Cet article plaide pour un décadrage et un recadrage nécessaires pour neutraliser certains effets pervers du terme d’ effondrement, tout en conservant ses vertus mobilisatrices. Il propose de s’appuyer sur la notion d’ undercommons (« communs d’en bas » ou « sous-communs ») avancée par Stefano Harney & Fred Moten en 2013, qui s’inspire des formes de vie et de pensée collectives cultivées au sein de la black radical tradition nord-américaine, par celles et ceux qui sont issu.es des cales (...) esclavagistes de la colonisation plantacionocène. (shrink)

This essay examines the importance of decolonization theory/practice outside of Latinx and indigenous literatures to understand how the African diaspora has produced rhetorical and philosophical interventions that have been understudied and ignored. The books reviewed all contribute to understanding the limitations of Western, white humanism through the concepts: Black reason, the undercommons, racial liberalism, the idea of the spill, and ontological terror. These texts function as entrees into a deep excavation of the limits of Kantian freedom and Rawlsian justice (...) that recenters anti-Blackness as an animating force of governmentality (particularly governmental structures and regimes that enforce possibilities of life and death), rhetorical invention, and philosophical engagement. (shrink)

Cet article propose une sélection de bonnes feuilles du livre de 2013 The Undercommons, actuellement en voie de traduction pour une publication française en 2021. Y sont abordés les thèmes de la politique « encerclée » ( surrounded ), de la gouvernance, du planning et de la policy, de la logistique, ainsi que de ce qui fait de l’étude consacrée aux undercommons une philosophie du toucher.

The theories underpinning gender/feminist studies, alongside critical race studies and queer studies, are rooted in historic, intersecting, radical social movements, driven by communities who were and remain oppressed by states, societies and institutions. Individuals who work in these fields therefore hold an ambiguous relationship with the university, often experiencing it as a site of both material potential and co-optation. In this article, I explore whether, and how, those in this contradictory position can carve out space and time from within institutional (...) thresholds to engage in decolonial feminist praxes. Abolitionist theorists have sketched the figure of the ‘subversive intellectual’, whose labour is paradoxically indispensable to and disowned by the university. Seeking the material existence of this figure, I held conversations with subversive intellectuals. My analysis of these interviews follows queer and posthuman feminist thinkers who invest in the political potential of the body – and the multiplicity of its possible relations with space, time and other bodies – for counter-institutional action. In this article, my aim is not to determine what role, if any, the subversive intellectual has in the university’s abolition, but I do share and make connections between the stories of individuals who are re-orientating relationships, spaces and time towards an imagined future, and who are collectively embracing a queer uprising from within the university. (shrink)

ABSTRACTHow can we deal with the apparent contradiction between the normative ideals of critical theory and the practice of the current university system? To answer this question, I consult three classical criticisms of the university system: At the beginning of the nineteenth century, the French educator Joseph Jacotot formulated a pedagogical critique of the disciplinary effects of the educational system; at the beginning of the twentieth century, German historian Franz Rosenzweig articulated an ethical critique of the hegemonic educational system’s distance (...) from life; and at the beginning of the twentyfirst century, British feminist Sara Ahmed proposed a political critique of the oppressing functions of academic institutions. Taken together, these critiques can serve as an orientation for critical intellectual practice even within the academic system. Finally, I try to describe the relation between critical theory and the university thus evolving by utilising Stefano Harney’s and Fred Moten’s concept o... (shrink)

To address an ethics of refusal in higher education is to wager in the name of future possibles not already governed by the extractive politics of colonial progress and oppressive regimes of knowing and doing. In this essay, Petra Mikulan shows American pragmatism to have always been, in a certain sense, post-Anthropocene in its condition of emergence, bound up with settler colonialism and its extractive geopolitics. However, pragmatism in its speculative trust can also help engage education in thinking of a (...) future that does not belong to a presupposed humanity and its “nature” by dramatizing a certain insistence of educational institutions on maintaining comfort and trust in the “common good.” What is at stake in education facing planetary ecological devastation and intensified racial and social injustices, Mikulan contends, is an ethics of refusal of institutionalized learning, knowing, and doing tout court, particularly if these educational regimes continue to insist on governing what are deemed the only possible (and thus impossible) enactments of education. (shrink)

