...Neferti X. M. Tadiar Copyright © 2015 Qui Parle 2015 Decolonization, “Race,” and Remaindered Life under Empire neferti x. m. tadiar To speak of empire today is to speak about a global dispensation of power predicated on, and furthering, the aims of capitalist accu- mulation...

...Avital Ronell The presidential discourse pitched one big complaint. The campaign that preceded the inauguration wore the mask of a life-affirming imposition, laced with destructive jouissance , while holding steady on first-chakra intensities that boost familial, tribal, nation-hugging...

...Jared Sexton; Huey Copeland RAW LIFE': AN INTRODUCTION Jared Sexton & Huey Copeland l came into the world imbued with the will to find a meaning in things, my spirit filled with the desire to attain to the source of the world...

...Aaron Frederick Eldridge Abstract How does tradition, a transmission of body and language, disclose a form of life? This article takes as its point of departure Talal Asad’s methodological pivot away from the modern concept of “belief” to Ludwig Wittgenstein’s concept of “form of life...

.... This article argues that preoccupation with influence inscribes an a priori ontology that already separates the past from the present. This makes it difficult to understand the relation between temporality and a form of life in a discursive tradition, as the question of influence grounds the ostensive...

..., not in a messianic mode but in the temporal mode of biopolitical bare life? What is the temporal structure of precarious life? Furthermore, how does this Ashkenazi figural tradition of animal-headed Jews point to forms of resistance to the biopolitics of medieval Christendom? How is messianic theory now...

...Bernard Stiegler The concept of entropy has been applied to life and, in Nicholas Georgescu-Roegen’s bioeconomics of exosomatization, to human life. These accounts of “negentropy” must be reinterpreted in the age of the data economy, however, from a perspective that starts from the technological...

... increasing wildfires and unbreathable air, and the brutal policing of Black American life. The short meditations in this dossier, from academics in various fields as well as creative writers, are responses to our current moment’s heightened awareness of the complexities of one of the most fundamental...

... discusses two Chinese critics’ engagement with Chernyshevsky’s treatise The Aesthetic Relation of Art to Reality (1853). Here Chernyshevsky advanced the proposition “Beauty is life.” In the 1930s and 1940s the literary theorist Zhou Yang read Chernyshevsky and produced a Chinese translation in 1942. In 1963...

...Tina M. Campt What changes in our understanding of the experience of black communities in diaspora when we move beyond the binaries of stillness and motion to engage black life through the lens of stasis? This essay explores a collection of vernacular photos of a black German family in the Third...

..., failure and fragility, ethnographic conceits and forms of life. References Abeysekara Ananda . “ Religious Studies’ Mishandling of Origin and Change: Time, Tradition, and Form-of-Life in Buddhism .” Cultural Critique (forthcoming). Abeysekara Ananda . “ The Un-translatability...

...Dora Zhang Abstract This essay argues that we do not yet fully recognize and attend to the importance of atmospheres as social and political phenomena of everyday life, and draws on a range of approaches to examine these ordinary and ubiquitous sites of affective charge. First charting how creating...

... to be an abiding preoccupation of Hall’s work. In particular, because blackness (or its notion) is never innocent, this essay explores the consequences of a certain undecidability that attends any encounter between representation and difference. And it is this X—its shaping of black meaning and life—that alerts us...

... and recount their life narrative. The first of these novels—Charles Gildon’s Golden Spy (1702)—gives voice to a bunch of coins. And the genre becomes self-reflexive when money starts to “coin words,” like the autobiographical protagonist of The Adventures of a Bank-Note (1770). Drawing on ancient sources...

..., stolon (runner) formation and grafting are considered here because they are vegetal forms of procreation that are not rooted in sexual difference and create collective life forms that are based on dividuality rather than individuality. Both characteristics are mobilized for a queer imagination. Analyzing...

...Anna Feuerstein Abstract This essay analyzes two late Victorian texts by white women colonists in South Africa—F. Clinton Parry’s children’s book African Pets (1880) and Annie Martin’s memoir Home Life on an Ostrich Farm (1890)—to nuance understandings of animality as racialization. By reading...

... lowest place, rather than with the nomos and topos imposed by the (modern) world and its regime of the proper. Immanence is thought of as anti- and antenomian force, a groundless ground coming underneath the conceptual logics of the world, its normative order of things, and life lived according to its...

... with the psychosomatics of Black life. This article begins by examining the exceptional narrative of Barney Hill, America’s first and thus far only popular Black abductee. Then it brings into focus UFOlogy’s aporetic negation of racial subjectivity and suggests that the UFO abduction phenomenon is, a posteriori...

... prevalent claim in black horror studies today—that black life is more frightening than the supernatural—actually originates with Baldwin’s 1976 rebuke of the film. By disidentifying with horror, Baldwin shifts attention away from paranormal evils and onto a more horrifying normative world. Sketching...

...Kathleen Powers Abstract The prion is a self-replicating protein that infects the central nervous system. This essay applies Georges Canguilhem’s criterion for life, biological normativity, to the prion for the purpose of arguing that the existence of the prion within living systems requires...