Diacritics Blog - Diacritics

Keeping the World: On the Maternal Conversation with Gil Anidjar and Lette Bragg

January 6, 2025 Keeping the World: On the Maternal Conversation with Gil Anidjar and Lette Bragg This dialogue is based on a conversation with Gil Anidjar and Lette Bragg in November 2024 about their recently published monographs. Approaching the topic from different perspectives, they grapple with the maternal as a...

by Gil Anidjar, Lette Bragg, and Hannah Miller

Unarchive 8: How Corals Remember

November 16, 2024 How Corals Remember: Archiving Sounds of the Anthropocene in Taiwan Does nature keep its own historical records? For environmental scientists, the answer is obviously “yes.” Ice cores, for instance, contain layers of ice accumulated over millennia, trapping air bubbles and particles—dust, pollen, and sea salts—that reveal past...

by Junting Huang

Strolling Hell, Strolling the Biosphere: An Interview with Timothy Morton

July 25, 2024 Strolling Hell, Strolling the Biosphere: An Interview with Timothy Morton Timothy Morton is Rita Shea Guffey Chair in English at Rice University and Director of the Cool America Foundation. They are the author of more than twenty books, including Hyperobjects, Dark Ecology, and Ecology Without Nature. Morton...

by Robert Savino Oventile

Revolution between History and Memory: A Conversation between Michael Hardt and Gavin Walker

July 2, 2024 Revolution between History and Memory: A Conversation between Michael Hardt and Gavin Walker This is an edited transcription of a conversation held in the context of the Comparative Literature Theory Colloquium on March 8, 2024, at the Society for the Humanities, Cornell University. In protest against...

by Michael Hardt and Gavin Walker

Acquaintance 3: Productivity and Pigeonholes of Connectedness: In Place of an Interview with Gunilla Palmstierna-Weiss

March 20, 2024 Acquaintance: Loose Links and Fleeting Connections #3: The concept of “acquaintance” has historically been given much less attention than notions of “friendship” or “love,” the idea seemingly relegated to the bottom of the hierarchy of influential social/intellectual/spiritual connections. And yet, much of our engagement with others—in social...

by Sophia Léonard

Decolonizing North American Archaeology: An Interview with Paulette F.C. Steeves

January 23, 2024 Decolonizing North American Archaeology: An Interview with Paulette F.C. Steeves Paulette F.C. Steeves (Cree-Métis) is Canada Research Chair Tier II, Indigenous History, Healing, and Reconciliation; Associate Professor and Department Chair, Sociology-Anthropology; and Associate Professor, Geography, Geology, and Land Stewardship, at Algoma University. On October 6, 2023,...

by Robert Savino Oventile

Acquaintance 2: Write Hehmisfear

November 27, 2023 Acquaintance: Loose Links and Fleeting Connections #2: The concept of “acquaintance” has historically been given much less attention than notions of “friendship” or “love,” the idea seemingly relegated to the bottom of the hierarchy of influential social/intellectual/spiritual connections. And yet, much of our engagement with others—in social...

by Oak Morse

Acquaintance 1: Making Connections Through the Paper Trail

September 18, 2023 Acquaintance: Loose Links and Fleeting Connections #1: The concept of “acquaintance” has historically been given much less attention than notions of “friendship” or “love,” the idea seemingly relegated to the bottom of the hierarchy of influential social/intellectual/spiritual connections. And yet, much of our engagement with others—in social...

by Fernando Rodríguez Mansilla

Capitalism, Slavery, and the Non-Appearance of Blackness

June 17, 2023 Capitalism, Slavery, and the Non-Appearance of Blackness: A Review of Nick Nesbitt's The Price of Slavery and Denise Ferreira da Silva's Unpayable Debt Unpayable Debt by Denise Ferreira da Silva. London: Sternberg Press, 2022 The Price of Slavery: Capitalism and Revolution in the Caribbean by Nick Nesbitt....

by Sara Maria Sorentino

#diacritics@50: An Interview with Emoretta Yang

Diacritics is 50: A golden anniversary is a significant milestone for any academic publication, let alone one that began from a rather eccentric (dare I say punk?) ethos. Rather than the usual toasts or special commemorative issues, we have asked our readers and writers to reflect on the history of...

by Ani Chen

#diacritics@50: À Jean-Luc Nancy, un passeur in-commun

by Irving Goh

#diacritics@50: An Interview with Neil Hertz

by Ani Chen

#diacritics@50: Restitution

December 30, 2021 Diacritics is 50: A golden anniversary is a significant milestone for any academic publication, let alone one that began from a rather eccentric (dare I say punk?) ethos. Rather than the usual toasts or special commemorative issues, we have asked our readers and writers to reflect on...

by Jean-Luc Nancy

Unarchive 7: there’s a stutter in the archive

November 23, 2021 there's a stutter in the archive It murmurs inside. It murmurs. Inside is the pain of speech the pain to say. Larger still. Greater than is the pain not to say. To not say. Says nothing against the pain to speak. It festers in- side. The...

by Patricia Keller

#diacritics@50: An Interview with Zoë Sofoulis

by Karen Pinkus

#diacritics@50: An Interview with Alicia Borinsky

by Matías Borg Oviedo

#diacritics@50: A Diacritical Apprenticeship

July 23, 2021 Diacritics is 50: A golden anniversary is a significant milestone for any academic publication, let alone one that began from a rather eccentric (dare I say punk?) ethos. Rather than the usual toasts or special commemorative issues, we have asked our readers and writers to reflect on...

by Georges Van Den Abbeele

Poetry for Drivers

June 28, 2021 Street signs and billboards collected on an Ithaca-Philadelphia trip in 2017. Pictures collected on Juneteenth 2021, courtesy of the author.

