Recent Issues

Vol. 34 | No. 1 | June 2025

Articles

Form and Its Discontents: An Introduction
Yvonne Lin and Lou-Silhol-Macher

This special issue delves into the freighted and often-debated relationship between form and formlessness, and we begin by positing that formlessness as a concept arises as the result of an attunement to form. Scholars calling for a renewed attention to form often decry the political impoverishment of formlessness, which is deployed to characterize the fragmented, interstitial, liminal, immaterial, evanescent, hybrid, unstable, unruly, unbounded, shapeless, or indeterminate. Formlessness is affiliated with gaps, dehiscence, play, disruption, dissolution, disorder, failure, excess, decomposition, or “anarcho-vitalism.”1 In service of a maximalist formalism, formlessness is simply presented as form’s opposite, at times becoming a straw man to better define formalist engagements and justify the necessity to attend to form. Yet we argue that, far from leading us into the fantasized ether or magma of shapelessness at the cost of our ability to say something for the real world—an often positivist anxiety—the formless sharpens our...

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Poor or Pure Form: On the Political Aesthetics of the Tent
Mario Telò

The tent, the shelter of pro-Palestine protests on American campuses in the spring of 2024 and of global metropolitan marginality, is an infrastructure of the unthought, constantly under the joint attack of capital and common sense. This essay attempts to welcome the tent’s interpellation to think and experience the unthought, specifically the informe, issued every time a home-dwelling observer encounters it. For hierarchical discourses, the tent is an expression of bad form or poor form, two ordinary norm-enforcing phrases that should perhaps spur us to correct or supplement, with a punning, prepositional negativity or heuristic tentativeness, the “return to form” still informing the theoretical zeitgeist. Explicit or implicit carriers of this negativity, Georges Bataille’s informe, Jacques Derrida’s fourmis, and Werner Hamacher’s afformative are various expressions of the poor (or pure) form that the tent’s an-architectural structure embodies. The relevance of these three alterations and supplementations of form, as a word and concept, to an-architecture is exemplified through comparative discussions of two artworks (Rebecca Belmore’s From Inside and Louise Bourgeois’s Maman) and a film (Luchino Visconti’s The Leopard). Collectively, these works illuminate the aesthetico-political implications of the tent’s inclination away from verticality, placement, and solidity toward horizontality, displacement, and liquidity.

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Form for All: Traversing the Skins of Human Bodies and Bodies of Discourse
Tess Takahashi

Using Emma Hart’s Skin Film (UK, 16mm, black-and-white, 11 min, 2005–7), as a point of departure, this essay considers how authorial identity has circumscribed critical readings of film in ways that impose premature form on the instability of the abstract image. Skin Film’s abstraction invites us to consider how the human body, the gendered and racialized body in particular, has been made to signify as an already-known epistemological endpoint within our culture. The essay challenges the critical conjoinment of cinematic materiality, authorship, and embodiment that too often provides easy meaning to a perplexingly formless image. The essay argues that instead of rushing to assign meaning to either image or body, we should consider the skin’s dual status as both materially specific and as an unfixed text, both formed and formless, discursively overdetermined yet uncertain in its meaning. The essay puts Skin Film into dialogue with the discourses of feminist theory, critical race studies, and queer theory, all fields invested in the positioning of vulnerable bodies that have been seen as both materially irreducible and dangerously unstable. Rather, the critical act of refusing to rush to meaning, and instead dwelling on the form of what might be construed as formless, constitutes a political act that embraces difficulty, multiplicity, and uncertainty.

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Excess and Formless: The Abang-guard and the Atmospheric
Amber Jamilla Musser

This essay foregrounds multiple modes of formlessness in Abang-guard’s emphasis on making the unrecognized labor of museum guarding tangible. Nestled within their hope that greater recognition might help change the political landscape is an invitation to think complexly about how questions of representation are related to those of form. This is because their work shows how the ability to perceive form often relies on submerging something else—a condition of possibility that we might describe, in turn, as “formless.” However, the essay also argues for thinking beyond an equivalence between invisibility and formlessness by examining how Abang-guard produces a formlessness that is atmospheric and engulfing, thereby shifting the affective and political registers through which formlessness is understood. Instead of focusing only on invisibilization, Abang-guard stays with the excess of formlessness, amplifying our ability to perceive the uncapturable by labor or even representation.

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Unable to be Titled: Form/lessness, Asian Americanist Critique, and the Destitution of Worlds
Suiyi Tang

Through a close reading of it has always been the perfect instrument, an installation art exhibition by Cato Ouyang, this essay asks after the affordances of form/lessness, an aestheticization of antisociality that ruptures identitarian frameworks of belonging and exclusion. Utilizing the exhibition as a point of contact between Bataillean base materialism and Asian Americanist subjectless discourse, the essay argues that Ouyang’s sculptures invoke violent self-deformation to perform an escape from the human body and a refusal of racial abstraction. In so doing, it expands a Bataillean sensibility that calls on absolute expenditure as a means of undoing the violence of homogeneity and the settlement of form. Where contemporary theories of minoritarian worldmaking have enfolded subjectless critique into exaltations of sociality based on identitarian attachments, this essay argues that Ouyang’s work rejuvenates subjectless critique’s theoretical stakes in identitarian deconstruction, extending it to a full-fledged refusal of the fantasies of relation that in turn sustains the potentialities of social form. Is it possible, the essay asks, that the social is possible only when we work against its idealized constitution?

