Journal Articles by Christopher Griffin
South Atlantic Review, 2022
The proliferation of work by autistic writers continues apace, defying a long and multidisciplina... more The proliferation of work by autistic writers continues apace, defying a long and multidisciplinary tradition of constructing autistic people as lacking the capacity for narration. To study neurodivergent literature, then, is to witness the refusal of these exclusionary narrative conventions, and to register the ideological presuppositions that underpin pathologization. In this article, I engage with recent insights from Neurodiversity Studies to explore the connections between narrative neuronormativity and other discourses of oppression, especially those that have generated racialized, gendered, and colonial narratives of desubjectification. Focusing on the neuroqueer movement—an emergent practice of disidentification that refuses the interpellations of neuronormativity, ableism, heteronormativity, and cisnormativity—I discuss the concept of allism, arguing that this satirical critique of pathologization harbors a deconstructive force that denaturalizes the dialectic of recognition. Pursuing the discursive context and theoretical implications of this critique, I provide a short genealogy of narrative neuronormativity, connecting the operation of the dialectic in the early novel to the clinical texts of child psychology. To demonstrate the neuroqueer subversion of this tradition, I then read An Unkindness of Ghosts, by Rivers Solomon, a text that stages a disidentification with storytelling. Protagonist Aster’s neuroqueer refusal indexes the concomitance of the construction of Blackness as an ontological foil for whiteness and the construction of autism as a standard of disordered sociality that neuronorms can be measured against. My reading of Unkindness suggests that the extant techniques of literary narratorship are political instruments that will, unless repurposed, continue to disseminate these dispossessive dialectics.
Interfere: Journal for Critical Thought and Radical Politics, 2021
The pandemic has been the most vivid agent of change that many of us have known. But it has not c... more The pandemic has been the most vivid agent of change that many of us have known. But it has not changed everything: plenty of the institutions, norms, and practices that sustain racial capitalism, settler colonialism, and cisheteropatriarchy have either weathered the storm of the crisis or been nourished by its effects. And yet enough has changed for us to see that the pandemic has profoundly recontextualised those structures and systems of violence, bringing us into a fresh negotiation with, for example, the question of how we discuss and imagine freedom. Responding in part to this unexpected provocation, activist-scholars Robyn Maynard and Leanne Betasamosake Simpson forged a collaboration from the lockdown of 2020, corresponding by letter to create their forthcoming book, Rehearsals for Living, due to be published by Haymarket Books (US) and Knopf (Canada) in 2022. In this interview, we asked them to explain the epistolary form of the book and expand on the concept of “rehearsal”, before inviting them to reflect on a series of issues that animate our current crises: the politics of recognition; the notion of apocalypse; ways to disrupt linear temporalities; practises of reciprocity against proprietary logics; the gendered violence of state apparatuses; and worldbuilding as a method of resistance. In their expansive answers, Robyn and Leanne draw on their experiences as organisers and educators, commenting on anticolonial struggles, the Movement for Black Lives, and the rise of abolition discourse. Stressing the need to build a multiplicity of shared homespaces in the face of racial/colonial capitalism and organized abandonment, they challenge us to rethink the predicaments and possibilities of the present, enabling us to imagine futures liberated of extractivist, carceral governance – “planting more liberatory futures in the present”, as Robyn puts it. The task of sowing those seeds is a collective praxis of rewriting the narratives that constitute us, refusing to hear that nothing can change and insisting that everything must.
This is an open access article distributed under the terms of a Creative Commons license (CC BY-NC-ND 3.0).
Derrida Today, 2020
On 30 March 2020, the Hungarian parliament approved emergency measures in response to the Covid-1... more On 30 March 2020, the Hungarian parliament approved emergency measures in response to the Covid-19 pandemic, granting prime minister Viktor Orbán the power to rule by decree. The very next day, the government repealed the legal recognition of transgenderism, ruling that assignations of biological sex are binary and permanent. The decision to place sexual difference under house arrest during a time of lockdown was not coincidental. As I argue in this short essay, Orbán's move was itself a kind of assignation, an act of discursive placing designed to eradicate transgenderism under the name of immunisation.
