This article considers how those subordinated for their gender and sexual orientation, but privileged for their race and class, may be better allies to people, especially women, of colour. Judith Butler’s Excitable Speech (1997) is a helpful aid. Butler offers us a strategy to think through — albeit by way of supplementary voices such as legal theorist Kimberlé Crenshaw, French sociologist Pierre Bourdieu and philosopher George Yancy — how white women may find an ‘insurrectionary’ form of speech that is both (...) embodied and attentive to how we stand in the pecking order of public sphere expression and exchange. The article considers how white women’s ‘critical freedoms’ have helped shape the discursive preclusions faced by Black women. It analyses the conditions by which white women may assert their freedom of speech without this being to the detriment of women of colour. (shrink)

Freedom was a core theme of Michel Foucault's later writings, as well the central tenet of the work of pro-capitalist writer Ayn Rand. This article firstly demonstrates some surprisingly similar arguments made in the oeuvres of these unlikely bedfellows regarding how cultivation of the self/holding the self as one’s highest value (in Foucault's and Rand's respective lexicons) can lead to an ethic of freedom. Secondly, the article examines the ways in which both ‘author functions’ (in Foucault's sense) have recently been (...) deployed in political discourse to stand in for caricatured versions of the freedoms of right-wing greed and left-wing moral relativism. Foucault is doubly problematized, moreover, since, as well as being used as a metonym for the perceived dangers of identity politics by the right, his ambivalent and ambiguous relationship with neoliberalism proves a problem to many scholars who wish to fit him squarely into a left-wing continental canon. (shrink)

This is a transcript of a dialogue between Lisa Downing and Maggie Nelson about Nelson’s recent book, On Freedom: Four Songs of Care and Constraint (2021). The interlocutors discuss the rise of cultural authoritarianism, the role of care in shaping and delimiting freedom, the ways in which freedom and care signify differently according to the sex of the ‘free’ subject, and the vexed question of what freedom will mean in an uncertain future foreshadowed by the spectre of climate change — (...) and potential apocalypse. (shrink)

Many Global North contexts are experiencing conflict in feminist discourses between supporters of trans and gender diverse self-identification and self-proclaimed ‘gender critical’ feminists who consider this to undermine feminist goals. We argue that the channelling of contemporary feminist discourse into defensive and oppositional channels has foreclosed the space for more nuanced and future-oriented, utopian thought around freedom from sex/gender, limiting the prospect of developing a coalition of actors focused not on difference, but rather on commonality. Putting classic feminist works by (...) Simone de Beauvoir, Shulamith Firestone and Luce Irigaray into dialogue, we consider an alternative approach to freedom premised on an ontology of potentiality combined with acceptance of the materiality of the binary gender hierarchy, that nonetheless remains utopian and open-ended, demonstrating the capacity to transcend these impasses and potentially overcome these divides. (shrink)

Keith Reader's brief, unfinished article ‘Freeze Peach’ situates contemporary controversies surrounding free speech in relation to material and economic concerns. Ian James's response draws attention to the way Keith does this by bringing together four key figures of late twentieth-century philosophy and theory: Louis Althusser, Jean-François Lyotard, Terry Eagleton and Stanley Fish. Ian argues that the conjugation of Marx-inspired theory with thinkers associated with the postmodern would have allowed Keith to develop a uniquely perceptive and productive insight into the present (...) moment of political disorientation, one which demands a renegotiation of the legacies of both modernity and postmodernity. (shrink)

Today’s debates about academic freedom in the US and the UK often echo arguments and counterarguments made by Immanuel Kant and the sovereign who censored him around the time when the modern Humboldtian university would be founded on the twin principles of critique and institutional autonomy. This article considers the limits of the criticist account by reading Jacques Derrida’s deconstructive engagement with Kant’s Conflict of the Faculties in the context of recent legislative developments and political interference which imperil these foundations. (...) To do so, it makes a turn to the ear and to the multiple senses of ‘hearing’ as auditory perception, responsiveness and judgement to explore an alternative basis for defending academic freedom that radicalizes Kant’s position and liberates scholarly inquiry from its closures. (shrink)

