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Continental Philosophy

Forthcoming Publications

20 May 2023
Anonymity, Architecture, Art, Continental Philosophy, Futurity, Gender & Sexuality, Maurice Blanchot, Publications, Queer Theory, Sex & Sexuality, Social Ethics, Time and Temporality
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Differences: a journal of feminist cultural studies

On 31 May 2023, a special issue of the journal differences, will be published, that I co-edited with Jacques Khalip, titled: “Syntax of Thought: Reading Leo Bersani.”

The volume brings together 35 scholars from a wide-range of disciplines and fields, each of whom has written a short essay based upon a sentence or two that they have selected from Bersani’s work. The volume covers the span of Bersani’s career, from his early work on Proust, Balzac, Baudelaire and other authors in the French modern canon; to his many collaborations with Ulysse Dutoit; to his work on sex and sexuality; and his late work on aesthetic subjectivity.

My own essay, “Incongruity,” considers the central role that this concept plays in Bersani’s radical rethinking of sociality in terms of sameness. I find inspiration and a jumping off point, in this sentence from Bersani’s essay, “I Can Dream, Can’t I?” originally published in Critical Inquiry and later in his book, Thoughts and Things:

“Incongruity institutes virtualities that have no intrinsic reason to be actualized. This retreat from the actual creates a freedom that might be defined as a kind of being to which no predicate can be attached.” (Bersani, Thoughts and Things 66)

Postmodern Culture (journal)

Austin Svedjan (PhD student, University of Pennsylvania) and I are co-editing a special issue of the journal Postmodern Culture, titled, “Afterlives of the Anti-Social.” It will feature essays by Grace Lavery, Mikko Tuhkanen, Tom Roach, Bobby Benedicto, Robyn Weigman, and me, plus an interview with Lee Edelman. Expected date of publication: 2024.

My essay, “Unlovable Oneness,” is structured by the “incongruous coupling” of Eimear McBride’s masterpiece debut novel, A Girl is a Half-formed Thing, and Ellsworth Kelly’s painted aluminum panels for the Pulitzer Arts Foundation, in St. Louis, Blue Black. In the essay, and my reading of Leo Bersani and Ulysses Dutoit’s work (from their early writing on Pasolini’s film, Salò, to their later work on Kelly), I consider the ethical virtue of going along with the unlovable and how literature and art provide us with an aesthetic training as to how to do so, and in ways that avoid reproducing the world’s violence in which we are all implicated.

Through Kelly’s monochromes, the essay also thinks about Bersani’s notion of “oneness,” in terms of chromatics, and how such incongruous oneness as Blue Black enables us to move out of a racial/racist chromatics and toward a different sense of being together. Something that artist Glenn Ligon explored in his curating of “Blue Black,” an exhibition in 2017 at the Pulitzer, that took Kelly’s work as inspiration and jumping off point.

New Formations (journal)

For a special issue of the journal New Formations, edited by Jessica Cotton on the topic of “Loneliness,” I have written an essay titled, “Solitude and the Time that Remains in Adania Shibli’s Minor Detail.” The essay is an extended close reading of Shibli’s remarkable novel. It considers the ways in which the book works with solitude and minor details as two key modalities in which the time that remains—as a non-enclosed temporality, not entirely circumscribed by the historical past, present, or future—opens for the anonymous Palestinian female narrator in the second part of the novel, as she travels through the contemporary Israeli apartheid state, in search of information about a young anonymous Bedouin girl who was brutally raped and murdered by Israeli soldiers decades earlier in the Negev desert. Expected date of publication: 2024.

Sex and the Pandemic

“Sex and Exclusion” is my essay for this collection of essays edited by Ricky Varghese, to be published by University of Regina Press. In it, I theorize the relation between sex and exclusion, partly in dialogue with recent work by Adam Phillips and also Maurice Blanchot, and in relation to artist Dean Sameshima’s photographic series, being alone, which he shot in sex clubs and bathhouses in Berlin during the pandemic. This essays continues writing that I have done on Dean’s work, that has recently been published in the journals, A/R and The Large Glass, both in 2021 (see related posts on this web site).

NEW Publication. Afterword to Jean-Luc Nancy’s poem, ‘Stoma: A Hymn’ in his book, Corpus III.