Drawing on Derrida's motifs of the gift and the dance, I offer a topology of birthsex, the ontological category produced by Orbán's law of immutable, dichotomous sexual dimorphism. I observe the movements of ipseity to show how Orbán's placement of the birthsex legislation within his pandemic programme enabled him to define transgenderism as a dangerous and foreign illness that requires an immunising response. Finally, to consider the racial and colonial context of this assault on trans, intersex, and nonbinary lives, I turn to María Lugones and her work on the coloniality of gender, finding her choreography of resistance to be in step with Derrida's.
Opinion Pieces and Blog Posts by Christopher Griffin
Engenderings, Apr 23, 2024
Since 2023, the UK government's response to the “migrant crisis” has revolved around two controve... more Since 2023, the UK government's response to the “migrant crisis” has revolved around two controversial flagship policies: the deportation of asylum seekers to Rwanda, and the detention of migrants aboard a giant barge. In this short article, I examine the colonial and gendered dimensions of the two policies, finding them to be examples of the coloniality of gender. What this indicates, I suggest, is that the purpose of these policies is not merely to deter potential migrants — particularly LGBTQIA+ migrants — but also to create a political narrative that allows the Conservative Party to garner right-wing votes by participating in high-profile culture wars; namely, the debate over transgender rights and the debate over how the UK should reckon with its imperial past.
Interfere Blog, Oct 30, 2020
In this short article I argue that the UK government’s decision not to update the Gender Recognit... more In this short article I argue that the UK government’s decision not to update the Gender Recognition Act 2004 (GRA) is more than a missed opportunity. It weaponises the GRA, now an effective instrument of assimilation and containment. The failure to reform the GRA seems like a maintenance of the status quo, but given that the circumstances have significantly changed since 2004, the GRA now explicitly fails trans people, including nonbinary people – and in fact this is the intention. Rather than being a flawed attempt to improve trans lives, the GRA is a well-designed apparatus of biopolitical control that reinforces binary gender and cisnormativity, demanding assimilation in return for recognition.
Discover Society, Apr 6, 2020
In this short article, I discuss a form of civil disobedience that emerged during the Covid-19 pa... more In this short article, I discuss a form of civil disobedience that emerged during the Covid-19 pandemic: the refusal to comply with lockdown rules. Because such rule-breakers often claim that they are acting to preserve freedom, I ask whether their unwillingness to help prevent the spread of the virus is symptomatic of neoliberal individualism. Drawing on Jacques Derrida's work on autoimmunity, I argue that Covid disobedience is ironically self-defeating, because in exacerbating the crisis the rule-breakers force governments to adopt increasingly draconian measures. Lockdown-refusers evidently believe that the protection of their individual rights is more important than the protection of vulnerable members of society, but this is an illusion. The self-sufficiency that they presuppose is a myth that sustains liberalism, and which has been debunked by the interdependency that the pandemic reveals.
Invited Talks by Christopher Griffin
Newcastle University, November 2023.
Sylvia Wynter is one of the key thinkers in decolonial s... more Newcastle University, November 2023.
