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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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