23 November 2022
Continental Philosophy, Jean-Luc Nancy, Poetry, Publications
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I am excited to announce that Corpus III, the third volume in Jean-Luc Nancy’s writing on the body, has just been published by Fordham University Press. The book features an eleven-part poem by Nancy, titled, “Stoma: A Hymn.”

It is a poem that he wrote in response to an inquiry that I and Andrea Gyenge made to him, regarding a comment that he had made in his Preface to the English edition of his early book on Descartes, Ego Sum. There he said that he has always wanted to write an “epic of the mouth.”

In a series of email exchanges back in late-autumn 2020, we asked him what such an “epic” would look like. Just a few weeks later, we received the poem, the hymn to stoma (small corporeal opening such as a mouth).

It is an extraordinary work of poetic philosophy and philosophical poetics; a meditation on the origin of the mouth as the originary opening that is the origin of human being. There are three places in the poem where “the mouth responds” to the ode that is being sung to it in the other parts of the poem.

In the final words of the mouth’s third response—which are also the words with which the poem ends—the mouth says:

It is me who alternates you

Me who shakes you

Me who agitates you

Me who troubles you

Stirs you opens you and closes you

It is me who rocks you and cradles

It is me who rhythms you and who thinks you

As we write in our commentary: “the subject, ego, or I, does not preexist the mouth’s opening, including in the form of enunciation, constative or performative speech, or even breath, but instead is born from out of this abyss and its rhythmic gaping. Indeed by the eleventh and last song, which joyously opens: ‘Stoma, it is you who swallows us! Stoma, it is you who speaks us!’ we arrive at the insight that the mouth makes us, and realize that Nancy’s poem has been, all along, a hymn to stoma in praise of and gratitude for what of us is stomatic.”

Queer Monadology

2 January 2022
Anonymity, Art, Continental Philosophy, Gender & Sexuality, Queer Theory, Sex & Sexuality, Social Ethics, Teaching, The Decision Between Us, Time and Temporality
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Bernhard Christoph Francke (gest. 1729), Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz, Leinwand 81 x 66 cm

In the Fall 2021 semester I taught a graduate seminar on “Queer Monadology.” The course emerges, in part, from out of my thinking and current writing on solitude, as part of my ongoing work on the anti-communal intimacy of anonymous singularities (strangers, the clandestine, the nameless passerby)—as for instance, in cruising.

Drawing upon Daniel Tiffany’s brilliant book, Infidel Poetics, and his theorization of sociologically obscure, solipsistic communities of opacity, imperceptibility, and illegibility, the seminar at the same time was rooted in Leo Bersani’s notion of impersonal narcissism and what Mikko Tuhkanen, in his indispensable study of Bersani’s lifework, The Essentialist Villain, refers to as “homomonadology.” With this neologism, Tuhkanen crafts a reading of Bersani that foregrounds the degree and extent to which Bersani is our current day Leibniz. With these authors and texts as our principle guideposts, the seminar was launched with a reading of Leibniz’s Monadology (1714), along with The Fold, Deleuze’s uniquely illuminating engagement with the latter.

Other topics and questions included: living in a world without others (Deleuze); the inertia of being (Kaufman); the sovereignty of quiet (Quashie); looking away (Terada); and last things (Khalip). We read Sherwood Anderson’s short story “Hands” (Winesburg, Ohio, 1919); Michel Tournier’s Friday (1967); and looked at the work of artists Dean Sameshima and Deirdre Logue. We ended the course with Alison Bechdel’s latest graphic memoir, The Secret to Superhuman Strength, and its own suggestion that giving oneself over to the elemental transience (and non-transcendence) of singularly monadic finitude, might be the “secret to superhuman strength.”

Here are the eleven sections of the course and assigned readings:

Week 1 Monadology

  • Leibniz, The Monadology, in G.W. Leibniz, Discourse on Metaphysics and The Monadology. Translated by George R. Montgomery. Prometheus Books, 1992. 
  • Gilles Deleuze, The Fold: Leibniz and the Baroque. Translated by Tom Conley. Minnesota, 1993. 
  • Daniel Tiffany, Infidel Poetics. Chicago, 2009. Introduction, and Chapter 4: Lyrical Monadologies.  
  • Merve Emre, “Critical Love Studies,” Los Angeles Review of Books, May 3, 2020. 

