers a critical reappraisal of Wittgenstein’s contribution, and to Wittgenstein scholars a (perhaps unfamiliar) moonlit Wittgenstein.

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This essay examines the role of rumors in F. W. Murnau’s films as well as in later writings about his life and career. While Murnau perpetuates long-standing figurations of gossip as a frivolous or even malicious activity, he also grants unverified information a truth value. Where Heidegger claimed that Gerede (idle talk) is based on “groundlessness” and “indifferent intelligibility,” this essay shows that rumors in Murnau’s films are often well-founded and also essential to a nuanced understanding of his work. Bringing together film analyses, archival materials, and philosophical texts, the essay sheds light on an underexamined aspect of Murnau’s oeuvre and addresses broader questions about the status of speculative, uncertain, or contested knowledge. A study of Gerede does not entail a concealment of authentic discourse but illuminates Murnau’s philosophy of rumors as part of a dialectic of destabilized knowledge.

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This essay concerns the descriptions of exhaustion connected to the suicidal thoughts and actions of Anyanwu, the protagonist of Octavia E. Butler’s novel Wild Seed (1980). Expanding the disability studies concept of desirelessness to graze Black diaspora studies, this essay resists the total absorption of enslaved Black women’s suicidal thoughts and actions into the collective political motivations of the living, even as it resists their banishment. Rather than speak authoritatively about an action ultimately undertaken alone, the essay feels for the ordinary edges of the limits of “diaspora” to consider more carefully those who are lost to the collective, those who turn away from it, and those for whom suicide cannot be categorized comfortably as only resistance or defeat. Or, plainly stated: Without purpose and without pity, we can still love you.

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Rural America is shaped by a conflicted sense of the ordinary: a place where a pastoral imagination of the countryside overlaps with, obscures, and, at times, is obscured by images of addiction and economic abandonment. This essay explores how these two senses of the ordinary are interdependent: how the possibility of a postindustrial future depends on the abjection of a deindustrial present. The essay approaches this problem through the analytic lenses of three scenes along a road known as “heroin highway” in rural New York. Tracing the ambivalence of these ordinary scenes makes it possible to see people and places excluded from the American dream as essential products of its logic.

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Through a sustained engagement with The Precarious Life of the Parol, an installation art exhibition by the Filipinx artist Diane Williams, this essay theorizes “brown gathering”: a quotidian practice of archiving that mobilizes the kinship networks of minoritarian subjects as an affective and circulatory infrastructure of collecting, preserving, and (re)signifying the objects of brown life. Brown gathering simultaneously attests to the intimacies of state violence and the practices of minoritarian subjects. In Parol, named after a Filipinx Christmas ornament of Spanish and native origin, Williams turns toward this curatorial practice of making art with trash objects as a way to reckon with the archival absences of Philippine history. This investigation of Williams’s pieces, all made from trash objects that her family donated to her, concerns three categories: skeletal frames (wood and wire), used to explore archives of excess and mess; plastics, used to speak about the temporality of diaspora; and discarded food containers (SPAM cans and sauce mixes), used to theorize the politics of the brown body. These objects, like the brown subjects that signify them, are testaments to the ongoing plunder of empire and to what empire jettisons around the world.

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Although it is sometimes construed as a mere negation of philosophical discourse, François Laruelle maintains that there is a positive side to his project of “nonphilosophy.” Often this takes the form of a defense of the “ordinary man,” a faceless individual, without qualities, defined by absolute finitude. Laruelle claims to articulate a rigorous science of man, capable of thinking human individuals in their essence, outside the philosophical interpellation to which they are usually submitted. This science intends to finally break apart the post-Kantian empirico-transcendental doublet, which is, for Laruelle, emblematic of the divided, fragmented, and alienated figure with which philosophy has always (mis)represented man. It does this by relinquishing all empirical and figural content in the name of an uncompromising formalism—a purely transcendental method. Yet, despite this intention, a preoccupation with subjective finitude, and the pathos derived from it, is both retained and amplified, describing an invariably fraught relationship between the ordinary man and the extraordinary world furnished by philosophy. Ultimately, nonphilosophy offers less a science of ordinary individuals and more an ethos for academic philosophers, guiding its readers toward a specific subject position, achieved through an ongoing labor of abstraction.

