This chapter explores the basic proposition that human coexistence with viruses depends, to a gre... more This chapter explores the basic proposition that human coexistence with viruses depends, to a greater degree than is usually acknowledged, on the language used to think about them. If we treat viruses as essentially enemies of human health and flourishing, then we will be perpetually at war with the virosphere that surrounds and, indeed, pervades us. Here I consider how counternarratives of viral intimacy that emerged from the HIV pandemic might spark different ways of talking and thinking about living with viruses in the age of COVID-19. Pursuing this inquiry, I ask after the role that psychical fantasy plays in thinking about virality beyond the bioscientific rationalities that often regard the virosphere in militaristic terms, as enemy territory to be conquered. How, in short, might humans inhabit the virosphere otherwise? Such questions grow out of my ongoing work on HIV and AIDS, which has been sharpened and renewed by the COVID-19 pandemic. The key difference in transmission routes between the human immunodeficiency virus and the novel coronavirus prompts reflection on the biopolitics of respiration: what is at stake in our sharing of the air? COVID-19 revealed the extent to which we are intertwined by virtue of our constantly inhaling each other-intertwined with viral processes and with all those, human and otherwise, who breathe the same air. This chapter endeavours to think through the multiple and often conflicting implications of getting inside one another without physically touching.
This essay considers the "descriptive turn" in literary studies from the vantage point of poetics... more This essay considers the "descriptive turn" in literary studies from the vantage point of poetics, arguing that the history of Western poetry, from the Greeks to the present, offers through the category of epideixis a theory and practice of description that illuminates some of the methodological impasses of contemporary literary studies. Epideixis, a basic mode of pointing or linguistic ostension, confers value, often by way of praise or blame, without trying to persuade its audience with the practical immediacy of political or forensic rhetoric. Drawing on the ordinary language philosophy of Ludwig Wittgenstein and Stanley Cavell, the essay suggests that praise constitutes a philosophically rigorous alternative to critique. This argument is exemplified via the work of Mark Doty, a contemporary poet of description-as-praise.
This chapter explores the basic proposition that human coexistence with viruses depends, to a gre... more This chapter explores the basic proposition that human coexistence with viruses depends, to a greater degree than is usually acknowledged, on the language used to think about them. If we treat viruses as essentially enemies of human health and flourishing, then we will be perpetually at war with the virosphere that surrounds and, indeed, pervades us. Here I consider how counternarratives of viral intimacy that emerged from the HIV pandemic might spark different ways of talking and thinking about living with viruses in the age of COVID-19. Pursuing this inquiry, I ask after the role that psychical fantasy plays in thinking about virality beyond the bioscientific rationalities that often regard the virosphere in militaristic terms, as enemy territory to be conquered. How, in short, might humans inhabit the virosphere otherwise? Such questions grow out of my ongoing work on HIV and AIDS, which has been sharpened and renewed by the COVID-19 pandemic. The key difference in transmission routes between the human immunodeficiency virus and the novel coronavirus prompts reflection on the biopolitics of respiration: what is at stake in our sharing of the air? COVID-19 revealed the extent to which we are intertwined by virtue of our constantly inhaling each other-intertwined with viral processes and with all those, human and otherwise, who breathe the same air. This chapter endeavours to think through the multiple and often conflicting implications of getting inside one another without physically touching.
This essay considers the "descriptive turn" in literary studies from the vantage point of poetics... more This essay considers the "descriptive turn" in literary studies from the vantage point of poetics, arguing that the history of Western poetry, from the Greeks to the present, offers through the category of epideixis a theory and practice of description that illuminates some of the methodological impasses of contemporary literary studies. Epideixis, a basic mode of pointing or linguistic ostension, confers value, often by way of praise or blame, without trying to persuade its audience with the practical immediacy of political or forensic rhetoric. Drawing on the ordinary language philosophy of Ludwig Wittgenstein and Stanley Cavell, the essay suggests that praise constitutes a philosophically rigorous alternative to critique. This argument is exemplified via the work of Mark Doty, a contemporary poet of description-as-praise.
This book brings together an international roster of renowned scholars from disciplines including... more This book brings together an international roster of renowned scholars from disciplines including philosophy, political theory, intellectual history, and literary studies to address the conceptual foundations of the humanities and the question of their future. What notions of the future, of the human, and of finitude underlie recurring anxieties about the humanities in our current geopolitical situation? How can we think about the unpredictable and unthought dimensions of praxis implicit in the very notion of futurity?The essays here argue that the uncertainty of the future represents both an opportunity for critical engagement and a matrix for invention. Broadly conceived, the notion of invention, or cultural poiesis, questions the key assumptions and tasks of a whole range of practices in the humanities, beginning with critique, artistic practices, and intellectual inquiry, and ending with technology, emancipatory politics, and ethics. The essays discuss a wide range of key figures (e.g., Deleuze, Freud, Lacan, Foucault, Kristeva, Irigaray), problems (e.g., becoming, kinship and the foreign, disposable population swithin a global political economy, queerness and the death drive, the parapoetic, electronic textuality, invention and accountability, political and social reform in Latin America), disciplines and methodologies (philosophy, art and art history, visuality, political theory, criticism and critique, psychoanalysis, gender analysis, architecture, literature, art). The volume should be required reading for all who feel a deep commitment to the humanities, its practices, and its future
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