From the films of Larry Clark to the feminist comedy of Amy Schumer to the fall of Louis C. K., comedic, graphic, and violent moments of abjection have permeated twentieth- and twenty-first-century social and political discourse. The contributors to Abjection Incorporated move beyond simple critiques of abjection as a punitive form of social death, illustrating how it has become a contested mode of political and cultural capital—empowering for some but oppressive for others. Escaping abjection's usual confines of psychoanalysis and aesthetic modernism, core to theories of abjection by thinkers such as Kristeva and Bataille, the contributors examine a range of media, including literature, photography, film, television, talking dolls, comics, and manga. Whether analyzing how comedic abjection can help mobilize feminist politics or how expressions of abjection inflect class, race, and gender hierarchies, the contributors demonstrate the importance of competing uses of abjection to contemporary society and politics. They emphasize abjection's role in circumscribing the boundaries of the human and how the threats abjection poses to the self and other, far from simply negative, open up possibilities for radically new politics.

Contributors. Meredith Bak, Eugenie Brinkema, James Leo Cahill, Michelle Cho, Maggie Hennefeld, Rob King, Thomas Lamarre, Sylvère Lotringer, Rijuta Mehta, Mark Mulroney, Nicholas Sammond, Yiman Wang, Rebecca Wanzo

In 2015, members of the philosophy department at the University of Madrid conducted an interview with Alberto Moreiras for the university’s digital archive. The resulting dialogues and the Spanish edition of this work, Marranismo e inscripción, o el abandono de la conciencia desdichada, are the basis for Against Abstraction, supplemented with an interview conducted for the Chilean journal Papel máquina. In these landmark conversations, Moreiras describes how, though he was initially committed to Latin American literary studies, he eventually transitioned to become an eminent scholar of critical theory, existential philosophy, and ultimately infrapolitics and posthegemony.

Blending intellectual autobiography with a survey of Hispanism as practiced in universities in the United States (including the schisms in Latin American subaltern studies that eventually led to Moreiras’s departure from Duke University), these narratives read like a picaresque and a polemic on the symbolic power of scholars. Drawing on the concept of marranism (originally a term for Iberian Jews and Muslims forced to convert to Christianity during the Middle Ages) to consider the situations and allegiances he has navigated over the years, Moreiras has produced a multifaceted self-portrait that will surely spark further discourse.

Do we take pleasure in reading ancient Greek tragedy despite the unsettling content or because of it? Does a safe aesthetic distance protect us from tragic suffering, or does the proximity to death tap into something more primal? Aristotle proposed catharsis, an emotional cleansing—or, in later interpretations, a sense of equilibrium—as tragedy’s outcome, and Sigmund Freud and Jacques Lacan, grand theorists of the forces of anti-mastery in human and nonhuman existence, surprisingly agreed. Notwithstanding this deferral to Aristotle, their theorizations of the death drive—together with Jacques Derrida’s notion of the archive as a place of conservation that inevitably fails—provide the groundwork for a radically new way of understanding tragic aesthetics.
 
With bold readings of thirteen plays by Aeschylus, Sophocles, and Euripides, including the Oedipus cycle, the Oresteia, Medea, and Bacchae; an eclectic synthesis of Freud, Lacan, Derrida, Žižek, Deleuze, and other critical theorists; and an engagement with art, architecture, and film, Mario Telò’s Archive Feelings: A Theory of Greek Tragedy locates Greek tragedy’s aesthetic allure beyond catharsis in a vertiginous sense of giddy suspension, in a spiral of life and death that resists equilibrium, stabilization, and all forms of normativity. In so doing, Telò forges a new model of tragic aesthetics.
 

This book brings together two of the most important figures of twentieth-century criticism, Walter Benjamin and Theodor Adorno, to consider a topic that was central to their thinking: the place of and reason for art in society and culture. Thijs Lijster takes us through points of agreement and disagreement between the two on such key topics as the relationship between art and historical experience, between avant-garde art and mass culture, and between the intellectual and the public. He also addresses the continuing relevance of Benjamin and Adorno to ongoing debates in contemporary aesthetics, such as the end of art, the historical meaning of art, and the role of the critic.