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This interview discusses how Bonnie Honig’s theorization of “the ordinary” has changed throughout her career, the importance of care for language in feminist thought, and Honig’s own practices of linguistic attention as an agonistic close reader of artistic and political texts alike.

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A review of Lauren Berlant, On the Inconvenience of Other People (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2022).
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A review of Christina Sharpe, Ordinary Notes (London: Daunt, 2023).

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Since at least the nineteenth century seriality and serialization have been among the most important formal and narrative strategies for popular media cultures and their negotiations with the radical changes brought on by industrialization and new communication technologies. Nothing less is at stake in popular seriality than the material and spatiotemporal ordering of the phenomenal world, with far-reaching political consequences. However, in an age of computation, predictive algorithms, and “personalized” media, the parameters of serialization are massively transformed. And because media forms and social formations are tightly intertwined, this transformation—or the shift from an “old” to a “new” form of seriality—brings with it crucial changes and uncertainties with respect to subjective and collective existence going forward. Centrally at stake in the new seriality is a set of techniques and technologies that aim to predictively “typify” subjects and preformat them vis-à-vis normative and statistically correlated categories of gender and race, among others. This article lays the groundwork for thinking seriality as a sociotechnics of typification, the scope and power of which is greatly expanded by algorithmic media.

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This essay examines how Stanisław Lem mobilizes the genre of science fiction to portray regional Central European concerns as structural conditions of semiperiphery. The essay centers on Lem’s interest in illegibility, which defines him as a novelist and a critic, showing how his argument against the US monopoly within the genre of science fiction is reflected in his novels. Focusing on Lem’s paralleling of female masochism and epistemological critique, the essay reads Solaris as a novel invested in inspecting the interrelatedness of systems of oppression.

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This essay theorizes an addiction to ecological anxiety that is characteristic of cultural reactions to climate change and made especially palpable in a time of pandemic. Borrowing from J. M. Coetzee’s identification in Franz Kafka of an epistemology of ever-evolving crisis, the essay surveys the growing corpus of scholarship on the Anthropocene, and, in particular, of quarantine writing, to examine the viral nature of first-person accounts of the ecocatastrophic, revealing a perpetual subjunctivity resistant to the ontological prioritization of the actual over the virtual. While such symptomatic thinking might seem to fulfill a psychologically inoculative function against impending catastrophe, the essay contends that it ultimately becomes a kind of autoimmune disorder: a prophetically self-fulfilling panic that makes it increasingly difficult to fathom, let alone to take action against, our current ecological and political crises.

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This article critically compares two recent approaches to the problem of aesthetic autonomy: Dave Beech’s Art and Value and Nicholas Brown’s Autonomy. By recentering the differences between these critics’ works around Marx’s categories of subsumption, it evaluates the fraught relationship between labor and aesthetics, economy and form, art and the market. Although Beech provides a persuasive account of art’s “economic exceptionalism,” his focus on the qualitative irreducibility of artistic labor risks losing sight of what is socially unique about aesthetic production. Likewise, and inversely, while Brown’s original account of art’s internal overcoming of the commodity-form provides a generative way to rethink aesthetics in modernism’s wake, it rests on a periodizing claim for the total domination of the capitalist market that equivocates on whether artistic labor can truly be “really subsumed” under capital. The article concludes by pondering the political dimension to these theories of autonomy, which mirror in important ways debates within communization circles over subsumption, programmatism, and the aesthetics of revolution.

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On April 17, 2023, Ilya Budraitskis and Ilya Matveev—both of whom were forced to flee Russia to avoid arrest for their open opposition to Russia’s war against Ukraine—sat down with anthropologist Alexei Yurchak to discuss the war, its origins, and its implications. How, in retrospect, might we trace a red thread from the authoritarian neoliberalism of the early Putin era to Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine and its pronounced dictatorial turn? What does this new form of Russian authoritarianism at home imply for the rest of the world? How useful are existing concepts from Marxism and critical theory—imperialism, Bonapartism, fascism, ideology—for understanding the situation both locally and globally?

What follows is a transcript of the conversation, lightly edited for readability.

