In the Anglo-American cultural sphere, the growing awareness of global warming and ecocide has coincided with the proliferation of a much discussed, post-apocalyptic imaginary that transports us to uninhabitable planetary futures. These “fictions,” as E. Ann Kaplan notes in a discussion of their mobilising potential, act as “memories for the future” which make us “identify with future selves struggling to survive.” This article turns to Günther Anders’s notion of “apocalypse-blindness” (1956) and Cormac McCarthy’s The Road to set out an alternative way of understanding the powerfully sentimental force such images of doom convey. While seemingly turning our gaze to the future and onto the devastating impact of consumerist lifestyles, I argue that this doom-ridden imaginary also entails a sentimentalisation of our own “inability to feel” and be sufficiently affected by the reality we know ourselves to be contributing to. As such, it bears witness to the trauma of “not being able to adequately feel” what one already knows. By revisiting The Road, a text that occupies a central role in discussions of the potentials and cathartic pitfalls of post-apocalyptic fiction, I suggest that its political potential lies in this confrontation with the limits of feeling. And the politics it opens onto does not hinge on images on ruin, but on a yearning for a socially sanctioned right to feel and express the fear representations only seem able to convey in an inadequate, anaesthetic manner.

Noise is said to disturb, disorient, and confuse, but this article looks specifically at the figure of noise “striking” – rather than, say, a rumbling or murmuring disquiet – us to examine its potential to unsettle European liberal hegemonic norms of ordering society and the inequalities they produce. In particular, it focuses on noisy protest, rebellion, and riot which might “awaken” citizens to these injustices and efforts to suppress them. Drawing on work of Saidiya Hartman, Christina Sharpe, Lauren Berlant, Fred Moten, Jacques Derrida, and Catherine Malabou, this article replays and dislodges the long-standing distinction between noise and logos by examining the transformative capacity of noise as something differential that inserts inconvenience into non-relational forms of sovereignty.

This paper considers how players of Magic: The Gathering (MTG) limited draft turn their acquired gameplay style or disposition (their MTG “gamer habitus”), with respect to drafting, into an object of knowledge. This is done in order to then consciously rework it, to respond to new formats and to the changing metagame. I will focus on a particular case study: how streamer Chord_O_Calls' instructional video shows his own re-evaluation of certain cards. Evidently, it is a process requiring reflexivity, although I aim to be specific with regard to the particular “form of reflexivity” involved. I distribute this outward to the MTG “habit assemblage” (an ensemble of techniques, things, relations) and argue that any individual player's instantiation of this reflexivity involves a practice-based synthesis of paratexts from the MTG habit assemblage that is not codified but is shaped by the assemblage. This leads to a consideration of the “intelligence” and limits of not only particular habits but that of the MTG “habit assemblage” itself. I argue that the broader socio-technical significance of the form of reflexivity that is being proliferated here is one which is defined by its flexibility, by an attentional style of delayed and shifting categorization.

This study reconceptualizes violence as the violation of value-laden boundaries through a close reading of the Death and the Displacement of Beauty trilogy by feminist philosopher of religion Grace M. Jantzen. Given the inherent normativity of the concept, it is difficult to imagine how violence could avoid simply becoming a tool in the hands of the powerful who would define it in polemical or coercive ways. But Jantzen’s work runs counter to a fatalistic treatment of the term by seeking the redemption of the present and a therapeutic approach to the violent pathologies of philosophy. Through a radical reconfiguration of the relationship between mortality and natality, Jantzen both diagnoses and critiques the death-obsessed moral imaginary of modernity. In response, I argue that Jantzen’s sophisticated methodological resistance to an ontology of violent displacement provides an important counter-narrative to the violent metanarratives of modernity that order origins and ends in absolutizing, universalizing, and totalizing ways.

In this interview, Luce Irigaray talks about how two of her latest books, Towards a New Human Being and To Be Born, relate to her wider work and her most well-known theoretical contributions. Irigaray offers reflections on important additions to her earlier work and how those can be a response to the most urgent challenges humanity is facing today. By explaining how her work, especially the difference between sexual and sexuate, has been misinterpreted, she responds to criticisms such as those regarding the experiences of transgender people. The interview draws on the regular conversations Luce Irigaray continues to hold with Ph.D. researchers and the communities of learning she is pioneering with her students.

This article sets out the contours of a Marxist hermeneutic approach to political economy. It begins by outlining how such a critique of political economy would function, with a particular emphasis on approaches which understand the discipline of economics as theory. It further claims that critique is over-reliant on the concept neoliberalism; that the categories proper to economic critique are value, time and space and that the innovation of a hermeneutic approach would be to reintroduce a sphere for antagonism through the analysis of the relationship of economic theory to value. To substantiate this argument, I offer an analysis of some important trends in recent scholarship on neoliberalism, notably the regulation school and the work of Wendy Brown. The article concludes by arguing that a reorientation towards value is timely and necessary, given the serious global recession precipitated by the Coronavirus and the economic reorganisation which will ensue.

This article examines both the persistence and the deconstruction of authenticity in francophone modernist and postmodernist representations of black women. The discussion takes as a starting point Fanon’s reading of Mayotte Capécia’s Je suis martiniquaise in Peau noire, masques blancs, and notes his scathing denunciation of the protagonist’s negrophobia. While Fanon uses the text to diagnose the black woman’s inferiority complex, manifested by her desire to become white through her relationship with a white man, he also scorns her blatant falsity. The rather sweeping brush strokes of Fanon’s reading of Capécia, however, reveal a lack of awareness of the complex circumstances of the text’s production, together with an uncertainty towards its status as an aesthetic artefact and a literary work. Fanon implies that Capécia lacks a more properly “authentic” assumption of black subjectivity, and yet the text’s manufacturing by the black woman’s lover and editor only shows with greater irony the elusiveness of this putative authenticity. The article then compares Fanon’s reading of Capécia with the examination of black feminine authenticity in Maryse Condé’s Heremakhonon. Condé rejects Capécia’s search for whiteness but ultimately debunks the Martinican protagonist’s similarly misguided preoccupation with her putative roots in Africa. The black feminine subject is shown in Condé’s work to be shaped by multiple myths, and her writing finishes by replacing the quest for authenticity with a depiction of the various fictions by which black women are shaped, and shape themselves. Reading Fanon, Capécia, and Condé together in this way uncovers the tensions surrounding notions of authenticity in the construction of black feminine identity.

Introspective crocodiles and exhibitionist writers, queered gender and temporality, critiques of capitalism and canon, experimental form and technique, speculative storylines traversing the cityscape, and physical if unconsummated young love characterize Qiu Miaojin’s distinctive novel, Notes of a Crocodile. A foundational work of Taiwanese queer literature whose protagonist’s name became the word for “lesbian” across the Mandarin-speaking world, the novel captures the queer experience at the moment of birth for a new country, while looking to the future. Bittersweet juxtapositions of pain and pleasure in the protagonist’s relationships with characters, countries, and concepts show how, struggling with complex inner worlds, Qiu births a queer world.