Week 2 Homomonadology

  • Sam See, “Bersani in Love,”  The Henry James Review, volume 32, number 3, Fall 2011.
  • Leo Bersani, “Is the Rectum a Grave?” in Bersani, Is the Rectum a Grave, and Other Essays. Chicago, 2010. 
  • Bersani, “The Gay Outlaw” in Homos, Harvard, 1995. 
  • Bersani, “Far Out,” Thoughts and Things, Chicago, 2015. 
  • Bersani, “Receptivity and Being-In,” Receptive Bodies, Chicago, 2018. 
  • Mikko Tuhkanen, The Essentialist Villain: On Leo Bersani. SUNY, 2018. Introduction, and Chapter 1 “Homomonadology.”

Week 3 Pornographic Life

  • Michel Foucault, “The Lives of Infamous Men,” in Essential Works of Foucault, volume 3: Power. The New Press, 2000. 
  • William Haver, “Really Bad Infinities: Queer’s honour and the Pornographic Life” Parallax 13, vol. 5, number 4, October-December 1999. 
  • Bruce Benderson, “Sex and Isolation,” in Benderson, Sex and Isolation and Other Essays. Wisconsin, 2007. 
  • John Paul Ricco, “Minor,” and “Wake,” in Ricco, The Logic of the Lure, Chicago, 2002. 
  • Tiffany, Infidel Poetics. Chapter 5: Infidel Lyric; and Afterword. 

Week 4 Living in a World without Others

  • Michel Tournier, Friday. Translated by Norman Denny. Johns Hopkins, 1997. 
  • Gilles Deleuze, “Living in a World without Others,” The Logic of Sense, Columbia, 1990. 
  • Eleanor Kaufman, “Extreme Formality and the World without Others,” The Dark Precursor, Johns Hopkins, 2012. 

Week 5 Looking Away & Being Quiet

  • Rei Terada, Looking Away: Phenomenality and Dissatisfaction, Kant to Adorno. Harvard, 2009. 
  • Kevin Quashie, Introduction: Why Quiet; Chapter 1: Publicness, Silence, Sovereignty of the Interior; and Conclusion: To Be One, in Quashie, The Sovereignty of Quiet: Beyond Resistance in Black Culture. Rutgers, 2012. 
  • Ricco, “Mourning, Melancholia, Moonlight.” CR: The New Centennial Review, volume 19, number 2, Fall 2019. 

Week 6 Inert Being

  • Kaufman, “The Inertia of Being” in The Dark Precursor. 
  • Bersani, “Lawrentian Stillness,” A Future for Astyanax, Little Brown, 1975. 
  • Bersani and Dutoit, “One Big Soul,” Forms of Being: Cinema, Aesthetics, Subjectivity. British Film Institute, 2004. 
  • Bersani, “Re-perusal, Registered”  The Henry James Review, volume 32, number 3, Fall 2011.

Week 7 On Queer Isolation and Loneliness, Then & Now

  • Michael Hobbes, “Together Alone: The Epidemic of Gay Loneliness.” (March 2017). 
  • Sherwood Anderson, “Hands,” in Winesburg, Ohio (1919). 
  • Nicholas De Villiers, Opacity and the Closet: Queer Tactics in Foucault, Barthes, and Warhol. Minnesota, 2012. 

Week 8 Aesthetic Solitude

  • Adam Barbu and John Paul Ricco, “Regarding Empty History,” and “Queer Solitude and Non-Reparative Curating.” Vtape, Toronto, 2019-2020. Download at: https://vtape.org/wp-content/uploads/2021/06/Empty-History.pdf
  • Art Works: Dean Sameshima, being alone and zu verschenken (to give away). 
  • Ricco, “Solitude and Things in the Time that Remains” (in press). 
  • Art Works: Deirdre Logue videos. 