ALEXEI YURCHAK: The first question I would like to address to both of you. You have written and spoken about the radical transformation of the political system in Russia...

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The Francophone writer Habib Tengour, born in Mostaganem, Algeria, in 1947, likes to say that he lives “between Constantine and Paris.” Indeed, although Tengour writes in French, his French gives expression to the liminal space that exists around and between the literary and cultural traditions of France and Algeria. His poetry is equally likely to invoke The Odyssey as it is the muʿallaqāt of pre-Islamic Arabia, and his writings brim not only with the voices of other Maghrebi writers, like the Algerians Kateb Yacine and Mohammed Dib, but with the giants of French letters, like André Breton, Arthur Rimbaud, and Charles Baudelaire; German Romantics like Friedrich Hölderlin; medieval Sufi poets like Ibn ʿArabi; and on and on and on. Over almost fifty years, having published more than fifteen works of poetry, essays, and drama, Tengour has built a house of literature whose windows and doors are open wide to...

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A review of Angela Y. Davis, Gina Dent, Erica R. Meiners, and Beth E. Richie, Abolition. Feminism. Now. (Chicago: Haymarket Books, 2022), and Françoise Vergès, A Feminist Theory of Violence: A Decolonial Perspective, translated by Melissa Thackway (London: Pluto, 2022).

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This special-issue introduction historicizes and seeks to move beyond the antinomy between totality and culture that is today a mainstay of much contemporary critical theory. The introduction proceeds in three parts. The first examines a midcentury crisis of Marxism that, concomitant with major shifts in global capitalism, set the scene for subsequent scholarly accounts of culture that have privileged the fragment, the supplement, the remainder, the site, the margins, and the like over against the totality. The second part consists of an analysis of two works of art—by the American visual artists Allan Sekula and Ellen Gallagher, respectively—which we take to be exemplary of the affordances of art, literature, and other forms of cultural expression for accessing totality anew. The third part briefly surveys recent theoretical work that aims to put a revitalized concept of totality at the center of cultural critique. The introduction concludes with summaries of the seven articles included herein. The special issue covers a lot of ground in terms of subject matter, theoretical milieu, disciplinary framework, and style. What binds the articles together is, in effect, a shared working method, which involves thinking through the relationship between a specific cultural object (or set of objects) and the social whole in and through which it emerged.

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Cultural and literary critics have begun to abandon a long-standing commitment to poststructuralist and deconstructive interpretative methods in favor of an ostensibly Marxist aspiration to comprehend cultural phenomena as symptomatic expressions of a social totality. This essay identifies some of the advantages and shortcomings of this symptomatological mode of interpretation by returning to a dispute in the German scientific establishment around the turn of the twentieth century concerning the applicability of biological conceptions of organic wholeness in cultural and social analysis. The dispute culminates in Max Weber’s nuanced defense of biological metaphors as indispensable heuristic devices for cultural inquiry that can nevertheless result in dangerous consequences when they are inappropriately employed. This essay ultimately argues that Weber’s contribution to cultural analysis remains an underappreciated and vital methodological resource for researchers who wish to rehabilitate the concept of totality today.

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Nikolai Chernyshevsky (1828–89) is best known for his utopian realist novel What Is to Be Done? (1863). However, he was perhaps most celebrated as a literary thinker in China as a result of the Soviet canonization of the nineteenth-century “democratic critics.” This essay discusses two Chinese critics’ engagement with Chernyshevsky’s treatise The Aesthetic Relation of Art to Reality (1853). Here Chernyshevsky advanced the proposition “Beauty is life.” In the 1930s and 1940s the literary theorist Zhou Yang read Chernyshevsky and produced a Chinese translation in 1942. In 1963 the philosopher Zhu Guangqian published the History of Western Aesthetics, in which he devoted a chapter to Chernyshevsky. This article explores how both Zhou and Zhu responded to Chernyshevsky’s proposition on beauty and life, with particular attention to all three thinkers’ engagement with Ludwig Feuerbach’s “transformative method” in his critique of Christianity, which sought to invert the relation between subject and predicate. Both Zhou and Zhu alighted on how Chernyshevsky’s reliance on Feuerbach led to a one-sided interpretation that needed further articulation; they marshaled the insights of Marx and Hegel to reinterpret Chernyshevsky. Finally, the essay considers the issue of transnational Bildung between Russia and China and the teacher-student relation as expressions of totality along the lines of both Feuerbachian transformative critique and Hegelian speculative retrieval.

