Straddling the fields of law, philosophy, and reproductive justice, this essay explores how the law understands conception through the notion of the contracepted person. A figurehead of “personhood absolutism,” this hypothetical ghost-being is foreclosed by contraceptive medication yet nonetheless “lives” in a blurry, imaginary legal forcefield of the unconceived: it is strategically assigned persona-hood, along with some kind of legal status, if not actual positive legal rights and powers.

This essay argues that there exist linguistic counterparts to the absentees known to codes of private law: “missing person pronouns.” Examples include certain uses of one and they, which evoke human beings without, however, referring to anyone in particular. To bring such pronouns into focus, the essay considers their peculiar logic in the English language, Émile Benveniste’s theory of the person, and the existential analytic of Martin Heidegger’s Being and Time, which accords a crucial—if enigmatic—role to grammatical nobodies of diverse kinds.

This article draws on recent trends in Marxist critique in order to analyze instances of compromised, misshapen, and deformed form in late medieval art. Produced in a range of media, these episodes exposed the contingent features of two formal enterprises crucial to the structure of the representational order: the moral exemplar and the nascent commodity. A reinvigorated mode of political formalism reveals the stakes of parsing an art of deflation that responded to a period crisis in the representational order.

This article examines Frantz Fanon’s reflections on family, from Black Skin, White Masks to The Wretched of the Earth, to recover a concept and critique of violence as the lived experience of everyday life in the colony. The family, which is a consistent focus of Fanon’s sociodiagnostic technique and his political thought, appears as the intimate arena of colonial war. While masculinism and misogynoir are an undeniable part of Fanon’s attitudes toward the family, his writings also offer an embryonic image of revolution that includes the liberation of women and children.

accelerated forgeries. The 1993 New Yorker cartoon ''On the internet, nobody knows you're a dog'' remains as much a description as a promise. The computer interface is a screen in more than one way, concealing the fingers (or paws) that press the keys from the users who read what they write. In 1993, the assumption was that a body was present, human or humanoid. But more recently, another type of nonhuman entity has flooded online spaces. Bots, an abbreviation of robot, are software programs that complete automated tasks, and only sometimes do they pose as human users. According to the Imperva Bad Bot Report, it is estimated that bot traffic comprised 42.3 percent of all internet activity in 2021. This is a variation on what Harun Farocki called operative or phantom images, whereby, in reading automatically generated images, machines interact with other machines, circumventing the human altogether. 1 By and large, bots speak among themselves, scraping credit card information, guessing passwords, flooding databases, and the like. With such bots, there is no pretense of a body, because there is no need. The situation changes with those bots that directly interact with humans, namely chatbots. Outwardly, they appear in the manner of the New Yorker dog, through textual exchange. The more sophisticated the bot, the more figure 1. Peter Steiner, cartoon from the New Yorker, 5 July 1993.

John Milton’s Paradise Lost is shaped by an implicit theory of life. In Milton’s view, the mark of the living is the capacity to endeavor, the ability to strive in phenomenally available and self-exceeding ways. This essay examines how Milton reworks ancient and early modern ideas about life in order both to develop a concept of endeavor and to represent the activity of endeavoring.

This paper argues for the absenting presence of an embodied theoretical architecture of materialist harmonious dialectic in Hubert Damisch’s engagement with Chinese art and architecture around the cloud. This connects with recent media studies discourse where environment both conditions and is being with an alternative architecture that is different from a centralized elevated arche. At the same time, the essay positively explores the decolonizing structural potential for displacing Eurocentrism and idealism in the making of theory and art and architecture history by opening up to global collaborative knowledge formation and reconnecting theory with practice.

This article advances an argument about two “imagined environments”—my term for the frameworks that human groups use to depict and dwell in more-than-human worlds. The first of these imagined environments arose around the US-Mexican Boundary Commission (1849–59): while failing to fulfill its official objective of building physical border monuments, this team of explorers and engineers still made media that helped two settler states conceptualize and control their borderlands. Against this increasingly efficient exploitation of both humans and nonhumans, a second imagined environment persisted in Mescalero Apache pictographs, Chihene Apache performances, and other Apache media. On our precarious planet, this imagined environment can teach us to stop defining ourselves around fixed places and to remain resilient while migrating through shifting spaces.