Week 9 Not Having Us

  • Justin Torres, We the Animals. Houghton, Mifflin, Harcourt, 2011. 
  • Dana Seitler, “Willing to Die: Addiction and Other Ambivalences,” Cultural Critique, volume 98, Winter 2018. 
  • Simon Critchley, Notes on Suicide. Fitzcarraldo Editions, 2015. 
  • Rob Cover, “Subjective Connectivity: Rethinking Loneliness, Isolation and Belonging in Discourses of Minority Youth Suicide” Social Epistemology (2020). 
  • Stephen Best, “Introduction: Unfit for History,” and Chapter 1: “My Beautiful Elimination,” in Best, None Like Us: Blackness, Belonging, Aesthetic Life. Duke, 2018. 

Week 10 Last Things, Last Addresses

  • Jacques Khalip, Last Things: Disastrous Form from Kant to Hujar. Fordham, 2018. 
  • Roshaya Rodness, “Cinema’s Queer Witness: Ira Sachs’ Last Address and the Indifferent View, CR: New Centennial Review, volume 19, number 2, Fall 2019. 
  • Olivia Laing, “Strange Fruit,” in Laing, The Lonely City: Adventures in the Art of Being Alone. Picador, 2016. 

Week 11 The Secret to Superhuman Strength

  • Alison Bechdel, The Secret to Superhuman Strength. Houghton, Mifflin, Harcourt, 2021. 

Muse-ecology: on birds and other tuning forks

2 January 2022
Agamben, Collective Afterlife of Things, Continental Philosophy, Giorgio Agamben, Publications, Social Ethics
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A new article in The Brooklyn Rail

https://brooklynrail.org/2021/12/criticspage/Muse-ecology-on-birds-and-other-tuning-forks

Appearing in the December 2021-January 2022 issue of The Brooklyn Rail, my article was commissioned by WJT Mitchell for the Critic’s Page that the magazine invited him to curate and edit. Tom’s chosen theme was “Sounding the Idols,” inspired by Nietzsche’s Preface to Twilight of the Idols where the philosopher advocates approaching the idols with a tuning-fork, thereby not smashing them with a hammer, but tapping them so that they are made to emit music.

My essay is part of my current book project on “extinction aesthetics” wherein ethical and aesthetic responses to species extinction—such as the ongoing loss of millions of birds and their birdsong—are argued to involve being attuned to these ensuing silences, to this mute music.

NEW Essay: “Hope, or Pandora in the Time of the Pandemic”

14 June 2021
Agamben, Continental Philosophy, Giorgio Agamben, Publications, Social Ethics, Time and Temporality, Visual Culture
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Featured in the new book, Pause.Fervour: Reflections on a Pandemic, jointly published by the Journal of Visual Culture and the Harun Farocki Institute, and edited by Manca Bajec, Tom Holert, and Marquard Smith. A free downloadable copy is available here.

Click on any of the images below to get a larger view.

It is a beautifully-designed publication, featuring short texts and artworks by over 50 writers and artists. The book is divided into four sections:

  • COVID-19, or the Pandemic Logic of Very Late Capitalism
  • Lockdown Life: Distance/Proximity
  • Biopolitics and Governmentality
  • New Ways of Caring

Click on the image of the article below, to open a larger view of the text.

Video: My talk, “Solitude and Things in the Time that Remains”

16 April 2021
Agamben, Anonymity, Art, Continental Philosophy, Gender & Sexuality, Giorgio Agamben, Jacques Derrida, Jean-Luc Nancy, Lectures & Events, Maurice Blanchot, Mourning, Queer Theory, Roland Barthes, Sex & Sexuality, Social Ethics, Things, Time and Temporality, Videos, Visual Culture
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I presented this talk on 15 April 2021, as part of “Thinking Loneliness” the sixth and last instalment in a series on “Loneliness and Technology,” organized by The English Association (UK).

Here is a description of the event:

What is the relationship between loneliness and the history of thought? How have thinkers thought about loneliness through time? The reinvention of aesthetics in eighteenth-century Europe saw an influential upheaval of the relation between solitude and sociality. Whereas aesthetic experience might remain a lonely state in practice, its ability to conjure the human faculties into a state of ‘free play’ was thought to register its inherently communal nature, which Hannah Arendt understood to form the core of an unwritten and arguably still unrealised political philosophy. Like solitude, loneliness has also been a site of philosophical fantasies: of self-presence and self-sufficiency, but also of the possibility of disposing with, or escaping from, markers of identity or difference, including race, class, gender and sexuality.