Sylvia Wynter is one of the key thinkers in decolonial studies today. In a series of longform essays and interviews stretching back to the mid-1970s, Wynter assembles an encyclopaedic array of cross-disciplinary sources to claim that the subject of European humanism is not in fact the human but actually “Man,” a specific mode of human life that universalises and naturalises its own culture, thereby “overrepresenting” itself as the human as such. This idea, along with Wynter’s proposed solution—a new counterhumanism devoted for the first time to the wellbeing of humanity in its entirety—is increasingly influential across the humanities. Part of the reason for this success may be Wynter’s relationship with European philosophy, which sets her apart from many of her contemporaries in decolonial studies. Unlike those who consider it to be irremediably infused with the axioms of coloniality, Wynter does not reject the tradition but engages with it, weaving carefully selected fragments of continental thought into her labyrinthine narratives. My paper will explore Wynter’s use of Jacques Derrida. Over the past 20 years, Derrida’s later works have become canonical for posthumanism in general and critical animal studies in particular: fields that are often criticised by scholars in decolonial and Black studies for their failure to adequately contend with colonialism and white supremacy. Wynter’s reading of Derrida repositions him within these debates without excusing his participation in a tradition that is yet to reckon with its colonial complicities. For such a reckoning to be possible, I want to suggest, the achievements of poststructuralism and deconstruction must be put to new use, not jettisoned altogether.
Conference Presentations by Christopher Griffin
Rethinking the Political: Narrative, Protest and Fiction in the 21st Century. University of Brigh... more Rethinking the Political: Narrative, Protest and Fiction in the 21st Century. University of Brighton, September 2024.
Current efforts to account for the coloniality of our prevailing political formations must reckon with the contingency and constructedness of the narratives that have produced them. If this has so far proven impossible, it is not only because the “truthfulness” of these narratives is constitutive of the episteme of Man, thus shaping possibility itself, but also because this regime is sustained by the discursive form in which truthfulness is held in suspension: the novel. Representation is one lens through which to examine this relationship. As well as being a representational medium that is fundamentally depictive and symbolic, the novel is imaginative, requiring and inspiring representation in thought, while also being a forum for reconceiving the systems of representation and delegation intrinsic to contemporary electoral democracies. Because these three forms of representation have contributed to what Sylvia Wynter calls the “overrepresentation” of Man—the synecdochic belief that the subject of European humanism stands for the human in general—the novel is a potential source of anticolonial narratives.
In Annalee Newitz’s Autonomous, set in 2144, advances in artificial intelligence have seen robots gain consciousness. In its depiction of nonhuman thought processes, the novel reveals that one of the speculative narratives of Man—the Kantian-Hegelian claim that the putative universality of imaginative self-representation legitimises political representation—corresponds more closely with robot consciousness than it does with human consciousness. In showing that this narrative portrays the figure of mechanistic philosophy, not humanity in total, Autonomous prepares the way for a counternarrative of representation to appear.
The 2nd International Trans Studies Conference. Northwestern University, September 2024.
Trans... more The 2nd International Trans Studies Conference. Northwestern University, September 2024.
Trans studies is at a crossroads, poised to make a postdisciplinary turn and forge meaningful connections across institutional silos for the first time. As we face this juncture, I suggest we take inspiration from Sylvia Wynter’s work on the role of academic disciplines within the knowledge regimes of coloniality. Crucial to the Western episteme, Wynter argues, is the belief that the founding sociogenic narratives of Man are universally true, a belief that is ratified and disseminated by the academy, especially via the disciplinary separation of the natural sciences from the humanities and social sciences (Wynter 2003). To transform the episteme and threaten the hegemony of Man that it sustains, it will thus be necessary to overcome this disciplinary schism. Because the model of immutable sexual dimorphism currently espoused by the anti-trans movement is a colonial construct that is enshrined as common sense within the present truth regime, a prerequisite for trans liberation is the end of the episteme of Man, as scholars have observed (e.g., Adamson 2022). My proposal, therefore, is that trans studies should seize the opportunity of its postdisciplinary turn in an ambitious effort to remake the disciplines as such. If we are transing trans studies, so to speak, let us also trans the disciplines through an avowedly anticolonial displacement of biocentric ontoepistemologies.