In Between Gaia and Ground Elizabeth A. Povinelli theorizes the climatic, environmental, viral, and social catastrophe present as an ancestral catastrophe through which that Indigenous and colonized peoples have been suffering for centuries. In this way, the violence and philosophies the West relies on now threaten the West itself. Engaging with the work of Glissant, Deleuze and Guattari, Césaire, and Arendt, Povinelli highlights four axioms of existence—the entanglement of existence, the unequal distribution of power, the collapse of the event as essential to political thought, and the legacies of racial and colonial histories. She traces these axioms' inspiration in anticolonial struggles against the dispossession and extraction that have ruined the lived conditions for many on the planet. By examining the dynamic and unfolding forms of late liberal violence, Povinelli attends to a vital set of questions about changing environmental conditions, the legacies of violence, and the limits of inherited Western social theory. Between Gaia and Ground also includes a glossary of the keywords and concepts that Povinelli has developed throughout her work.

In an era of intensified information warfare, ranging from global disinformation campaigns to individual attention hacks, what are the compelling terms for political judgment? How are we to build the knowledge needed to recognize and address important forms of harm when critical information is either not to be trusted or kept hidden? Rather than approach conspiratorial narrative as an irrational response to an obviously decipherable reality, Conspiracy/Theory identifies important affinities between conspiracy theory and critical theory. It recognizes the motivation people have—in their capacities as experts, theorists, and ordinary citizens—to search for patterns in events, to uncover what is covert and attend to dimensions of life that might be hiding in plain sight. If it seems strange that so many find themselves living in incommensurable, disorienting realities, the multidisciplinary contributors to Conspiracy/Theory explore how and why that came to be. Across history and geography, contributors inquire into the affects and imaginaries of political mobilization, tracking counterrevolutionary projects while acknowledging collective futures that demand conspiratorial engagement.

Contributors. Nadia Abu El-Haj, Hussein Ali Agrama, Kathleen Belew, Elizabeth Anne Davis, Joseph Dumit, Faith Hillis, Lochlann Jain, Demetra Kasimis, Susan Lepselter, Darryl Li, Louisa Lombard, Joseph Masco, Robert Meister, Timothy Melley, Rosalind C. Morris, George Shulman, Lisa Wedeen

When Black Feminist Thought by Patricia Hill Collins was published in 1990, reviewers called it "remarkable," "rich and valuable," and proclaimed, "with the publication of this book, Black feminism has moved to a new level." Now, in Fighting Words, Collins expands and extends the discussion of the "outsider within" presented in her earlier work, investigating how effectively Black feminist thought confronts the injustices African American women currently face. Collins takes on a broad range of issues-poverty, mothering, white supremacy and Afrocentrism, the resegregation of American society by race and class, the ideas of Sojourner Truth and how they can serve as a springboard for more liberating social theory. Contrasting social theories that support unjust power relations of race, class, gender, and nation with those that challenge inequalities, Collins investigates why some ideas are granted the status of "theory" while others remain "thought." "It is not that elites produce theory while everyone else produces mere thought," she writes. "Rather, elites possess the power to legitimate the knowledge that they define as theory as being universal, normative, and ideal." Collins argues that because African American women and other historically oppressed groups seek economic and social justice, their social theories may emphasize themes and work from assumptions that are different from those of mainstream American society, generating new angles of vision on injustice. Collins also puts such oppositional social theory to the test: while the words of these theories may challenge injustice, do the ideas make a difference in the lives of the people they claim to represent? Throughout, Collins provides an essential understanding of how "outsiders" resist mainstream perspectives, and what the mainstream can learn from such "outsiders." Historically situated yet transcending the specific, Fighting Words provides a new interpretive framework for both thinking through and overcoming social injustice. "In her perceptive book, Fighting Words, Patricia Hill Collins, a leading scholar in critical theory, argues that intellectuals who break with conventional wisdom are more of a threat to the establishment than their numbers might suggest." Joe R. Feagin in The Chronicle of Higher Education "Fighting Words is a treatise, if you will, encouraging all black women to engage in dialogue and to reach out to each other, regardless of education, income, or class. Fighting Words is an amazing work in the way it seamlessly combines the histories of black women and feminism. Even more impressive is the way Collins blends her personal experiences as a black woman, educator, and sociologist. Collins is all about telling the truth, now. That is probably why Fighting Words is such a revelation." Black Issues Book Review "Fighting Words ably demonstrates that Collins is still our leading theorist. Those who understand black women in terms of reductionist categories and who need to read this book probably won't. But it gives the rest of us another sharp implement with which to saw at the ropes." Women's Review of Books "Collins argues that the political gains of black women's 'talking back' now must be measured against changes brought on by the postmodern criticism of social science and Afrocentricism. Collins calls for a critical social theory that not only encourages black women's full participation in social life but actually grounds its own authority in its ability to enable black women's full participation." American Journal of Sociology "Collins' exploration of the question, 'What is knowledge?' demonstrates the value of a perspective that brings together the complex interrelationships of race, gender and social ranking. The text is both counter-theoretical and practical­­a readable, persuasive and important source. Highly recommended." The Diversity Factor "Advances a much needed discussion, beyond feminism and identity politics for black women and, presumably, for women of color generally." National Women's Studies Association Journal "Hill Collins provides a refreshing new look at theory that is not mired in obscure language but purposely written in multiple languages to welcome a broader audience. By using accessible/inclusive language and drawing on many schools of intellectual thought, she informs and educates across disciplines ­ a unique characteristic in academia. She delivers a critical and passionate work that is inspiring to a new generation of scholars and renews the spirit of existing scholars." Gender and Society "Collins has offered an excellent text that helps us understand not only Black feminist thought and its relationship to Black women's experiences, but also how it may help those of us truly working for social justice." Feminist Collections "This book has many suggestive ideas and well-thought-through social theoretical analyses. In line with her earlier work, Collins continues to argue that group positions generate epistemological standpoints from which people ask and answer questions of social knowledge in different ways. She considers whether recent theories of Black women as having 'intersectional' positions is a better conceptualization of the specific standpoint of Black women. Collins's book offers much to think about and to discuss for those involved in struggles generated by encounters and events beyond theory." Hypatia "This is a work that is both theoretically rich and yet deeply personal in its expressive voice. Collins points us toward the construction of new critical theoretical approaches that can effectively advance the struggles for social justice. Fighting Words is a powerful and passionate work." --Manning Marable Patricia Hill Collins is Charles Phelps Taft Professor of Sociology in the Department of African American Studies at the University of Cincinnati.