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This article critically surveys Georges Bataille’s multiple engagements with G. W. F. Hegel from the early 1930s to the 1950s. It homes in on how Bataille’s conceptual, experiential, and parodic demarcation from Hegel targets not the German philosopher’s aspiration to totality but (via Bataille’s dialogue with Alexandre Kojève) his action-centered framing of the movement of history and the character of actuality. Against the dialectical mastery of history, Bataille seeks to articulate an unpolitical image of sovereignty and play that is ultimately poetic or literary in kind.

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This essay foregrounds the hermeneutic purchase of totality in contemporary literary criticism. Responding to the recent proliferation of the “gig work” novel, the essay takes up two interrelated lines of inquiry: How might we rethink the conceptual affordances of “totality” for the ongoing project of the critique of political economy? What would a rethinking of totality’s position in the conceptual architecture of literary criticism offer in the way of new heuristics for the analysis of the novel? Through recourse to G. W. F. Hegel’s Science of Logic and Michael Theunissen, Hans-Friedrich Fulda, and Rolf-Peter Horstmann’s Critical Presentation of Metaphysics: A Discussion of Hegel’s “Logic” (Kritische Darstellung der Metaphysik: Eine Diskussion über Hegels “Logik”), this essay proposes a method of literary analysis that approaches the formal aspects of the novel as defined through the historical-material conditions for the writing of the text. The essay then puts a close reading of Hilary Leichter’s Temporary in conversation with Sarah Brouillette’s account of the decline of the English-language literary novel to suggest how the formal properties of the contemporary gig work novel respond to the general crisis of novel production in the twenty-first century.

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This essay proposes a reading of the American photographer Allan Sekula’s 1995 essay “Dismal Science” alongside The Forgotten Space, an essay film he directed with Noël Burch in 2010. These works are still resonant today because they suggest the possibility of picturing the totality of capitalist modernity. Sekula’s representations of the shipping container and the subsequent shifts in maritime economy recuperate the prospect of a panoramic, totalizing view in an era marked by a prevalence of detail and data over meaningful grand narrative. The totality the container embodies and represents, however, is not the whole of a frictionless and seamless accumulation of capital but a nonsynchronous, polemical, and critical totality of struggle and antagonism. Sekula turns the shipping container from a stand-in for a system of commodity circulation to an allegorical sign of the continuing fight between labor and capital. Rather than envisioning this totality of struggle as a merely thematic concern, Sekula’s compositions eschew commodification on the level of form by delving into the constitutive tensions of realism and reintroducing a living context of militancy and resistance into the matter of representation itself.

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Apparent similarities between Marxism and Afro-pessimism on questions of abstraction, social reproduction, and abolition have curiously not marked the beginning of a conversation. To gauge the dimensions of this halted conversation, this article explores the uses of the oikos in theorizing the demands of the present. Drawing from conflictual interpretations of Aristotle’s Metaphysics and Politics and reading against the grain of Marxist feminism, this article proposes a general theory of incapacity that identifies the role of capacity in reproducing the problem of slavery, the tensions of the oikos, and the inadequacies of capitalist critique. Afro-pessimism both mimics the capitalist totality by replacing it with slavery and exceeds that totality by staying with the dissolving quality that the slave qua incapacity comes to impossibly represent. This article argues that the collapse of race into a form of “reduced capacity,” like class or gender, is the way antiblackness articulates itself for political economy, but the slave’s incapacity cannot then be reducible to capital or critical reconfigurations of social reproduction. The oikos, in this reading, becomes a generative terrain for thinking tensions in intersectionality as well as antagonistic figures of liberation, from the abolition of the value-form, gender, and the family to the proposition of the “end of the world.”