This article considers the recent publications of French philosopher Simone de Beauvoir, and offers an overview of contemporary scholarship in Beauvoir Studies. Beauvoir’s canonization in Gallimard’s La Pléiade collection in 2018 is discussed, specifically Gallimard’s choice of Beauvoir’s Mémoires for these first two volumes. Exploring the imbrication of Beauvoir’s philosophy with her own lived experience, the article traces what Annie Ernaux describes as the ‘running threads’ connecting us, namely the ways in which Beauvoir’s legacy is interwoven in our lives today. (...) Surveying recent scholarship highlights the pertinence of Beauvoir’s work to contemporary contexts on issues ranging from sexual violence, subjective agency and female subjugation to emancipatory politics and transnational feminist solidarities. Thereafter, the importance Beauvoir placed on self–Other relations is explored in relation to scholarship on Beauvoir’s epistolary exchanges, the publication of her lost novella Les Inséparables, and on Beauvoir’s philosophy of alterity and old age in light of the pandemic. (shrink)

This article analyses the ‘live’ virtual human in ABBA Voyage, the long-awaited concert reunion of the Swedish pop group ABBA, via Vilém Flusser’s concept of the digital apparition. It first argues for these virtual performers (dubbed ‘ABBA-tars’) to be understood as externalized computational codes which shift the grounds of ownership over and consent to the use of one’s likeness. They are also key to disproportionate and as yet unaccountable power held by technology companies. Secondly, ABBA Voyage’s presentation of ABBA as (...) their past selves places time in a capitalism of immateriality profiting from the protean temporality of bodies. This temporal discombobulation thwarts finitude and confounds time in meanings of life, death and growth. The article thus addresses urgent confrontations between actual and virtual humans placed in the same physical environment, and paves the way for thinking about how we are going to deal and live with their virtuality. (shrink)

This article establishes a dialogue between Virginie Despentes’s 2006 memoir-cum-manifesto, King Kong théorie and Jack Halberstam’s theorization of ‘shadow feminism’. For Halberstam, ‘not succeeding at womanhood can offer unexpected pleasures (…) Shadow feminisms take the form not of becoming, being, and doing but of shady, murky modes of undoing, un-becoming, and violating’. In King Kong théorie, I argue, Despentes embraces her failure to ‘become woman’, and her accounts of rape and rape fantasy present a refusal of mastery wherein the subject (...) might unravel, come undone. Through her use of the King Kong metaphor, Despentes connects ‘unbecoming woman’ to an unravelling of the human subject; King Kong figures in the text as a composite, cyborgian creature, with whom Despentes herself identifies. In King Kong théorie, then, Despentes adopts a shadowy, hybrid positionality, forging a textual space for all creatures who fail to be or become woman. (shrink)

This article argues that ‘the digital’ and ‘big data’ are metaphors of obfuscation, which are used to screen the real effects of technologies on lived experiences and the planet. Now that technolog...

The purpose of this essay is to provide an interpretive and evaluative introduction to Franco ‘Bifo’ Berardi’s critical media theory and to situate it with a view to understanding but also thinking beyond the limitations of an aesthetic practice rooted almost exclusively in conscious, language-based thought. It begins by examining the way in which Berardi conceptualizes the techno-social paradigm emerging in the passage from late industrial society to semiocapitalism (a form of capitalism based on immaterial labour and the explosion of (...) the infosphere), connecting this to the ecological-aesthetic concerns of Félix Guattari. It concludes by questioning the prospects of poetry to forge lines of escape from the determinism of techno-linguistic governance, suggesting, by way of N. Katherine Hayles and Donna Haraway, that extra-linguistic, nonconscious resources may provide a broader and more viable theoretical palette for conceiving of indeterminability beyond, behind, and in the interstices of a complex digital ecology. (shrink)

Beyond the only text Jean-Luc Nancy explicitly dedicated to it (‘Rumoration’ in La Ville au loin), rumor lurks in the background — under the surface — of any discourse on community, or on being-with. Following closely Nancy’s thought process in ‘Rumoration’ (Nancy presents himself as walking, wandering in the city), this article interweaves fragments of a genealogy of rumor, from the ancient Greek logopoios to today’s ‘fake news’. But rumor is precisely what evades genealogy, so although it can be thought (...) of as an archimedium (pure mediality, as Maurice Blanchot suggests), its floating texture, made up of references to references, turns it into a kind of anarchistructure. (shrink)

This essay compares the poetic and political theories of contemporary philosopher Giorgio Agamben with the poetry of Wallace Stevens in order to outline a dynamic of ‘inoperativity’ that foregrounds the intimate relationship between language, form and an existential expression of possibility. Through a reading of Stevens’s prose essays and poetry, I demonstrate how Agamben’s reconceptualization of potentiality as a power kept in a non-relational relationship towards its formal realization can be mapped onto the self-conscious articulations of Stevens’s poetic speakers who (...) employ poetic tropes and forms only to question and expose their claims to truth and foundationality. Rather than follow a tradition of poststructuralist readings of Stevens’s destabilizations, I argue for a framework of ‘inoperativity’ that preserves Stevens’s poetic attitude towards life, while showing how his emphasis on potentiality delineates an imaginative vigour that brings the poetic self into renewed attunement with his or her environment. (shrink)