This essay builds on various critiques of the relationship between the voice and autonomous individual subjectivity, briefly tracking the specific history through which the voice transformed into an ideal object representing the liberal subject of post-Enlightenment thought. This paper asks: what are we to make of those enfleshed voices that do not conform to the ideal voice of the self-possessed liberal subject? What are we to make of those voices that refuse the imperative of improvement that underpins social and economic (...) contractualism? How might we attend to the sonicity of those voices that refuse to individuate, possess, and accumulate? And what fugitive modes of speech might be transmitted by such un-formed and un-organized voices? Against the idealized voice of liberalism, and the gendered and racialized exclusions that this voice implies, I propose a mode of fugitive listening that allows us to open our ears to the noisy voices and modes of speech that sound outside the locus of politics proper. Indebted to the Black radical tradition, fugitive listening attends to sonic practices that refuse the given grounds of representation. I argue that fugitive listening is a practice that can be situated in what Stefano Harney and Fred Moten call ‘the undercommons’. The essay concludes by turning to gossip, figuring this noisy modality of speech as central to undercommon spaces shaped by Black performance. (shrink)

El presente artículo tiene por objeto analizar el modo en el que se desarrolla la base afectiva que se encuentra tras las políticas raciales patentes en la distribución social del espacio urbano. Para ello, se abordarán los siguientes aspectos: 1) la imposición de una ley afectiva que sirva como base para una performance legitimadora de la condición de ciudadanía; 2) su repercusión en el ámbito estético y ontológico a través de la invisibilización y negación de los sujetos racializados; 3) las (...) posibilidades de habitar la ciudad desde la disidencia mediante el caso de estudio de la práctica Corpografía del Colectivo Ayllu. Con ello se propone la reapropiación del concepto de ciudadanía afectiva a partir del potencial incapturable del afecto. (shrink)

As a collective of inter-cultural women moving in but not of, and against and beyond the modern/colonial (neoliberalised) university we (t)race generative pedagogical experiences of worldmaking cosmopolitics and their (im)possibilities within the University and Politics Disciplinarity. We do this not to redeem or reimagine but to contribute to an enfleshed feminised and racialised undercommons for whom indigenist-decolonial feminist pedagogical-political praxis can never be nor desire to be obedient to the constraints, containments and violences of the settler colonial and its (...) epistemological-pedagogical genocidal project of the Lettered City of anti-Blackness and Indigenous disavowal. We refuse inclusion within, representation as legibility, and the making of community of and as the University. We instead foreground abolitionist categories such as enfleshment, dignity, mutual recognition as exteriority, differential responsible relationship-making, multiple temporalities and the epistemological as ontological, and we centre the knowledges of Indigenist feminised subjects from the exteriority of modernity-coloniality. We are thus selective and explicit about who we choose to walk with, who we make relationship with, and to whom we are responsible and honour. We both guard our right to opacity as well as leave threads of pedagogical meaning-making as invitation to unlearning and relearning new-ancient onto-epistemologies and cosmovisions that move us towards plural pedagogical worlds beyond heteropatriarchal capitalist-coloniality. (shrink)

What does it mean to be human untethered to modalities of sex and race? What other styles of human being may have already emerged by posing that very question? This chapter moves away from analytics of inclusion, and travels through queer and black engagements with critical negativity to find a theoretical engagement with sexual politics that does not affirm human being, but ruptures this figure toward an elsewhere to come. Critical negativity following Eve Sedgwick’s focus on negative feelings toward José (...) Muñoz’s queer horizon holds a promise for more liveable lifeworlds. Yet, this chapter argues such imaginings of transformation are haunted by humanist assumptions that end up constraining its horizon. Critical negativity emerging from black studies also carries such promise of liveability but consists of a move from the negative (ontological negation) to the fugitive. In particular, this chapter provides a collage of three concepts – Zakiyyah Iman Jackson’s Plasticity, Tavia Nyong’o’s Afro-fabulation, Fred Moten and Stefano Harney’s Undercommons – to provide a door to a different world, where human being might not pivot on the violence of racialization and sexualization. Reading these critical negativities together invites us to think of transformation and fugitivity in the same political and theoretical frame without collapsing one into the other. It challenges psychosocial studies to seek the humanist assumptions roiling underneath its ambivalent relation to discipline and invites psychosocial studies to look for the other worlds that can be found in the shadows of its transdisciplinary intelligibility. (shrink)