Abstract: This essay takes as is impetus a response to Victor Peterson II’s essay “On the Supernumerary” to offer a rejoinder to the typical criticisms of Afropessimism and at the same time staging its own theoretical intervention into Black studies as a critical and political enterprise. Arguing that Peterson’s essay restages the same critiques around identity politics in different terms, “Laughter of the Zero” proceeds by way of a rethinking of racial blackness through Peterson’s own terms, along the way identifying two persistent absences in the usual critiques of Afropessimism that both fail to account for its historical emergence and its economy of enunciation. A redefinition of blackness as subjectivity, not identity, is emergent, positing racial blackness as means calculation of different exposures to vulnerability and the necessary accompaniment of an authoritative calculating meta-subject. Finally, by taking the numerical assumptions to task, this essay locates problems inherent in Afropessimism as a call to answer from within the theory itself.
Abstract: The following paper presents a micro-history across the seams of culinary, financial, and art history in Lower Manhattan in the 1980s. The narrative traces how New York artists and overseas investors—powered by the Japanese asset bubble—were drawn together during the summer and fall of 1989 to create a Museum of American Graffiti alongside a short-lived supper club, the collapse of which helped clear the way for a new generation of deluxe sushi restaurants. The unlikely convergence of Japanese risk capital and the New York avant-garde reveals a deeper transformation in the cultural economy of the late twentieth century. The restaurant, financial, and art worlds were not merely neighboring scenes but parts of the same circuit of speculative energy, each translating liquidity into taste and taste back into value. The arrival of Japanese investors in SoHo and NoHo did not just inject money into the city’s real estate and art markets; it redefined what counted as sophistication, ushering in an aesthetic that linked minimalism and luxury, risk and refinement. More than a curious footnote to the 1980s boom, this episode illuminates how artistic exploration and financial speculation became mutually intelligible practices, how food and art could become parallel theaters of globalization, and how the ghost of one failed venture, a “museum” of graffiti art, helped prepare the ground, literally and metaphorically, for the rise of a whole generation of high-end sushi restaurants in New York.
Abstract: Can Dalit cinema continue to offer a critique of Indian democracy in its current majoritarian, ethnocentric, and intolerant form? Spurred by the agonistic turn in democratic political theory and the globalization-induced dereliction of institutions and collective participation, this article pursues this question along two trajectories. First, through an engagement with Nagraj Manjule’s film Fandry ( The Pig , 2013) and its aesthetic genealogy in the longer arc of Indian realism, with its complex visions of majoritarian violence and subaltern culpability. Second, through the arc of democracy’s relationship with visuality, where the irruptive psychic entailments of Ambedkar’s iconography in India’s public and cinematic life revise the problem of culpability with relation to Hindutva’s intolerant territoriality. By foregrounding the passive, intimate, and durational register of Fandry ’s countervisual bearing, the article interrogates the analytic scope of Indian democracy in relation to post-national Dalit cinema.
Abstract: After Disney's nineteenth MCU film, Avengers: Infinity War , kills half of the franchise's superheroes, its sequel, Endgame , introduces the Quantum Realm—a subatomic reality that superposes all possible worlds as an inexhaustible resource to extend its grand narrative of superhuman salvation. Through Disney's quantum leap, this paper examines how new materialist thinking in current cultural production re-ontologizes, or "quantumizes," its intellectual properties as excess that enfolds contradictions, such as scenarios of hidden risks and their preemptive solutions. The current ontological turn in the social sciences and humanities speculates about this sort of quantumized substratum as a strategic means to think about disciplinary sustainability in the Anthropocene.
This essay brings Jacques Derrida's appearances on the small screen into dialogue with his theoretical writings on television as medium. Developing the notion of medial "rhythm" outlined in Echographies of Television (1996) and elsewhere, the essay argues that Derrida's reflections on broadcast television are important resources for thinking the protean phenomenon of television in a digital age. Despite his suspicions of the structural distortions of the televisual frame, Derrida adapts the medium to his own ends in gesturing towards what this essay calls a "television of the event." At a time when television's digital mutations offer fresh possibilities for -and obstacles to -thinking differently, Derrida's involvement with the small screen shows that a new relation to television only ever begins by looking at and listening to what is happening before our eyes.
This essay examines intersections of warfare, policing, and crime in the work of Kawamata Chiaki, HectorTobar, and William Gibson. Locating novels by these authors at the crossroads of war writing and crime fiction, the article rethinks transformations around armed force during the consolidation of neoliberalism. The analysis places these writers into conversation across a global canvas, using their work to outline a contemporary rearticulation of antiwar politics and casting the latter as a potential site of convergence for struggles in the present around populist nationalism, militarized policing, and digital surveillance.