Sigmund Freud’s biologism has historically come with a negative valence, seeming to consign us to passive determination by irrational drives. While the nonhuman turn has recently highlighted the underacknowledged creativity of animal life, this re-evaluation of biology has hardly implicated Freud. I contend that Maurice Merleau-Ponty reveals a nascent ‘other Freud’ able to inform the nonhuman turn, one that sees the human animal as the basis of the free and relational psychoanalytic subject. I follow Merleau-Ponty in reading Freud as engaged (...) with the question of how a shared, intersubjective world is possible. Both thinkers realized that it is in the domain of life, not cognition, that we verify this seemingly human relational potential. Elaborating the Merleau-Pontian Freud, I argue for a psychoanalytic subject that necessitates nonhuman life as its ecstatic unmooring towards the Other and reality. Ecological thinking is not an obstacle to the relationality prized by psychoanalysis, but a necessity. (shrink)

Inspired by Paul B. Preciado’s work of autotheory, Testo Junkie, and the various processes of self-shaping that circulate through his corpus, this visual piece and its accompanying personal essay draw upon the artist’s familial and ancestral knowledge of their grandmother’s confinement in an asylum. Developing a visual methodology based on the holographic philosophy of Nondual Śaiva Tantra, Techno-Tantrik Embodiment seeks to offer analogous holistic technologies that harness the power of the repressed and the taboo, to transform mind, body and environment. (...) The piece questions how technological scale sets conditions for relations, feelings, democratic processes and infrastructures, and it provides a mixed-reality approach to consciousness, asking: what types of engagement with image-based systems can subvert and transform our worldview? Utilizing a queer framework that eschews respectability or a quest for ‘positive’ counternarratives, it explores the possible synergies between Tantrik and digital technologies, to build meaningful connections with ourselves and alterity. (shrink)

This discussion concerns the under-explored influence of Jacques Derrida on Paul B. Preciado and the autotheoretical enterprise that is Testo Junkie. Picking up on the deconstructive logic of contamination at work in Preciado’s early writings, the article reckons with autotheory as both a theoretical mode motored by the first person and an autobiographical mode interested in self-shaping. In so doing, it offers a genealogy of autotheory that finds its origins in Derrida’s disinterest in disciplinary purity and dislike of philosophical detachment, (...) at the same time as positioning Testo Junkie firmly within a French literary and philosophical context where it both intervenes in the activity of queer theorizing and antagonizes the highly popular genre of autofiction through a series of generic contaminations. Autotheory, in this itinerary, is inseparable from the self-writing project that Preciado undertakes and advocates, one that disidentifies from the fiction of a privately sexed and interior ‘self’. (shrink)

Despite its imperative to include all gendered positions under one umbrella, ‘trans’ is continually riven by intramural confrontation over the differences between its masculine and feminine iterations. Whether in political organizing, on social media or in the pages of academic trans theory, it sometimes seems like ‘trans’ is subject to an interminable and gendered custody battle. Dissatisfied with the terms of masc–femme antagonism, this essay uses the gendered interfaces of critique and autotheory to enmesh the work of Jules Gill-Peterson and (...) Paul B. Preciado. Reading into the interdependence of Gill-Peterson’s and Preciado’s texts yields a different theory: trans as an auto-antonym, a word that produces opposite meanings depending on context. Treating trans as auto-antonymic conjures a relational and even erotic escape from the naturalization of gendered antagonism in trans theory, affirming the unexpected bridges, reversals or ‘sex changes’ of specifically trans writing. (shrink)

This article considers the idea of gender hacking, particularly as it circulates in Paul B. Preciado’s Testo Junkie, and places this in the context of wider discourses of both bio- and computer hacking. Of particular interest is how a hacking paradigm has come to inform twenty-first-century theories of activist intervention, and the implications of this for contemporary conceptions of political agency. Drawing out the parallels between conceptualizations of hacking and transgression, the article considers both the possibilities and the potential limitations (...) of thinking about sociopolitical changemaking in these terms. Ultimately, it uses theories of transgression to propose a rethinking of the distinction between engineering and hacking, with a view to negotiating the conflict between micropolitical hormonal intervention and ambitions toward re-engineering biotechnical hegemony in gender-hacking projects. (shrink)