This event brings together scholars whose work has addressed loneliness at the intersection of philosophy, critical theory, aesthetics, and queer theory. We will be asking: what role has loneliness played in the history of philosophy? How has it structured philosophy’s attempts to establish the foundations, possibilities and limits of both subjectivity and community?

VIDEO of my talk: “Solitude and Things as the Time that Remains”

19 March 2021
Anonymity, Art, Collective Afterlife of Things, Continental Philosophy, Gender & Sexuality, Giorgio Agamben, Jacques Derrida, Jean-Luc Nancy, Lectures & Events, Mourning, Queer Theory, Sex & Sexuality, Social Ethics, Things, Time and Temporality
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Part of The English Association’s series on “Loneliness and Technology” – 15 April 2021

Thinking Loneliness is the sixth event in our series of The English Association’s special interest group on Loneliness and Technology.

What is the relationship between loneliness and the history of thought? How have thinkers thought about loneliness through time? The reinvention of aesthetics in eighteenth-century Europe saw an influential upheaval of the relation between solitude and sociality. Whereas aesthetic experience might remain a lonely state in practice, its ability to conjure the human faculties into a state of ‘free play’ was thought to register its inherently communal nature, which Hannah Arendt understood to form the core of an unwritten and arguably still unrealised political philosophy. Like solitude, loneliness has also been a site of philosophical fantasies: of self-presence and self-sufficiency, but also of the possibility of disposing with, or escaping from, markers of identity or difference, including race, class, gender and sexuality.

This event brings together scholars whose work has addressed loneliness at the intersection of philosophy, critical theory, aesthetics, and queer theory. We will be asking: what role has loneliness played in the history of philosophy? How has it structured philosophy’s attempts to establish the foundations, possibilities and limits of both subjectivity and community?

“Solitude in the Time that Remains”- Talk at Goldsmiths, University of London -Visual Cultures Now lecture series – 25 March 2021

19 March 2021
Art, Collective Afterlife of Things, Continental Philosophy, Gender & Sexuality, Giorgio Agamben, Jacques Derrida, Jean-Luc Nancy, Lectures & Events, Mourning, Queer Theory, Sex & Sexuality, Social Ethics, Things, Time and Temporality
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John Paul Ricco outlines a queer ethos of finitude in which both solitude and things affirm time as only ever the time that remains

By looking at the ways in which Denise Riley’s essay, Time Lived, Without Its Flow, and Adania Shibli’s novel, Minor Detail, confront the singularity of death and what of life remains unlivable, and then turning to Dean Sameshima’s photo series, being alone, and zu verschenken(‘to give away’), Ricco begins to outline a queer ethos of finitude in which solitude and things are two principal existential and empirical affirmations of the sense of time as only ever the time that remains.

I will be in conversation with Jean-Paul Martinon (Goldsmiths). You can register via the Eventbrite link below.

“Isolation, Loneliness, Solitude: The COVID-19 Pandemic Has Brought Us Too Close Together”

8 December 2020
Continental Philosophy, Publications, Social Ethics, The Decision Between Us
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New Article in Topia: Canadian Journal of Cultural Studies

Access a copy of the article here: https://www.utpjournals.press/eprint/PRDBGJWIR6HXXWS4QTGN/full

In this article, I attribute the isolation and loneliness that are central conditions experienced by many people in the midst of the COVID-19 pandemic to a politics and law of movement, the ends of which are not simply political-economic or bio-political, but also ethical-existential, to the extent that the very space of separation is destroyed. Through a reading of Hannah Arendt on tyranny and totalitarian governance, I assert the importance of solitude as what needs to be reclaimed for there to be any ethical sense of the common and any political sense of solidarity.

Topia: Canadian Journal of Cultural Studies, Number 41. Fall 2020 Special Issue on “Our COVID Conjuncture: Critical Essays on the Pandemic.” Guest Editors: Penelope Ironstone and Greg Bird

Cover Image: Theatre sign: “Wash your hands love each other”, photographed by Joshua Reddekopp (@joshuaryanphoto; Joshuareddekopp.com). Unsplash: https://unsplash.com/photos/vsywM-roPSE.

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