Call for Papers: The Subject and its Estrangements, a special issue of Qui Parle
‘The wounds of the Spirit heal, and leave no scars behind.’
—Hegel, The Phenomenology of Spirit
Qui parle: who speaks? For several generations, the theoretical humanities have disavowed the Enlightenment response to such a question: the free, rational subject. Such a figure has appeared hopelessly naïve and constitutively violent, a conceptually incoherent fantasy mobilized to justify the worst atrocities of modernity. Under the sign of various anti- and post-humanisms, we have pursued a number of intertwined alternatives—suggesting it is language that speaks, or perhaps ideology, power, coloniality, the color line, the nonhuman, the technical system, the heterogenous assemblage. Along the way, the philosophical correlates of the modern subject—its reason, self-consciousness, freedom, equality, universality—have been discarded, reformulated, and replaced.
Today, we see a countertendency emerging. Dissatisfied by poststructuralism and its many progeny, recent critical dialogues have returned to the figure of the subject and its constitutive features. Such conversations have found resources in the tradition of Left Hegelianism—taking the negative path to the subject rather than dogmatically asserting its positive essence. This critical turn locates, in our historical errors and estrangements, traces of subjectivity rather than signs of its essential brokenness. It reminds us that the possibility of universal human emancipation, for Marx, is grounded in his account of how the product of our activity comes to dominate us as an autonomous power. Likewise, that by unfolding the Black subject’s forced appropriation of white, colonial language, Fanon simultaneously attempts “to recapture the self and to scrutinize the self” in view of a disalienated future. Both thinkers identify a contradiction between our social form and its professed values; in both cases, we see how a proper analysis of alienation offers an immanent critique of our failed social form rather than a naïve humanism. Such an approach suggests that every analysis of our unfreedom, irrationality, and inequality contains a vision of the properly actualized subject.
We see the subject reemerging in various forms across the critical disciplines: in renewed debates over false consciousness and rational agency, in the revival of republican accounts of freedom, in metaphysical interpretations of the psychoanalytic subject, in the search for alternatives to the sociology of science and literature, in the turn to global modernisms, in feminist reevaluations of sex abolition and the question of sexual difference, in reassertions of the figure of nature, in efforts to delimit our accounts of mediation and immediacy. Without avoiding the historical and theoretical estrangements that the subject has undergone—indeed, precisely because of them—we wonder: perhaps we have rushed too quickly from historical failures to metaphysical indictment; perhaps we have been sold cheap imitations of freedom, reason, and universality; perhaps understood the right way, the figure of the subject might still be theoretically necessary, worthwhile, even radical.
For this special issue of Qui Parle, we are looking for research articles and review essays dedicated to the following:
- Alienation and reification in the work of Hegel, Marx, Lukacs, Fanon, and others
- Critical reappraisals of philosophical anti-modernisms: Nietzsche, Heidegger, Arendt, Strauss, others
- The philosophical implications of Marx’s value form analysis; capital as ‘automatic subject’
- Currents in analytic German Idealism, new Aristotelian readings of Hegel
- Evaluations of structuralism & poststructuralism for the present
- Psychoanalytic accounts of the subject: Lacan-Hegel-Marx
- Postcritique and its aftermath
- Estrangement and the alienation-effect in aesthetic theory and literary formalisms
- Theories of the racial subject: afropessimism and its alternatives
- World Literature & universality beyond the West
- The desiring subject: sex and sexuality beyond performativity
- The autonomy of the artwork & the place of sociology in interpretation
- Resurgent realism in literary studies
- The disabled subject, the crip subject, the subject of disability justice
- Intellectual histories of alienation and disalienation
- New histories and interpretations of the Frankfurt School
- Histories of scientific knowledge beyond SSK and French historical epistemology
- Computational intelligence & artificial subjectivity in the philosophy of technology
- Teleology, organicism, and critical naturalism
- Ecomarxism and the question of nature; environmental thought beyond the critique of anthropocentrism
Papers, along with a brief bio, are due August 7, 2026 through our manuscript portal. Please see our website for details on our peer review process, and email inquiries to quiparlejournal@gmail.com.