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This essay argues that the artwork’s opacity and purposively purposeless quality are a tacit refusal of the compulsory division between intellectual and manual labor, which afford the artwork a unique capacity to access an otherwise occluded totality. By analyzing conceptual work by the artist duo Claire Fontaine—who deploy Alfred Sohn-Rethel’s notion of market exchangism in their work—in relation to twentieth-century intellectual debates around representation, abstraction, and social synthesis, the essay develops a model of totality in a descriptive rather than prescriptive register. At issue is the artwork’s potential for dereification, whereby a given work of art may provide perceptual experience of the transactional logic that underpins and structures the social field.

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A review of Daniel Bensaïd, The Dispossessed: Karl Marx’s Debates on Wood Theft and the Right of the Poor, edited and translated by Robert Nichols (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2021), and Robert Nichols, Theft Is Property! Dispossession and Critical Theory (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2020).

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A review of Keti Chukhrov, Practicing the Good: Desire and Boredom in Soviet Socialism (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2020), and Bogdan Popa, De-centering Queer Theory: Communist Sexuality in the Flow during and after the Cold War (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2021).

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This essay works to clarify Edward Said’s writings on religion, criticism, and the secular, arguing that this clarification has serious implications not only for Said’s project of “secular criticism” but also for understanding the workings of what he called the “critical consciousness” within a “purely secular view of reality.” The essay holds that there are not one but two concepts of the religious operative in Said’s work and maintains that most commentators on Said have ignored the second concept and have therefore misconstrued secular criticism’s relationship to what it nominates as religious. By reexamining Said’s writings on religion, criticism, and the secular, as well as his early studies of modern literature, this essay contends that a secular criticism aware of its commitment to both concepts of the religious allows for a more nuanced and powerful account of the manner in which such criticism can call itself secular. It suggests, furthermore, that this account not only clarifies the workings of Said’s own critical consciousness but also provides a likewise more nuanced view of the “method” or “rationality” such a consciousness deploys in making sense of human life, ingenuity, and history. 

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This essay explores visual reading and its colonial aspects by analyzing the novel Ze ʿim ha-panim elenu (The One Facing Us, 1995), by Ronit Matalon, an Israeli Jewish author of Egyptian descent. In this novel Matalon displaces the dramas of Mizrahi Jews (Jews originating from the Arab and Muslim world) to Cameroon, thus stressing her protagonists’ uneasy positioning within the colonizer-colonized, West-East divides and connecting Zionist racialization to broader, global processes of colonial capitalism. By exploring her elaborate readings of photographs in the novel, the essay reveals two rival traditions of reading the visual: the first involves what might be described, following Matalon, as a certain “intending toward” the photograph—a colonial reading practice through which a subject converts her absence from the photographic moment into a visionary, intentional presence. In this Barthesian tradition, the image is an empty land to be colonized, and Oriental subjects are racialized by being fetishistically associated with both authentic matter and theological aura. The second tradition, typified in the novel by the protagonist’s Egyptian mother, is a laborious collective practice of reading photographs that is attentive to subtext, nonverbal communication, and social codes. The essay argues that this reading practice has nothing to do with postcolonial or Levantine hybridity or with a “migratory state of mind”—concepts that govern scholarship on Matalon—and that its subsistence requires in fact a solid, counterdiasporic sense of home.

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In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:

Scholars from a range of disciplinary backgrounds have been critical of history’s vision of itself as grounded in empiricism, its function as a secularist theodicy, and its commitment to humanism. Meanwhile, Black studies has exposed the Human as a sociopolitical construction masquerading as mere ontological fact. Yet historians remain committed to the fiction as if it were fact, occluding the ways that narrating the Human requires evading full recognition of the ubiquity and permanence of anti-Blackness in the modern world. Indeed, this article argues, this is the unstated function of history, conceived here as a discipline, or constraint, on what it is possible for historians to think and register as significant as they bring order to chaos in the form of narrative. Against empiricism and the humanist compulsion to explain suffering rather than abide in its meaninglessness, this article suggests an embrace of antidisciplinarity. By shifting perspective through Afropessimism, embracing methods such as critical fabulation, and inventing the past through cross-disciplinary borrowing, autobiography, and explicit empathy, the article demonstrates the implications of an antidisciplinary approach to historical inquiry. It engages the historiography and archives related to the Houston Police Department’s attack on Texas Southern University students in 1967 and in doing so exposes the incoherence of historiography that speaks of peace in an anti-Black world and that relies on an ontological certainty of the Human as a simple fact of existence, alongside its attendant codes, specifically those of linear time, gender subjectivity, and agency.

