This essay examines Clemens Brentano and Achim von Arnim's text "Various Sensations in front of Friedrich's Seascape with Capuchin Monk" in relation to the affective-aesthetic concept of Stimmung. Brentano and Arnim's interaction with Monk bythe Sea reveals a dissonant relationality that would not have been recognizable as Stimmung at the time but prefigures modern interpretations of the term. This essay explores how Brentano and Arnim transition from direct observation of the painting to an engagement with the social dynamics within the Berlin Academy where it was displayed. This shift reflects an emergent awareness of the complex interplay between affect and discourse, positioning Brentano and Arnim's work as a precursor to contemporary theories of atmosphere and social interaction in aesthetic experiences. The essay further refines the affective-discursive dynamics of Brentano and Arnim's piece by placing it alongside its better-known redaction by Heinrich von Kleist.
This essay provides an immanent critique of the Afropessimist-Black feminist impasse through a close reading of Iyko Day's "Afro-Feminism Before Afropessimism." Delineating how the assumption of an antagonism between Afropessimism and Black feminism necessarily flattens both while relationally constructing the two in a spectacularized field of enmity, this essay reads the demand for their non-coincidence as a staged violence refracting antiblack gendered fantasies. Through this antagonism, both Afropessimism and Black feminism are deployed from without to extend the interlocutory projects of civil society's antiblack discourse. And so, this essay argues, the inability to reckon with the conjuncture of Black feminist Afropessimism reveals how Black thought is scaled through the academy precisely by way of its disappearance in a gendered schema that both forecloses and fixes, indeed forecloses by way of fixing, the Black female imago.
Taking Peter Thiel's provocative suggestion that "crypto is libertarian, AI is communist" as its point of departure, this essay interrogates the entanglement of neoliberalism, cybernetics, and the problem of economic planning. Cybernetics and its computational offshoots have long been imagined as tools for socialist planning, from Oskar Lange's proposals to the experiments of Cybersyn and OGAS. Yet Friedrich Hayek's defense of the market, grounded in a theory of dispersed knowledge and feedback, reveals cybernetics as central to neoliberal thought-and to its unresolved tension between spontaneous order and directed control. Following the etymology of "cybernetics" and its mobilizations in the philosophical tradition from Heraclitus and Plato to Heidegger, the essay opens onto a broader inquiry into governance, computation, and the contemporary stakes of political steering.
Abstract: Analyzing the theoretical work of Silvia Rivera Cusicanqui in conversation with collective memory studies, I explore the robust theory and praxis of subaltern decolonial mythologies. The goal of this essay is double-pronged: First, I decouple myth from its frequent association with reactionary and fascist politics by showing how myth has mobilized popular decolonial movements. Second, I demonstrate how myth as a category used by Indigenous intellectuals serves decolonial ends, although these ends are a contested site of their own.
This essay reframes Susan Stryker's "My Words to Victor Frankenstein above the Village of Chamounix: Performing Transgender Rage" (1993) through the lens of Barbara Johnson's "My Monster / My Self" (1982). It argues that while the figure of the monster stalks the social order which identifies it as a deformation, social mutability remains contingent on the rage of its exclusions. Trans rage registers what Icall "monstrous returns," those uncanny doublings that call subject/object relations into question. Ilocate "monstrous returns" in metaphors pertaining to "home" and "family" that trans studies has crafted to describe its own formation. Ironically, however, disciplinary discourses continue to rage against "family" as a figure for debates internal to gender and sexuality studies.
Looking at a range of contemporary projects that explore the limits of musical duration-aesthetically and institutionally-this essay explores what such performances beyond the capacity of any listener's patience, and indeed lifetime, can tell us about the politics of long-term planning for a world perpetually at risk of collapse. From the John Cage Organ Project in Halberstadt, Germany to Apichatpong Weerasethakul's Memoria and the drone metal band Sunn O))), the radical deceleration of sound provides a weird soundtrack for the weird times of a present that can feel like it is ending all at once, but in agonizingly slow motion. Yet these works also highlight some of the ways that even these worst of times can be endured.
This essay approaches deceleration as a thickening of historical and phenomenological time through the audiovisual moving image. Iread Garrett Bradley's poetic documentary about mass incarceration, Time (2020), alongside works by the pianist Emahoy Tsege Mariam Gebru, whose expansive, genre-defying compositions score the film. Emahoy's music bears the inscriptions of Italian colonialism in Ethiopia and its carceral archipelagoes, and refuses to be contained by them. Beginning on the former prison island of Asinara (Sardinia), where Emahoy, her family, and members of her community were forcibly relocated by Italian occupiers when she was a child, the essay traces the anticarceralconjunctures delicately woven into and radiating out from Bradley's film. Thick time emerges across this essay as a means of resisting carceral temporalities and sensing their longue dur & eacute;e. Through Bradley's Time, Itheorize the time-image as it collides with a carcerality that wields time as a whip, or duration as punishment-one that is not limited to the run time of the film, but instead reverberates for centuries.
Staged across a series of thought experiments, this essay explores the concept of deceleration at the intersection of photography and cinema. Beginning with a meditation on the language of photography, then turning to close readings of works by Hiroshi Sugimoto, Bruce Conner, and Jean Epstein, my theorizations situate deceleration as an aesthetic and philosophical inquiry into time, made possible through photography and cinema's mutual imbrication, occurring at the juncture of the moving image stilled and the still image that harbors and indexes movement. If the decelerated image is capable of generating new forms of attention, then it is, in part, through its capacity to translate visually otherwise invisible correspondences between light and duration. What emerges is a new method of seeing through slow forms of contemplation. Deceleration is ultimately, Isuggest, a form ofvisualization and witnessing revealed in the space between remaining still and still remaining, between the photographic fossilization of the world and its cinematic excavation.