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Deformation; or, Catachresis and Silk Stalkings
Nick Salvato

This essay springs from the speculation that deformation might be a useful keyword with which to triangulate the relationship between form and formlessness—that is, with which to work yet to push against and perhaps beyond the opposition between form and formlessness. In so doing, the essay raises questions about the potential ongoing value of writing that remains indebted to poststructuralist approaches more than to recent developments in the scholarly humanities. Routing some of those questions through a figural reading of the pilot episode of the television police procedural Silk Stalkings, and the episode’s hinging on the uses of catachresis or overextended metaphor, the essay also affirms the sanguineness of tracing critical and pedagogical pathways that are not only professional but sometimes personal as well.

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The Intoxicating Image: Antonin Artaud and Jean Epstein’s Impossible Search for Formlessness
Juan Camilo Velásquez

In 1920s France everything seemed to be losing its form. An adolescent cinema and a burgeoning spirit of aesthetic modernism turned artists’ gazes toward the future, but the specter of Friedrich Nietzsche and nineteenth-century Romanticism lingered. This essay compares Antonin Artaud and Jean Epstein to get a sense of this intellectual milieu and its obsession with formlessness. The essay argues that Georges Bataille’s concept of informe was not the only attempt at grasping formlessness. Artaud and Epstein shared a concern with intoxication and embodied states of altered consciousness because they saw them as conduits for a fundamental state of formlessness. The essay first explores their personal and theoretical engagements with intoxication to track their intellectual influences and those whom they influenced. Then it follows their artistic quests for this elusive concept or feeling to suggest that while Epstein played with cinema to achieve a formal multitude and simultaneity that approached formlessness, Artaud rebelled against cinema and attempted to exploit the live presence of theater to approach a state of pure communion without frames or linguistic signs to separate the self from the world. Ultimately, their aesthetic experiments and theoretical interventions revealed that formlessness is a limit concept—impossible to trace, grasp, perhaps even define. Yet the elusiveness of formlessness only makes it more alluring, so much so that we still feel the hangover of the taste for it.

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Species-Being, Metabolism, and Natural Limit
Karen Ng

This essay explores two key concepts in the work of Karl Marx and argues for their essential interconnection: species-being and natural limits. The first section provides a general account of the idea of species-being, arguing that this concept is best understood as continuous with the post-Kantian project of “critique.” Drawing on both G. W. F. Hegel and Marx, the essay shows that species-being is connected with self-consciousness of the form of living activity and its natural limits, enabling and constraining certain theoretical and practical powers. The second section develops a distinctly philosophical account of natural limits in contrast to the empirical account generally taken up in eco-Marxist debates. This section argues that a philosophical account of natural limits provides a new way of understanding Marx’s claim that the movement of capital is limitless, or maßlos, and draws on Aristotle to develop an idea of limits in connection with purposes or ends. The third section returns briefly to Hegel and his discussion of limits to provide a more dynamic and dialectical account of natural limits, in accordance with our powers of self-consciousness and self-transcendence. These powers are enabled and constrained by our form of life, demonstrating the necessary interconnection between species-being and natural limits.

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Abjection and Formlessness: Value, Digitality, and the Differential Allocation of Form
Alan Díaz Alva

This article seeks to construct historical and conceptual bridges between digitality, value, and categories of social difference, understanding them as distinct yet interconnected forms of abstraction. To do so, it elaborates on Seb Franklin’s idea that the formalizing logic of capital operates through the differential allocation of form and formlessness. It argues that value-mediated sociality operates through a logic that allocates form while producing a gendered or racialized formlessness as its disavowed or abject precondition, articulating capital’s abstract domination with other forms of extra-economical dispossession and violence. The first section outlines a Marxian conceptual framework grounded on the notions of real abstraction, social form, and subsumptive form-determination. The following section explores the relation between form and formlessness, translating this dynamic into political economic terms. The third section analyzes the role of digitality, interpreting digital abstraction, in a Sohn-Rethelian key, as logically and historically linked to a form of social synthesis grounded in the exchange relation. The conclusion briefly suggests how this analysis can serve as the foundation for a critique of digital technologies that continues the Marxian critique of technological neutrality while sharply contrasting with commonly held views of digital abstraction as detached from its sociopolitical context of emergence.

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Interviews

The Enduring Problem: An Interview about Form
Lou Silhol-Macher and Eugenie Brinkema

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For the Sake of Appearing: An Interview on the Diversity of Queer Forms
Annabel Barry and Ramzi Fawaz

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Review Essay

Pattern beyond Form
Carmen Faye Mathes

A review of Sarah Dowling, Here is a Figure: Grounding Literary Form (Northwestern University Press, 2024).
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Cover: Cato Ouyang, font IV (2020). Soapstone base with nose and gaping mouth, stuffed with raw egg; three wooden spikes decorated with honeycomb, 5 × 6 × 13 in.

Volume 34.1 is available at Duke University Press. Qui Parle is edited by an independent group of graduate students at the University of California, Berkeley and published by Duke University Press.