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To speak of life, of life in the context of death, is to speak of too little and not enough. As you know, Jean-Luc Nancy died in August 2021 at the age of eighty-one. Nancy’s celebrated academic career is a matter of record; his many works are widely available in both French and English, among other languages. From 1968 until 2004, Nancy was professor of philosophy at the University of Strasbourg. During that time he published The Experience of Freedom (1988), his dissertation for his doctorat d’état, adjudicated by two individuals familiar to readers of so-called French theory, Jacques Derrida and Jean-François Lyotard. Nancy’s close relationship with Derrida is commemorated in Derrida’s On Touching (2000), one of a select few manuscripts penned by the philosopher on the subject of a living contemporary. The vastness of Nancy’s philosophical contribution is inarguable, to say nothing of his esteemed art...

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Jean-Luc Nancy published four times in Qui Parle during his lifetime: once in 1987, once in 1989, and twice in 2017. “Under Construction: Interventions” marks the first English translation of his first publication in this journal, in its second-ever issue. In this short piece, written five years after his groundbreaking La communauté désoeuvrée, Nancy takes up the question of teaching and its inherent entwinement, as he argues, with “the work of thought.” Teaching is here understood much like Nancy’s community: not as what stems from collaboration but as comprising a series of mimetic displacements, reproductions, gestures. Teaching thus magnifies the possibilities at “the limit of sense.” As Nancy puts it: the reconfiguration of those listening students will continue its reach where a teacher’s mastery has reached its finitude. Amid contemporary conversations about collaborative learning and pedagogical missions, Nancy’s brief missive offers a compelling intervention—an alternative model to that of master and pupil—but envisions a classroom community built on layers of displacement.

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Jean-Luc Nancy was concerned with commencement at several levels, of several kinds, in several senses, because he could speak of commencement with affirmation, which means with audacity. From the hospital in July 2021 he completed his last essay, which was intended to commence the project of “the other beginning of philosophy” envisaged by him, Shaj Mohan, and Divya Dwivedi, and he titled it “The End of Philosophy and the Task of Thinking.” In and through it are gathered all of Nancy’s critical reflections on destiny, on the antisemitic components of the Heideggerian history of being, on the ends of philosophy that we must reckon with, on origins and archaeophilia, on the an-archique essence of philosophy and democracy—and this means for us, on another sense of commencement than arche, which could allow us to prepare another beginning of philosophy than the Heideggerian one, and to respond to Nancy’s wager “Pourquoi pas en finir?” Nancy has not left us; rather, we are only now commencing with Nancy. 

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This article gives a personal recollection of discussions with Jean-Luc Nancy and offers a reflection on these together with a philosophical analysis of texts written by him that were published in 2020 in the volume La peau fragile du monde (The Fragile Skin of the World). It engages with Nancy’s novel understanding of prophecy to understand his own writing as a form of “prophetic voice” receptive to the emergence of the present and its opening onto the future. A meditation on time, the loss of history, and on the need to be receptive to what comes to us as the real and from the real, the article outlines Nancy’s singular, generous, and open praxis and ethos of thought.

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In his ontology of the singular plural, Jean-Luc Nancy makes the claim that nothing preexists the event of being: no principle, arche, or prior substance. With such a statement, a thinking of the event emerges: not preceded by any principle or ground, and no longer referred to any prior substance, being is nothing but the event of itself. Thus preceded by nothing and grounded in no essence, the event of being can only come as a surprise. This essay explores Nancy’s thinking of the event as surprise. Indeed, for Nancy, far from being an occasional accompaniment of an event, the surprise is a constitutive feature of the event. An event, he states, is surprising, or it is not an event. In the end, as Nancy puts it, thinking the event, the surprise of the event or the event as surprise, will amount to thinking being surprised, or “over-taken” (sur-prise) by the event, for the event always exceeds thinking while also each time happening to it.