This essay traces the figure of detour through Roland Barthes's late work-from Camera Lucida to the lectures on "the Neutral"-where it serves as a conceptual hinge between the reimagining of relational ties and the pursuit of a suspended, decelerated mode of experience. Placing Barthes alongside queer accounts of self-and worldmaking, Iargue that his sense of deceleration as a retexturation of agency-and its concomitant ethics grounded in oscillation-offers a way to inhabit such fashioning apart from demands for the sovereign subject's flexibility. The essay ultimately reframes Barthes as a theorist of complicity: an oblique mode of inhabitation that retextures, rather than intensifies, agency.
This essay attends to the problem of cinematic deceleration and the resistance to the "measurability" of life and labor under colonial modernity by looking at an early work of Iranian new-wave cinema, Sohrab Shahid Saless's Still Life (1974)-a slow reflection on the relationship between labor time and life time in the lives of an elderly couple who are falling out of sync with the labor demands of capitalist modernity. Drawing on images of the unceasing domestic labor of the nameless woman in the film and the problem of spectatorial labor, Iunderline a notion of time that is accumulative, infinitely folded, and immeasurable-that which precedes all the externally regulated forms of labor in capitalist-colonial modernity. In Still Life, accumulative time paradoxically emerges through a nonliquid form of filmic language, which, in the first encounter, seems strictly measured, minimalist, and static. Slowness and certain forms of deceleration pave the way for the expression of time as accumulation; however, once this notion of time emerges, it becomes a critique of the very measures through which we create categories of slowness and fastness, deceleration and acceleration.
Abstract: Genius enters in three different situations in Walter Benjamin's "Schicksal und Charakter:" three times in the context of tragedy, twice in the context of comedy, and once as a new world age. Motivated neither causally nor logically, Genius likes to make momentary appearances and disappear, then reappear unpredictably. Genius has a catalyzing function that reveals relationships while breaking up forms and changing appearances. Genius is a transformative and unpredictable force, an unreliable character that resides hidden in plain sight.
Abstract: Walter Benjamin's "Fate and Character" introduces a cast of eclectic characters. The final character, the Comic—otherwise known as the Scoundrel—is loved on the stage but despised in the world. This character study attempts to catch Benjamin's Scoundrel, who shadows the others, revealing layered concepts of character. The others ground their character in a tragic moral order that condemns the poor to uphold the authority of the Law. The Scoundrel, lacking character altogether, breaks from tragedy by scandalously exposing the moral world order as fiction, and fate as farce.
Abstract: In a new set of cards inspired by Walter Benjamin, bliss is always limned by the fear, terror, and sorrow of the card reversed.
Abstract: How might music allow us to think Benjamin's "God" as intrinsic to the concepts of evil, misfortune, innocence, guilt, and pleasure? Here, Schubert's lieder are thought of as condemning the subject to Benjamin's destructive gods by offering the idea that fate is the ultimate fortune teller, divorced from morality.
Abstract: This essay addresses the pivotal challenge the 2024 Gaza Solidarity student encampments bring to our understanding of the university that resonates within a longer genealogy of anti-war and anti-imperial movement politics. The piece proposes "dwelling" as a form of critical analysis and political practice, referring to the term's structural, affective, and temporal registers. Approaching the university as an activating "dwelling" site, the essay asks: how might the university's "illiberal" political formation allow us to not only undiscipline the student movement's relation to the institution itself, but also track its workings of power and potential to operationalize otherwise. The essay further contrasts this movement with the way "dwelling" in Gaza—physical shelter, life-making possibilities—has been undergoing genocidal siege and erasure. The essay hopes to open up rather than foreclose or obscure the continued need to build coalitional possibilities that have always already been in formation.
Abstract: This special issue of Diacritics includes poems from two extraordinary Palestinian-American poets who remind us what, in the face of tyranny, poetry is for. In their poetry, we encounter not only a verse in witness, but also a record of a life, of a living that resists its violent interruptions, the attempts at its annihilation.
Abstract: The photographs gathered in this special issue of Diacritics bear witness to an exceptional moment in the relatively short but politically impassioned lifespan of the 2024 student encampments. Together, these images directly address the different textual and textural complexities inherent in the very concept of "encampment" they perform. We enter into this small selection of images by way of fragments, offering brief readings that aim to frame and contextualize key questions, provocations, and actions referenced by the photographs themselves. In these fragments, we identify two main threads: historical tensions and entanglements; critique and alternative pedagogies.
The chiromancer appears in "Fate and Character" as she might have figured at the time of its writing: fleetingly, whether in popular and academic periodicals or in a booth at the fair. This essay seeks to reconstruct her cursory role in relation to Benjamin's wider philosophy of history, where the hand becomes a site for condensed temporalities, a ledger of past action and future possibilities. We argue for the replacement of the notion of chiromancy as it is entrapped within bourgeois notions of character and fate, tied to work and profession, with a more critical, historical-materialist reading, that links moments of crisis and struggle across time and points to an elsewhere: a time of redemption, music, and truth.