In conversation with scholars in Black studies, I argue that this transformation should be both transversal, cutting across existing lines of study and structure from within the crosscurrents and undercommons of the university with fugitivity (Snorton 2017), and trans/figurative, irreverently and nonhierarchically evoking the redefinition of the human produced by the divine metamorphosis of Christ (Bey 2022) while transforming the figures, tropes, and metaphors that regulate legibility and possibility. Finally, I propose that we break decisively with the epistemic conditions of sociogenic exclusion by asserting the specularity of our narratives. To reject of the doctrine of universal truth and embrace poiesis and invention is perhaps the most crucial step towards anticolonial trans liberation, but it is also the most difficult, demanding a critical examination of our attachments to scientific reason, including the temptation to historicise and universalise, thereby to legitimise, trans life (Everhart 2022). If this speculative leap represents a major challenge to all of us—desedimenting the projects of the humanities and social sciences as profoundly as the empiricism of the natural sciences—then perhaps this shared unmooring is a postdisciplinary ground zero from which we begin.
London Conference in Critical Thought. University of Greenwich, June 2024.
Artistic practices... more London Conference in Critical Thought. University of Greenwich, June 2024.
Artistic practices that envisage radical democratic futures do so from within the imbrications of three senses of “representation.” Firstly, artistic works may resemble, depict, or symbolically stand for objects and ideas. Secondly, as products of the imagination, such works require and inspire representation in thought. Thirdly, in reimagining political formations, they often query the systems of representation and delegation intrinsic to contemporary electoral democracies. Following Sylvia Wynter, I argue that it is crucial to examine how aesthetic practices explore and problematise these forms of representation (and the connections between them) in order to chart their political vectors. Wynter shows that the hegemony of “Man”—the subject modelled on the white cisheteronormative man of the Global North—was achieved via the creation of a universalised synecdoche in which part of humanity stands for the whole, allowing Man to “overrepresent” itself as the human as such. To what extent can prefigurative visions of radical futures, themselves synecdochic, unsettle colonial matrices of representation?
In Annalee Newitz’s Autonomous, set in 2144, advances in artificial intelligence have seen robots gain consciousness. In its depiction of nonhuman thought processes, the novel reveals that one of the speculative narratives of Man—the Kantian-Hegelian claim that the putative universality of imaginative self-representation legitimises political representation—corresponds more closely with robot consciousness than it does with human consciousness. In showing that this narrative portrays the figure of mechanistic philosophy, not humanity in total, Autonomous prepares the way for a counternarrative of representation to appear.
Derrida Today Conference. National and Kapodistrian University of Athens, June 2024.
In her 1... more Derrida Today Conference. National and Kapodistrian University of Athens, June 2024.
In her 1990 essay “Beyond Miranda’s Meanings,” Sylvia Wynter offers an adaptation of the notion of différance, substituting the motif of deferral for that of deference in order to name the forms of social domination and control that are produced when differences are ontologised by colonial narratives. Given that this can be explained without recourse to Derrida, we might wonder why Wynter alludes to him here; today’s decolonial scholars might even ask whether this represents Wynter’s own deference to the academic trend of deconstruction, a philosophical discourse that emerges from the very colonial narratives that Wynter aims to displace. Derrida scholars, on the other hand, could be forgiven for wondering what Wynter’s countersignature of différance contributes, given Derrida’s well-known attention to the hierarchies and priorities generated by oppositional binaries. In this paper, I argue that Wynter’s intervention is inventive and productive for both fields of study, giving decolonial scholars a promising way to unravel some of the complexities of Wynter’s epistemology, and Derrida scholars an example of how to address contemporary concerns that deconstructive approaches are irremediably beholden to the coloniality of their European context.
Wynter’s project is devoted to challenging the reign of Man, the form of life that demands deferential behaviour from the racialised and colonised groups that it constructs as less than human. According to Wynter, this domination can be unsettled with heretical counter-exertions: narratives of subjectivity formulated in breach of the logical or significatory terms of the prevailing episteme. Such breaches are comparable, I propose, to what Derrida calls a generalised anacoluthon, an interruption that introduces a new form, leaving the previous form unfinished. In an event of this kind, laws and conventions of imposed deference are interrupted, creating opportunities for alternative relationalities and socialities; such ruptures may contribute to an anacoluthic process in which the sociogenic codes of Man are rewritten. Turning to two foundational texts of deference and rebellion—The Tempest and Antigone—I ask whether figures of disobedience offer the chance for us to articulate a decolonial demand for the right to anacoluthon.