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Deconstruction was the beginning of a disassembly of metaphysics that now proceeds toward anastasis through the openings created by Jean-Luc Nancy. Deconstruction remained classical in the sense of its reliance on classical laws of thought, of which it remained the self-critique. With Nancy, however, the rejection of the classical laws of thought emerged. Anastasis is the other beginning that opens philosophy to the experiences covered over by the classical laws.

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This article stages a dialogue between Jean-Luc Nancy’s postphenomenology and Sara Ahmed’s queer phenomenology to examine the conditions, ethos, and politics of world creation as well as the habits, obstacles, and inequalities that resist it. It argues that Nancy’s understanding of sense as the event of the mutual exposure of bodies reveals what exceeds dominant worldviews, how bodies extend the world beyond prevailing spatializations, but that it does not sufficiently examine what prevents us from sensing that event as a call to world creation. Conversely, Ahmed analyzes how the spatial orientation of bodies restricts exposure, causes uneven access to the world, and suppresses Nancean sense. Her account of disorientation illuminates how we could experience the world as ungrounded and susceptible to creation but struggles to explain what would enable the sharing of this event so that it does not reconfirm the dominant orientations of whiteness and heterosexuality. Reframing disorientation in terms of Nancy’s relational ontology and its spatial conception of justice rethinks the nonalignment of bodies and spaces as freeing the circulation of sense so that alternative worlds could appear. In this way, disorientation can be read as potentially opening the passage from injustice to justice, from orientation to creation.

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This text on Jean-Luc Nancy engages his interest in the motif of departure to reexamine and register the importance of some of his central contributions. Along with returning to Nancy’s singular rendering of key concepts like finitude, sharing, communism, and resurrection, the essay stages a passing encounter between Nancy’s thought of parting and the poetry of Walt Whitman.

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This is a creative dialogue between artist-filmmaker Phillip Warnell and author-philosopher Jean-Luc Nancy. It explores, among other things, their film, text, and research collaborations spanning more than a decade.

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Over two years later, a “return to normal” remains the pandemic’s most enduring political promise, a token of hope to hedge against continued death and precarity. Held within this recursive promise, however, is a prima facie condition that deserves interrogation. What, exactly, is the “normal” to which we will return? Will capitalism and its attendant crises no longer demand our attention absent a continual state of emergency? The coherence and stability of the “normal” eludes us. Georges Canguilhem sees the normal as itself a chimeric category that, from the perspective of medicine and science, is not so distant from the “pathological” it is meant to foil.

In the contemporary moment, what we might term paranormativity has further infringed on our so-called norms, unfolding in internet circles, blue-chip art institutions, and scenes of communal mourning.

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This essay takes the example of a poem composed by a ghost in the Tang dynasty—one of many preserved in literary anthologies and treated as actually having been authored by the dead—as an entry point to ask broader questions of ghostly haunting and poetic presence. What the essay demonstrates is how both the ghost and the poem are informed by logics of analog mediation (rather than representation): how the ghost finds purchase in the world only through bodily possession, spatial haunting, material displacement, and psychic transference and how the poem effects the transmission of mind through the channels of linguistic form, meter, and rhyme. Neither the ghost nor the poem exists except in or as its mediations, yet through these mediations, both the ghost and the poem become present and are communicated into the world. While contemporary media theory has identified the intertwined discourses of technology and spiritualism, the focus has almost solely been on the nineteenth century and later, on the age of electric and electronic telecommunications. The medieval ghost poem, as an exemplary case, complicates this account, showing how poetry has long served as a necrotechnology that mediates the dead and returns ghosts to presence.

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Cristina Peri Rossi was born in Montevideo, Uruguay, but has lived in Barcelona since the early 1970s, when she went into political exile. The only woman associated with the Latin American Boom, Peri Rossi has continued writing despite political repression, tenuous immigration status, and linguistic discrimination. She has published nineteen books of poetry and earned many literary prizes, most recently the 2021 Premio Cervantes.

My translations focus on the theme of lesbian intimacy as it relates to queer concepts of home in exile. Peri Rossi’s portrayal of exile is woven with eroticism, affection, and affect made manifest in corporeal experience. Yet her work highlights what is in excess of the corporeal, especially what is beyond normative body/spirit and human/animal distinctions.