In Inter-imperiality Laura Doyle theorizes the co-emergence of empires, institutions, language regimes, stratified economies, and literary cultures over the longue durée. Weaving together feminist, decolonial, and dialectical theory, she shows how inter-imperial competition has generated a systemic stratification of gendered, racialized labor, while literary and other arts have helped both to constitute and to challenge this world order. To study literature is therefore, Doyle argues, to attend to world-historical processes of imaginative and material co-formation as they have unfolded through successive eras of vying empires. It is also to understand oral, performed, and written literatures as power-transforming resources for the present and future. To make this case, Doyle analyzes imperial-economic processes across centuries and continents in tandem with inter-imperially entangled literatures, from A Thousand and One Nights to recent Caribbean fiction. Her trenchant interdisciplinary method reveals the structural centrality of imaginative literature in the politics and possibilities of earthly life.

In Intersectionality as Critical Social Theory Patricia Hill Collins offers a set of analytical tools for those wishing to develop intersectionality's capability to theorize social inequality in ways that would facilitate social change. While intersectionality helps shed light on contemporary social issues, Collins notes that it has yet to reach its full potential as a critical social theory. She contends that for intersectionality to fully realize its power, its practitioners must critically reflect on its assumptions, epistemologies, and methods. She places intersectionality in dialog with several theoretical traditions—from the Frankfurt school to black feminist thought—to sharpen its definition and foreground its singular critical purchase, thereby providing a capacious interrogation into intersectionality's potential to reshape the world.

In Life-Destroying Diagrams, Eugenie Brinkema brings the insights of her radical formalism to bear on supremely risky terrain: the ethical extremes of horror and love. Through close readings of works of film, literature, and philosophy, she explores how diagrams, grids, charts, lists, abecedaria, toroids, tempos, patterns, colors, negative space, lengths, increments, and thresholds attest to formal logics of torture and cruelty, violence and finitude, friendship and eros, debt and care. Beginning with a wholesale rethinking of the affect of horror, orienting it away from entrenched models of feeling toward impersonal schemes and structures, Brinkema moves outward to consider the relation between objects and affects, humiliation and metaphysics, genre and the general, bodily destruction and aesthetic generation, geometry and scenography, hatred and value, love and measurement, and, ultimately, the tensions, hazards, and speculative promise of formalism itself. Replete with etymological meditations, performative typography, and lyrical digressions, Life-Destroying Diagrams is at once a model of reading without guarantee and a series of generative experiments in the writing of aesthetic theory.