On Relationalities: Politics, Narrative, Sociality. University of Brighton, April 2023.
Despi... more On Relationalities: Politics, Narrative, Sociality. University of Brighton, April 2023.
Despite growing awareness of the diversity of neurocognitive functioning, a matrix of norms that pathologise neurodivergent behaviours, bodyminds, and experiences remains operative. Forms of relationality and sociality associated with autism, for example, are routinely characterised as withdrawn, self- enclosed, and so on – testament to the persistence of a clinical tradition exemplified by Leo Kanner’s 1943 description of the “aloneness” of the neurodivergent children he studied, and their “inability to relate.” In this paper, I aim to contribute to the denaturalisation of these norms by historicising them and tracing the influence of one of their guiding presuppositions: the dialectic of recognition. As recent work from the neuroqueer movement has shown, the dialectic of recognition endows dominant notions of sameness and otherness with sociopolitical and medicolegal force, constructing neurodivergent people as developmentally disordered enigmas who lack full personhood, and interpellating them as patients to be subjected to diagnostic practices that have emerged from a violent tradition.
But how did the dialectic of recognition – a specific narrative of relational subjectivity – attain its hegemonic position? Among the many possible answers, the one I want to propose examines the literary dissemination of the dialectic, particularly its role in the emergence of the European novel form in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Literary critics such as Franco Moretti have argued that the Bildungsroman, for example, the coming-of-age story that portrays the character formation and individuation of its protagonist, closely follows the dialectic of recognition, producing a prescriptive genre that operates as a regulative technology of citizenship. My claim is that the image of mature, assimilated personality presented by the Bildungsroman shaped the work of Freud, Piaget, and other thinkers who would lay the groundwork for the concept of autism. By enshrining the dialectic within a scientific paradigm, the architects of neuronormativity facilitated the colonisation of subjectivity by a recognitive ideal, stigmatising opacity, interdependency, and non-normative relationalities.
Derrida Today Conference. Arizona State University, June 2022.
In 1986, the Kenyan authoritie... more Derrida Today Conference. Arizona State University, June 2022.
In 1986, the Kenyan authorities attempted to apprehend a fictional character. Alarmed by reports of a mysterious stranger roaming the country making revolutionary pronouncements, President Daniel arap Moi issued a warrant for the arrest of the troublemaker, only to discover that this “Matigari” was merely the eponymous protagonist of Ngug̃ ĩ wa Thiong’o’s latest novel, the publication of which had caused a minor sensation within Kenya’s working class. Because the president’s next move was to ban the book, this strange incident, frequently discussed by Ngug̃ ĩ himself, is often used to illustrate the paranoia and heavy-handedness of the Moi regime. In this paper, I argue that the event has broader theoretical consequences than this. By showing the political and textual conditions that render the threshold between character and person permeable, the incident exposes the coloniality of our prevailing ontoepistemology of the human.
The counterhegemonic implications of this interpretation become apparent when we consider the circumstances that made it possible for Matigari to be mistaken for a human agitator. A fraught libidinal economy – fear of uprising and longing for liberation – combined with Ngug̃ i’̃ s rejection of European literary conventions of linear and unitary characterisation. The result was a discursive register that anxiously traversed the interstices of the episteme, charting the contingency and constructedness of the boundary separating fiction and reality with such acuity as to momentarily deborder the epistemic binary. On this reading, the Matigari incident offers a glimpse of what Sylvia Wynter calls sociogeny, the process by which humans invent themselves socially and culturally, specifically through the telling of stories – origin stories, cosmogonies, and descriptive statements that claim to reveal the essence of the human. Bringing Wynter into conversation with Paul de Man (on allegory) and Jacques Derrida (on invention), I present Matigari’s intervention as a spectral effect of the incomplete repression of sociogeny by biocentric discourses of human life and subjectivity. My claim is that the dominance of the colonial vision of “Man” can be challenged by the dissemination of narratives that are avowedly sociogenic and willing to confront the political and philosophical consequences of a form of self-invention that has been defined as impossible.