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This essay argues that Lesley Nneka Arimah’s collection of short stories, What It Means When a Man Falls from the Sky, evokes para-worlds that reveal and contend with the world and its norms. Examining the collection’s entwinement of magical, mythical, and animist modes with science, technology, and innovation, the essay shows how Arimah’s work creates its own metagenre, which functions as a paranormal frame that disrupts the common sense of existing interpretive frameworks of progress and difference. The paranormal in Arimah’s work is a space where the illegible significance of Blackness exists. These para-worlds, the essay contends, are paranormal because they function as parallel, ancillary, and barricading structures that reveal the spatial and temporal continuums that order the world. Viewing the norm as the world-constituting structures instantiated in 1492, the essay contends that Arimah’s para-world functions as a continuum to reveal the ever-present structures of violence.

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Beginning with James Baldwin’s critique of The Exorcist in The Devil Finds Work (1976) and ending with campy allusions to the film in the works of three contemporary black gay authors, this article argues that the aesthetics of possession helps articulate queer forms of desire that blur the lines between agency and passivity. Deploying José Esteban Muñoz’s theory of disidentification, it shows how black and queer subjects disruptively locate themselves in the horror genre by drawing on their racial affinities with the genre. The first section proposes that the most prevalent claim in black horror studies today—that black life is more frightening than the supernatural—actually originates with Baldwin’s 1976 rebuke of the film. By disidentifying with horror, Baldwin shifts attention away from paranormal evils and onto a more horrifying normative world. Sketching enthusiastic alternatives to Baldwin, the latter half of this article examines idiosyncratic attachments to the film that are routed through the demonic. By disidentifying with the possessed child, the narrators of Larry Duplechan’s Eight Days a Week (1985) and Blackbird (1986), James Earl Hardy’s B-Boy Blues (1994), and G. Winston James’s Shaming the Devil (2009) all articulate fraught performances of desire.

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Oksana Vasyakina and Elena Kostyleva are contemporary Russian poetesses who contribute to Ф-письмо (F Letter), a digital platform that publishes, critiques, and celebrates feminist writing.1 Their work is testament to a generational change in Russophone poetry, which has seen a decline in the certainties and declamatory style of the previous generation in favor of all-embracing polyphony and linguistic experimentation, an ethical commitment to decolonization and leftist politics, and a strong focus on diverse spectrums of gender and sexuality.

Vasyakina’s “Girl” is the latest in a series of poems that trace the trials, tribulations, joys, and hopes of the author’s own biography. The poem was published not long after her debut novel, Рана (Wound), a hybrid text that includes essays, poems, and novelistic plot devices and enters into dialogue with several female thinkers, both past and present.

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The prion is a self-replicating protein that infects the central nervous system. This essay applies Georges Canguilhem’s criterion for life, biological normativity, to the prion for the purpose of arguing that the existence of the prion within living systems requires attention to how biological matter uses space. Without the involvement of DNA, the prion protein is physically capable of transforming nonprion proteins into prion proteins—a capacity afforded by the specific characteristics of the energy landscape it propagates within, which in turn is determined by the specific arrangement of atoms in its molecular architecture. Like a hammer that is a mirror, the prion compresses and folds surrounding proteins, making its environment identical to itself. This essay studies how information exchange occurs for the prion for the purpose of arguing for a philosophy of biology premised on the analysis of space with attention to form over the analysis of language with attention to genetic code.

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Evidence suggests that the UFO/alien abduction phenomenon is exclusively experienced by white people in the United States. But while scholars have probed abductee narratives to surface political and symbolic anxieties for decades, none have thought of the phenomenon’s whiteness alongside the archival absence of Black abductees. Using abductee accounts, interdisciplinary studies of the UFO abduction phenomena, and critiques of Black subjectivity, this article attends to the ontological anxieties that permeate UFO abduction narratives and their choreographic resonance with the psychosomatics of Black life. This article begins by examining the exceptional narrative of Barney Hill, America’s first and thus far only popular Black abductee. Then it brings into focus UFOlogy’s aporetic negation of racial subjectivity and suggests that the UFO abduction phenomenon is, a posteriori, inaccessible to the Black nonsubject. Finally, it returns to Hill’s experience and offers speculative implications of a libidinal relationship between the starship’s technics and the slave ship’s terror.

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