In On Paradox literary and legal scholar Elizabeth S. Anker contends that faith in the logic of paradox has been the cornerstone of left intellectualism since the second half of the twentieth century. She attributes the ubiquity of paradox in the humanities to its appeal as an incisive tool for exposing and dismantling hierarchies. Tracing the ascent of paradox in theories of modernity, in rights discourse, in the history of literary criticism and the linguistic turn, and in the transformation of the liberal arts in higher education, Anker suggests that paradox not only generates the very exclusions it critiques but also creates a disempowering haze of indecision. She shows that reasoning through paradox has become deeply problematic: it engrains a startling homogeneity of thought while undercutting the commitment to social justice that remains a guiding imperative of theory. Rather than calling for a wholesale abandonment of such reasoning, Anker argues for an expanded, diversified theory toolkit that can help theorists escape the seductions and traps of paradox.

This unorthodox account of 1960s Black thought rigorously details the field’s debts to German critical theory and explores a forgotten tradition of Black singularity. 
 
Phenomenal Blackness examines the changing interdisciplinary investments of key mid-century Black writers and thinkers, including the growing interest in German philosophy and critical theory. Mark Christian Thompson analyzes this shift in intellectual focus across the post-war decades, placing Black Power thought in a philosophical context.

Prior to the 1960s, sociologically oriented thinkers such as W. E. B. Du Bois had understood Blackness as a singular set of socio-historical characteristics. In contrast, writers such as Amiri Baraka, James Baldwin, Angela Y. Davis, Eldridge Cleaver, and Malcolm X were drawn to notions of an African essence, an ontology of Black being. With these perspectives, literary language came to be seen as the primary social expression of Blackness. For this new way of thinking, the works of philosophers such as Adorno, Habermas, and Marcuse were a vital resource, allowing for continued cultural-materialist analysis while accommodating the hermeneutical aspects of Black religious thought. Thompson argues that these efforts to reimagine Black singularity led to a phenomenological understanding of Blackness—a “Black aesthetic dimension” wherein aspirational models for Black liberation might emerge.

A strikingly original account of Theodor Adorno’s work as a critique animated by happiness.

"Gordon’s confidently gripping and persistently subtle interpretation brings a new tone to the debate about Adorno’s negativism."—Jürgen Habermas
 
Theodor Adorno is often portrayed as a totalizing negativist, a scowling contrarian who looked upon modern society with despair. Peter E. Gordon thinks we have this wrong: if Adorno is uncompromising in his critique, it is because he sees in modernity an unfulfilled possibility of human flourishing. In a damaged world, Gordon argues, all happiness is likewise damaged but not wholly absent. Through a comprehensive rereading of Adorno’s work, A Precarious Happiness recovers Adorno’s commitment to traces of happiness—fragments of the good amid the bad. Ultimately, Gordon argues that social criticism, while exposing falsehoods, must also cast a vision for an unrealized better world.

While current scholarly interest has assured McLuhan's foundational status as media theorist, it has by no means exhausted the import of his writings, which take on additional layers in the current digital moment. This collection of essays argues that it was McLuhan's confrontation of the bios that was the distinguishing feature of his media theory and the source of its most consistent problematic. Holding that media were extensions of the human, McLuhan also posited that the human was a product of technology. Remediating McLuhan ranges over media theory, art history, bio-technology and deep history in addressing this problematic, and discusses McLuhan in the context of Flusser and Turing, Carl Woese and Daniel Lord Smail.

 In Sentient Flesh R. A. Judy takes up freedman Tom Windham’s 1937 remark “we should have our liberty 'cause . . . us is human flesh" as a point of departure for an extended meditation on questions of the human, epistemology, and the historical ways in which the black being is understood. Drawing on numerous fields, from literary theory and musicology, to political theory and phenomenology, as well as Greek and Arabic philosophy, Judy engages literary texts and performative practices such as music and dance that express knowledge and conceptions of humanity appositional to those grounding modern racialized capitalism. Operating as critiques of Western humanism, these practices and modes of being-in-the-world—which he theorizes as “thinking in disorder,” or “poiēsis in black”—foreground the irreducible concomitance of flesh, thinking, and personhood. As Judy demonstrates, recognizing this concomitance is central to finding a way past the destructive force of ontology that still holds us in thrall. Erudite and capacious, Sentient Flesh offers a major intervention in the black study of life.