What Happens Now? British Association for Contemporary Literary Studies, September 2021.
Acco... more What Happens Now? British Association for Contemporary Literary Studies, September 2021.
According to a popular definition, speculative fiction differs from science fiction/fantasy in eschewing the supernatural, limiting its imaginative projections to new combinations of events that have actually occurred. This explains the politicality of speculative fiction: it often contains a warning about potential futures. But what are the risks of elevating the importance of “actual” events in this way? What ontoepistemological presuppositions guide the appeal to reality over the supernatural? In this paper, I argue that political visions of the future speculate in the economic sense of the term, staking their plausibility on the stability of the boundary between fact and fiction. But what this gesture also risks, however inadvertently, is the reinscription of the truth regime that underwrites the colonial logics of race and gender.
To explain this, I read Octavia E. Butler’s Earthseed books, Parable of the Sower and Parable of the Talents. Butler’s protagonist is Lauren, the young survivor of near- apocalyptic social collapse who wanders the wasteland of early twenty-first century America, guided by a spiritual calling. Lauren is the founder of Earthseed, the religion she has formed from her own personal reflections, and which she considers to be ‘the literal truth’. This unwavering faith provides the conviction and purpose that allows Lauren to inspire a small group of followers and create a self-sufficient community, a beacon of safety in a very dangerous world. However, Lauren’s denial of the fictive and metaphorical content of her discourse also authorises ‘the Destiny’, her eschatological prophecy that highlights the connection between specularity and coloniality.
“Blood on the Leaves/And Blood at the Roots”: Reconsidering Forms of Enslavement and Subjection ... more “Blood on the Leaves/And Blood at the Roots”: Reconsidering Forms of Enslavement and Subjection across Disciplines. University of Warwick, June 2021.
The Handmaid’s Tale has become one of the most politically salient representations of slavery in recent decades, thanks, in part, to a high- profile television adaptation and the striking use of Handmaid costumes by reproductive rights activists. But Handmaid is a speculative story of white slavery, leading critics to accuse Atwood of erasing race and appropriating African American history. In this paper, I argue that the text’s deracination of slavery is not so much a matter of colour-blind racism or political insensitivity, but rather an intervention that attempts to map a metaphysical terrain of slavery by ontologising race and gender. This gesture cannot be explained away as a mere product of the text’s mid-eighties pre-intersectional context. As the ongoing fascination with Handmaid attests, the image of slavery that Atwood offers speaks directly to the questions of autonomy and agency that animate our current conjunctures.
My suggestion is that Handmaid deploys slavery as a discursive operator to organise and secure the affective and libidinal economies of ‘hegemonic feminism’ – a form of predominantly white feminism that mounts a dialectical battle with patriarchy by essentialising femininity and reproduction. As Sophie Lewis has recently explained, Handmaid offers a ‘wishful scenario’ in which the complicating factors of trans and nonbinary genders disappear along with Blackness, creating a cisheteronormative foundation for women’s rights while avoiding feminism’s troubling history of complicity with anti-Blackness. Drawing on the work of Saidiya Hartman and Sylvia Wynter, I argue that the text uses the figure of slavery to raise the stakes of this fantasy. Through close readings of Handmaid’s depiction of domestic servitude and its Linnaean naturalisation of hierarchical categories of race and gender, I unravel the narrational strategies that enable representations of enslavement to reinscribe the ontological premises of social death.
Democracy and Populism Conference. University of Brighton, January 2021.