by Mariaenrica Giannuzzi

Unarchive 6: Commodities, Love, and Attenuated Reproduction in the Archives of Cybernetics

June 3, 2021 A letter from Gregory Bateson to the social psychologist Uriel G. Foa dated February 7, 1969 reads: A schizophrenic patient once pointed out to me that there are two worlds. The first he called “commodital.” The other world he called “dementiaprecoxal.” We discussed the commodities of the...

by Seb Franklin

When the House Burns Down

January 6, 2021 When the House Burns Down Translated by Kevin Attell Originally published as: Giorgio Agamben, “Quando la casa brucia,” Quodlibet, October 5, 2020, https://www.quodlibet.it/giorgio-agamben-quando-la-casa-brucia. “There is no sense in anything I do, if the house burns down.” And yet it is exactly while the house is burning that...

by Giorgio Agamben

Unarchive 5: Conjuring Presents

December 18, 2020 There is a tension between the slow, steady study of knowledge, image, and object worlds of time past and the piling debris of the contemporary. The present pierces the archive—more or less immediately and materially—as it enters, explodes, and oftentimes destroys the traces of history we as...

by Lara Fresko Madra

Residual Time

August 5, 2020 One of my favorite French courses that I ever took was on twentieth-century quotidian literature. The syllabus included texts by writers such as André Breton, Francis Ponge, Georges Perec, and Annie Ernaux, in addition to philosophers and literary theorists working on and around the idea of the...

by Caroline Godard

La Lingua Americana: Voice and Representation in Academic Publishing

July 29, 2020 In the midst of a national reckoning over visual and symbolic representation in the United States—or, the grassroots takedowns and official removals of statues of colonial figures and founders of the nation during the summer of 2020—there are other modalities of representation that continue to elide authentic...

by Ella Maria Diaz

Unarchive 4: Teaching and Learning in an Archive Gone Digital

July 8, 2020 Has the archive lost its taste and smell during the Covid-19 pandemic? I’ve been teaching a class on documents and archives for years. Before plunging the students into historic archives, I usher them into the class through an encounter with a powerful contemporary document. For our first...

by Cristina Vatulescu

Unarchive 3: The Undocument

June 22, 2020 In her study of the Afro-Trinidadian writer and revolutionary C. L. R. James, Laura Harris introduces the evocative idea of an “underground undocument.” The undocument refers to the ambitious literary project James was invested in during the forties and early fifties, when he lived undocumented in the...

by Christian Rossipal

Unarchive 2: Apprehending the Acoustic

June 3, 2020 In late May, the New York Times published an article on the sounds of a city confronting COVID-19 and practicing social distancing. Capturing the new acoustics of the pandemic were sixteen microphones that had been spread through three boroughs as part of Sounds of New York City...

by Sam Carter

Four Vignettes on Sleep

May 11, 2020 “I can sleep!” I thought on March 6, as the first event was cancelled. Ten days later, all classes at the university were cancelled. My travel to Italy to visit family was cancelled. My assistantship for the summer was cancelled. My colleagues. My workplace. My life. “It’s...

by Mariaenrica Giannuzzi

Unarchive 1: Closure and the Memory of the State

May 4, 2020 I arrived in Paris on February 1, 2020, roughly six weeks before the COVID-19 pandemic led the French government to implement its mandatory quarantine. My trip had originally been made possible by a doctoral fellowship through the Embassy of France in the United States, itself aimed at...

by Marc Kohlbry

Life and the Interim

April 28, 2020 Over a span of just a few weeks, the force with which human species life has collided with governmentalities on a planetary scale cannot but yield a powerful biopolitical episteme. That the biological is urgently political now is without doubt. However, the problem I perceive is a...

by Yasmeen Arif

Practicing Vulnerability: Reading Robin Mitchell’s Vénus Noire and Barbara Christian’s “The Race for Theory” Together

April 21, 2020 In early February, after I finished reading Robin Mitchell’s Vénus Noire: Black Women and Colonial Fantasies in Nineteenth Century (University of Georgia Press, 2020), I wrote a short Twitter thread about how it impacted me, personally, as a student and scholar of Francophone Caribbean Studies as well...

by Nathan Dize

The Metaphysics of Patient Zero

March 18, 2020 Translated by Karen Pinkus, Editor of Diacritics Translator’s note: There has been a good deal of important writing by Italian intellectuals during the lockdown there. A short piece by Giorgio Agamben, titled “The Invention of an Epidemic,” has aroused a great deal of controversy. It was followed...

by Felice Cimatti

Watch This Space

August 5, 2019 This space will serve as a forum for readers and writers to interact in many ways: The afterlife of essays: the time frame of publishing a journal article is glacial (although, come to think of it, that’s no longer an apt metaphor) so this will give us...

by Karen Pinkus

Fevered Reading: Archives, Books, and Journals

August 20, 2019 My favorite job was as an illicit-sounding “book-dealer” after college in my small town on the shores of Lake Superior. The shop had a musty smell that three out of ten patrons would praise after entering and inhaling. I spent my time reading and writing while...

by Nick Huelster

All Scholarship Is Quit Lit

September 5, 2019 Any graduate student seeking insight into the experience of scholarly publishing can learn a lot, I am sorry to say, from the first few chapters of Karl Marx’s Capital. When workers bring the products of their labor to the market, Marx tells us, these products become commodities....

by Max Larson

Unfamiliar Ceiling/THE BEAST

Unfamiliar Ceiling/THE BEAST was made in February 2018, after a tough 2017. It was summer and the summers in Rio are getting warmer and warmer every year. On this particular day, it had rained a little, but without getting any colder. Gray was the color of the day, but the...

by Lucas Ferraço Nassif

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