DECELERATION
Editors: Patty Keller (Cornell) and Rhiannon Welsh (UC Berkeley)
What is deceleration and what is unique about it today? Why does slowness persist as an aesthetic form? How might the recurrence of both—slowness and deceleration—be crucial to understanding our present moment? Decelerated aesthetics asks: what perceptual differences are necessary for a fuller account or understanding of the multiple and conflictual histories that subtend contemporaneity? And what kinds of technologies and registers are needed in order to engage such differences?
FATE AND CHARACTER
Editors: Paul Fleming (Cornell), Rachel Aumiller (ICI Berlin), Sam Dolbear (ICI Berlin), Tom Vandeputte (ICI Berlin)
Walter Benjamin’s ‘Fate and Character’ occupies a curious status in the reception of his work. Published in 1921 but composed in the fall of 1919, the essay was part of the constellation of writings translated into English in the late 1970s. Benjamin repeatedly stressed the significance of the essay, and reports that he counts it “among the best of [his] works.” Despite this, and perhaps because of its highly condensed and enigmatic quality, the text has not received the same critical attention as the other texts from the same period. And yet ‘Fate and Character’ can be considered as the text where Benjamin first engages with the constellation of themes central to his political writings, urgent questions of our moment as much as his: the critique of law, the notion of bare life, the persistence of myth in modernity, the “improper” temporality of fate, and the formation of the subject in history. This special issue of Diacritics is entirely dedicated to this puzzling eight-page text. What is at stake, however, is not only an examination of the relevance of ‘Fate and Character’ for the study of Benjamin’s writings, but also an exploration of how the constellation of themes structuring the essay may speak to a broader range of discussions across the humanities today.
QUEER ENVIRONS
Editors: Austin Lillywhite (University of Kentucky), Nicole Seymour (CSU Fullerton)
Both noun and verb, “environ” points to what’s “out there,” one’s milieu or surrounding world, the assemblage of human and more-than-human beings in which one finds oneself situated, as well as the activity of encircling an area to enclose, circumnavigate, or occupy it. So too, “queer,” as noun and verb, derives its original meaning from space, referring to something that is oblique, slanted, or off-center. Taking the spatial dimensions at stake in the queer and the environmental seriously, this special issue asks: How might the notion of the queer environ trouble notions of gender and sexuality as originating inside an individual’s subjectivity, rather than in the space beyond one’s skin? What would it mean to consider sex environmentally, as a spatial style of being, rather than determined by what’s under one’s clothes? What are the possibilities—and limitations—of analogizing human transness, nonbinariness and genderfluidity to examples drawn from the environment? And how might we challenge the notion, contained in the etymology of the word environ, of a colonizing subject settled at the center of its surroundings?