David Graeber’s Debt... more Democracy and Populism Conference. University of Brighton, January 2021.
David Graeber’s Debt: The First 5,000 Years is a work of Left populism that attempts to displace hegemonic narratives of economic debt, particularly the moral axiom that debts must be repaid. It’s also an example of strategic foundationalism. Graeber sets out to prove that his counternarrative is supported by incontestable empirical evidence, giving him recourse to objectivism and positivism, and prompting him to dismiss Nietzsche’s influential work on debt as ‘fantasy’.
In this paper, I explain the political consequences of the different approaches taken by Graeber and Nietzsche. From this I suggest that Graeber is trying to mitigate the anxiety caused by the disappearance of the ground of signification. Hoping to produce a conceptually accessible and convincing text, Graeber offers what Derrida calls the ‘reassuring certitude’ of an illusory foundation. But this epistemic premise is a gamble. While the strategic foundationalism of Debt gives it counterhegemonic force, it risks reinscribing and perpetuating the very economic logic that Graeber aims to displace. To draw out the relationship between fictionality and risk, I describe Debt as a speculative narrative: an imaginative retelling of the past that also speculates in the economic sense, staking something on a profitable return in the future.
Given that we’re now living in a time of epistemic uncertainty – the so-called post-truth era – I think we should take the risks of strategic foundationalism seriously. What we owe to Graeber, perhaps, is to attend closely to the effects of his wager.
The Sexual Politics of Freedom, September 17, 2020.
Over 20 years since it began, the recogni... more The Sexual Politics of Freedom, September 17, 2020.
Over 20 years since it began, the recognition debate rages on in postcolonial thought, queer theory, and trans theory. The question of how we might act to resist or refuse the violent interpellations of liberal personhood seems more urgent today than ever. In this paper, I suggest that a way to think this resistance is through consideration of the neurotypicality of hegemonic subject formation.
Following Erin Manning and Fred Moten, I see neurotypicality as a matrix of regulatory norms that work to govern subjectivity through the construction of a purportedly neutral ground of rationality and propriety. As neurotypicality naturalises and enforces many of the political and ontological presuppositions of colonial cisheteropatriarchy – by, for example, pathologising dependence and relationality – I consider it to be a necessary site for resistance within and alongside the sexual politics of freedom.
I approach this topic through a reading of a recent neuroqueer science fiction novel, An Unkindness of Ghosts by Rivers Solomon. The protagonist, Aster, is an enslaved subaltern worker in the isolated community of a huge ship lost in deep space. Being black, queer, and non-binary, Aster struggles to survive within the oppressive caste system that orders the society of the ship. But her neurodivergence makes her an actively disruptive force. Unable to conform to the strictures of deference and proper behaviour, Aster operates outside the frame of recognition with a strategic fugitivity that the ruling class cannot contain.
Property and Precarity Workshop, January 31, 2020.
In this paper I explain how Derrida develo... more Property and Precarity Workshop, January 31, 2020.
In this paper I explain how Derrida developed ‘ex-appropriation’, his term for the movement of expropriation that accompanies every appropriation. More than a simple deconstruction of the appropriation/expropriation binary, Derrida wants ex-appropriation to name the interruption or displacement of any dialectic of appropriation, such as those proposed by Hegel and Marx. I aim to provide some context for Derrida’s intervention by looking at his early suggestions that différance exceeds both speculative and materialist dialectical systems. I also try to show that ex-appropriation has fruitful connections to more familiar Derridean themes, like justice and the gift.
Contemporary Challenges to Human Rights Law. December 1, 2018.
Why would anyone wish to claim... more Contemporary Challenges to Human Rights Law. December 1, 2018.
