philoSOPHIA

This essay is from two exhibitions on We (我們 Women) curated by Abby Chen (2012) and Hoi Leung (2021) at the Chinese Culture Center of San Francisco.

Martinican-born poet and theoretician Édouard Glissant suggests that a shift to “archipelagic thinking” can allow one to see the world metaphorically as a collection of islands connected to each other. Foregrounding the body and affect, I will consider the exhibition WOMEN我們, organized by Abby Chen, that traveled from Shanghai (2011) to San Francisco (2012) and Miami (2013) through what I refer to as “archipelagic feeling.” WOMEN 我們 explored queer Chinese feminism, and in a nod to cities in which the venues were located, the curators expanded the checklist at each leg of the tour. In this way, the curators aimed not to essentialize or center queer Chinese feminism but productively connect it to (for example) Latinx subjectivities and Asian-American feminist concerns. In so doing, I suggest this exhibition offers a new framework for thinking about the transnational through both queerness and creolization.

Artists’ texts from an exhibition curated by Olivia Shao with an introduction by Lauren O’Neill-Butler and Arthur Ou.

Recent trans-Saharan migrations have reawakened older imaginaries of travel and trade across the Sahara. Several years ago, I set out to study the history of these imaginaries as a step toward understanding contemporary racial dynamics in North Africa. Little did I know how structuring trans-Saharan slavery had been for Moroccan society, or how my own family was implicated in it. This essay is an attempt at articulating the web of questions that arose from that process.

This article criticizes the equation of “philosophy” with “Western philosophy” that became a common feature of Western philosophical historiographies starting in the eighteenth century and that has, over the course of the last two centuries, become an identity-constituting force in academic philosophy. The essentially Anglo-European identity of modern-day academic philosophy has serious implications, shaping our perception both of what counts as philosophy and of who counts as a philosopher. To counter the racism that lies at the heart of this identity, we go beyond recent calls for the expansion of the philosophical canon and advocate a more radical position rooted in the unconditional embrace of what we call the groundlessness of philosophy. Since there are no necessary conditions that can effectively delimit the domain of philosophy, philosophy is essentially groundless. It has no transhistorical essence and thus cannot be either logically, historically, or geographically circumscribed. To illustrate this groundlessness, we use the Buddhist non-self doctrine as a heuristic to encourage academic philosophers to let go of the need to find a universal, permanent ground for philosophy to stand on. This ethical gesture has the potential to ameliorate some of the problems that plague the discipline today.

Using the motif of the hipster to consider the arrival of the concept “Anthropocene” into the orbit of critical theory, this essay establishes the grave existential consequences that issue from the infatuation with, and rapid, uncritical uptake and circulation of, concepts in a philosophical market overcome by neoliberal pressures. These epistemic habits align with political commitments that unwittingly controvert the original intents of critique—and this paradox requires remediation. This essay, thus, argues for a recalibration of epistemic praxis by reclaiming a retro, critical, vital form of philology—figured as both a scholarly practice and a way of life. The hope is to counter the stultifying force of the late-capitalist praxis of commodification, consumption, and hyper-production of concepts spawned by the fatal lure of progress narratives and the fetishization of innovation and originality they entail. Accordingly, we might resolve the tension between habits and politics and account for vital differences and resistances not revealed by the mutation of critique inherent in contemporary strategies. Thus, not only might epistemic politics evolve, but critical theory may also avert extinction by revitalizing it as a dynamic life practice.

Both Judith Butler and Lee Edelman—in spite of the many differences in their respective positions—see Antigone as an anti-natal figure who disrupts social order by refusing to perpetuate the heteronormative cycle of reproduction and reproductive futurism. In this essay, however, I will argue that in resisting what Jacques Lacan calls the “second death” of her brother, Antigone emerges in the maternal position precisely through her power both to suspend and to allow (re)generation. If the fantasy of “second death” is to push back generation to the realm of nothingness—an absolute extinction of the cycle of life—Antigone refigures this “nothingness” of ex nihilo as the maternal body in all its traumatic fecundity. Reading Lacan’s Antigone alongside Adriana Cavarero’s feminist explication of the Demeter myth, and resituating Lacan’s notion of “second death” in the light of Cavarero’s “birth-no-more” would, I hope, serve to enrich our understanding of the sexuate dimensions of Antigone’s desire. I shall also engage with the writings of Julia Kristeva, Luce Irigaray, and Emanuela Bianchi in order to imagine a queer maternal politics that has place both for the mother and the child, even as it resists resorption into the normative logic of reproductive futurism.