This discussion takes up the politics of gestational labour and uterine productivity in connection with genetic self-reproduction and the family in the oeuvre of Paul B. Preciado. In his autotheoretical treatise Testo Junkie, Preciado dispensed with the standard Marxist-feminist term ‘sexual division of labour’, positing instead a ‘technogestational division of labour’ to describe the mechanism by which capitalism segments people’s bodies and constructs the capacity to make babies. Taking up that coinage, with enthusiasm for the political horizon it illuminates, I (...) nevertheless read Preciado against Preciado. I identify moments (including in An Apartment on Uranus) of oscillation away from the earlier work’s posit of always already non-sovereign ‘politically assisted procreation’; moments which break faith with the ‘copyleft’ spirit of collective gestational anti-authorship insofar as they call for trans and queer individuals’ equal access to ‘genetic speech’ and for our reappropriation of parental property rights qua ‘confiscated patrimony’. (shrink)

In Testo Junkie, Preciado briefly introduces the figure of the ‘techno-Barbie’. Contrasted with his own Testogel-fuelled pornographic experiments, the possibilities of oestrogen or progesterone seem somewhat uncharitably foreclosed upon. Though Preciado draws our attention to the gendered politics of chemical enhancement and hormonal justice, it begs the question: where do we draw the line between experimentation and chemical domination? We engage with the figure of the techno-Barbie to explore our own experiments with hormones and gendered agency in the boundaries of (...) advanced biocapitalism. Drawing on a range of allied texts, we explore the ambivalences of our own hormonal experimentation. What kinds of hormonal experiments are allowed to be cast as such? In response to this all-encompassing theory of domination, we ask: how might the techno-Barbie speak back? (shrink)

What can be learnt from Paul B. Preciado’s ecological framing of trans* and migrant world-making in An Apartment on Uranus? How might trans* and migrant solidarities affirm life in the context of capitogenic climate catastrophe and what Françoise Vergès has named the ‘racial capitalocene’? Through these guiding questions, I connect recent calls to ‘decolonize trans* imaginaries’ with translocal hispanophone knowledges that reaffirm the plurality of gender/sexuality in las Amé ricas before the conquest by braiding together strands of Preciado’s writing with (...) Latin American decolonial transfeminists such as María Lugones and Gloria Anzaldúa, among others. Reviewing recent debates on how ‘border imperialism’ unevenly shapes and restricts trans* and migrant mobility, I address criticisms of Preciado’s analogies between trans* and migrant experiences, by considering how his writings on these themes offer an intersectional reflection on the multiple cracks of the nation-state, the fictions of race and regimes of binary gender to reveal the cracks of capitalism. (shrink)

This discussion concerns the under-explored influence of Jacques Derrida on Paul B. Preciado and the autotheoretical enterprise that is Testo Junkie. Picking up on the deconstructive logic of contamination at work in Preciado’s early writings, the article reckons with autotheory as both a theoretical mode motored by the first person and an autobiographical mode interested in self-shaping. In so doing, it offers a genealogy of autotheory that finds its origins in Derrida’s disinterest in disciplinary purity and dislike of philosophical detachment, (...) at the same time as positioning Testo Junkie firmly within a French literary and philosophical context where it both intervenes in the activity of queer theorizing and antagonizes the highly popular genre of autofiction through a series of generic contaminations. Autotheory, in this itinerary, is inseparable from the self-writing project that Preciado undertakes and advocates, one that disidentifies from the fiction of a privately sexed and interior ‘self’. (shrink)

Looking at Paul B. Preciado’s relationship to psychoanalysis across texts, but especially the recent book Can the Monster Speak?: A Report to an Academy of Psychoanalysts, I seek to disentangle a possible vision for a new psychoanalysis from Preciado’s concerns, ambivalence and disgust with the professional field. I call this a somato-militant psychoanalysis that leans on Freud’s notion of conversion as the creation of a parasitic traumatic kernel that insists on the side of the body and shows a potential for (...) mutuation, transference, amplified potentia gaudendi, surgical intervention and a radical exteriorization of the subject through access to desire. This somatic archival work runs against an idea of psychoanalysis as merely a privatization and interiorization of the subject, a site for upholding the colonial-patriarchal regime of gender norms and an attempt at therapeutic re-territorialization. In the end, the meeting between Preciado and psychoanalysis is given a name: terminal, meaning both at the very limit, the end point, and incurable. (shrink)