After Disney's nineteenth MCU film, Avengers: Infinity War, kills half of the franchise'ssuperheroes, its sequel, Endgame, introduces the Quantum Realm-a subatomic realitythat superposes all possible worlds as an inexhaustible resource to extend its grandnarrative of superhuman salvation. Through Disney's quantum leap, this paper examineshow new materialist thinking in current cultural production re-ontologizes, or"quantumizes," its intellectual properties as excess that enfolds contradictions, such asscenarios of hidden risks and their preemptive solutions. The current ontological turn inthe social sciences and humanities speculates about this sort of quantumizedsubstratum as a strategic means to think about disciplinary sustainability in theAnthropocene
This article engages with the corporeal and mediated intensities of mourning publics at celebrity funerals in Kerala, attended both in person and via TV and other live-streaming platforms. Live coverage transforms discrete emotional valences of these events into monumental media spectacles, consolidating an affective economy of grief based on the expression of "liveness" in all its urgency. This urgent expression results from the historical transition from traditional to new media in digital environments over the last two decades. Spectacles of "liveness" are key to understanding the cultural dynamics of mass participation in Kerala, which often abjures the general South Indian public's enthusiasm for celebrities. Emotional eruptions at mass funeral processions form a melodramatic counterbalance to the "rational," realist Malayali public sphere, which is proved, by such displays, to be an inadequate lens for viewing cultural self-definitions within popular discourses in Kerala.
This article examines the ontologies of blackness, animality, and technology in Jordan Peele's Nope (2022). It argues that Nope's CGI alien both engages and resists canonized film histories of material and discursive humanness, demonstrating the medium's complex relationships between humanness and not. By tracing interlocking logics of racism, spectacular technology, and animal exploitation, the article seeks to undo notions of cinema as inherently "human," arguing that Nope's aesthetic and epistemological collapses of body, machine, alien, animal, and human can open more possibilities for cinematic ontology and historiography.
This essay reads Emily Short and Liza Daly's First Draft of the Revolution (2012) as a leading example of recent digital interactive fiction that uses remediations for political critique. The clashes and contradictions in First Draft's remediations of paper texts are where the piece discloses the propaganda of a suppressive regime as well as challenges the idea of a new medium's immanent revolutionary potential. The essay briefly traces interactive fiction's development as a genre grounded in remediation and concludes by placing First Draft in context of related interactive "complicity" texts and other political directions for the genre's future remediations.
Abstract: Is " queer now to be taken as delineating political rather than erotic tendencies?" Leo Bersani laments in Homos , his 1985 text that helped launch his reputation as the god father of queer theory's now famed anti-social thesis. For Mikko Tuhkanen, Bersani's critique of queer theory and its reverberations engender a crucial distinction: Bersani is forever "a queer thinker ," not a " queer theorist ." Reading with Tuhkanen's distinction, this essay explores Bersani's investment in queer thinking as a mode of anti-institutional critical practice in order to track the centrality of the conflict between the political and erotic in the past and present work of queer scholarship.
Abstract: This essay highlights the centrality of the concept of "incongruity" in Leo Bersani's thinking of ethical relation. It is structured by the incongruous coupling of Eimear McBride's novel A Girl is a Half-formed Thing and Ellsworth Kelly's paintings, especially Blue Black (2000), as it considers the ethical value of going along with the unwatchable and unreadable (e.g., gender and sexual violence), and with monochromatic abstraction in the context of race. According to Bersani, incongruity is the syntax of undivided being. By looking at ungrammatical literary syntax (McBride) and chromatic oneness (Kelly), the essay argues for ethical alignments absent of predication or congruity as it affirms an antisocial aesthetics of incongruous oneness as opposed to the often-murderous fixation on identity and difference.
Is "queer now to be taken as delineating political rather than erotic tendencies?" Leo Bersanilaments in Homos, his 1985 text that helped launch his reputation as the god father of queertheory's now famed anti-social thesis. For Mikko Tuhkanen, Bersani's critique of queertheory and its reverberations engender a crucial distinction: Bersani is forever "a queerthinker," not a "queer theorist." Reading with Tuhkanen's distinction, this essay exploresBersani's investment in queer thinking as a mode of anti-institutional critical practice inorder to track the centrality of the conflict between the political and erotic in the past andpresent work of queer scholarship.
This essay identifies two modes of "escape" in the "gay fugues" of Pet Shop Boys,dierentiated by their (non)fascist potential. To trace this potential, the essay engages thework of Lee Edelman, Leo Bersani, and Ernesto Laclau, while extracting further lessons fromStefan Zweig, Village People, Russian history, Fourierism, AIDS eulogies, West Side Story, andthe mathematics of zero
This essay argues that Bersani's attempts to articulate a non-Cartesian form of knowledgeproduction spur him to speculate anew about epistemology and ontology. Specifically,Bersani's late theory and practice of recategorization, a recursive engagement with thinkersand concepts that reveals thought's virtual potential, aords him the opportunity toconceive of a cognitive temporal unity and an immanentist conception of being. Aerexploring Bersani's theory of recategorization and his textual recategorizing practice, I turnto the work of multimedia artist Juan Pablo Echeverri to oer a dialogic example ofrecategorization as aesthetic practice
Lee Edelman is the Fletcher Professor of English Literature at Tus University and a keyfigure in queer theory. This interview was conducted in December 2022, a month beforeEdelman's fourth book, Bad Education, was published by Duke University Press. In thisdiscussion, Edelman revisits the "antisocial" debate in queer theory and assesses hisunderstanding of negativity and antisociality in relation to the positions of Leo Bersani andJos & eacute; Esteban Mu & ntilde;oz, among others. Edelman also outlines how his thought in No Future andBad Education interacts with contemporary politics and strands of Afropessimism, feminism,and family abolition
