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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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A review of Sarah Dowling, Here is a Figure: Grounding Literary Form (Northwestern University Press, 2024).
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This article maps the differences in the application of systems method in Marxist dialectics, cybernetics, and poststructuralism. It studies the impact of algorithmic rationality on the speculative lexicons of philosophy—especially when philosophical dialectics is defined as nothing more than quasi-cybernetic recursivity. According to Yuk Hui, the decline of philosophy and dialectics can be contested only by second-order cybernetics as the proper successor of philosophical speculation. To dispute this bold assumption, the article embarks on a comparative inquiry into the systemic method in Marx’s political economy, cybernetics, and poststructuralism, respectively. Reference to the comparative analysis of systems method and Marxist dialectics by Igor Blauberg and Eric Yudin allows one to challenge the thesis according to which the preconditions of dialectics can be developed in the frame of cybernetic recursivity. It enables one to go farther in demonstrating the differences between the Marxist application of systems, which includes dialectical procedures and genesis, and cybernetic systematics, in which these procedures are redundant. Lev Vygotsky, Evald Ilyenkov, and Merab Mamardashvili are brought in as the exemplary methodists who elaborate Marxist methodology to encompass genesis and dialectical difference within systemic abstraction.

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This article discusses a Christian devotional painting by the Early Renaissance artist Andrea Mantegna. It traces its iconographic traits to illustrate its anti-Jewish implications by focusing on the depiction of an inscribed, pseudo-Hebrew paper crown. This attribute situates Mantegna’s painting within the humanist studies of Hebrew, the Veritas Hebraica, which was a means to access antique sources and to delegitimize Jewish belief. The article further draws a parallel to the burning of heretics, who wore similar crowns when they were condemned. Since Mantegna depicts the Jews with such crowns while they hold Jesus in their hands, Mantegna invents a cunning way to invert the accusers and the accused and embeds a hitherto unexplored, anti-Jewish statement. The article traces the development of the visual tradition of the ostracization of Jews in the late fifteenth and early sixteenth centuries.

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A letter to the futurologist FM 2030 written by a young martyr.

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A review of Matteo Pasquinelli, The Eye of the Master: A Social History of Artificial Intelligence (London, UK: Verso Books, 2023).
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A review of Dan Sinykin, Big Fiction: How Conglomeration Changed the Publication Industry and American Literature (New York: Columbia University Press, 2023).

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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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