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.