Why would anyone wish to claim the right not to have rights? According to Giorgio Agamben, this is precisely what was attempted by the Franciscan monks of the thirteenth century, as part of their struggle to live without worldly goods. In renouncing all forms of ownership, the monks argued that they should be allowed to use goods and services for free without possessing them; recognising that they would therefore be living outside the law, the monks proposed to give up their rights as well as their duties and responsibilities. Agamben goes on to develop a philosophy of use as an alternative to ownership. This is central to his theory of antinomianism and his critique of biopolitics.
In this paper, I will consider the implications of these ideas for human rights law. Is there a way to enable people who have lost their rights, the stateless, for example, to use rights rather than possess them? This leads us to reflect on the fact that human rights law presupposes that rights are possessive. Even while asserting rights as ‘inalienable’, the aspirational early documents such as the UDHR accept that rights can be claimed, granted, or withheld. This gives nation-states huge power over citizens and noncitizens alike. Even states that have agreed to ratify aspects of international human rights law retain the ability to dispossess citizens of rights.
The history of rights reveals them to be a technology of control rather than liberation. Developed alongside proprietary notions of subjectivity in early capitalism, rights were simply another possession that enabled propertied men to codify their social power in politico-juridical terms. The wider distribution of rights in the modern era has not changed their possessive nature.
Drawing from contemporary fiction and continental political philosophy, I argue that what prevents human rights law from ensuring that humans have safe, happy, and liveable lives is the fact that rights are possessive. What we need instead is a new concept of collective sovereignty in which power and goods cannot be individually owned and thus not taken away.
Writing Refugees Workshop. November 1, 2018.
To read about refugees today is to encounter the u... more Writing Refugees Workshop. November 1, 2018.
To read about refugees today is to encounter the unapologetic brutality of contemporary biopolitics. Stories and reports constantly remind us that western immigration policies are regimes of exclusion and abandonment that deny certain groups the rights to move, enter, and seek safety. But can such narratives hope to do more than simply expose these injustices? Can fiction, in particular, challenge the conceptual premises of closed borders?
In this paper, I look for answers in four recent texts: Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie’s Americanah, Mohsin Hamid’s Exit West, Bhanu Kapil’s Ban en Banlieue, and Nam Le’s The Boat. These works all assert the right to movement. They show the disastrous consequences of fortress states, and some of them also test the conventions of the novel form, breaching the boundaries of discipline to enact a vision of unhindered mobility.
But the radical potential of these texts is defined, I argue, by their approach to subjectivity. Stories about travel have a tendency to employ tropes of linear character development: physical journeys, with their attendant hardships, culture shocks, and notions of arrival, happen to occur alongside internal journeys of selfhood, in which the protagonist develops and matures into a complete person. This literary technique produces texts that have a persuasive symmetry and disseminate a story of human life that has political effects. As Joseph Slaughter has observed, the concept of subjectivity presented in the coming-of-age story reinforces the model of citizenship codified in national constitutions and human rights discourses: citizens gradually develop the social and political skills necessary to act responsibly and earn the rights bestowed by the state. This conception of the citizen-subject empowers the state with biopolitical tools to determine who may join the polity.
To avoid complicity with the very doctrines that they seek to question, fictions of movement must reject myths of individual development and contend with the political implications of the image of human life that they present.
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Journal Articles by Christopher Griffin
This is an open access article distributed under the terms of a Creative Commons license (CC BY-NC-ND 3.0).
Drawing on Derrida's motifs of the gift and the dance, I offer a topology of birthsex, the ontological category produced by Orbán's law of immutable, dichotomous sexual dimorphism. I observe the movements of ipseity to show how Orbán's placement of the birthsex legislation within his pandemic programme enabled him to define transgenderism as a dangerous and foreign illness that requires an immunising response. Finally, to consider the racial and colonial context of this assault on trans, intersex, and nonbinary lives, I turn to María Lugones and her work on the coloniality of gender, finding her choreography of resistance to be in step with Derrida's.
Opinion Pieces and Blog Posts by Christopher Griffin
Invited Talks by Christopher Griffin
Sylvia Wynter is one of the key thinkers in decolonial studies today. In a series of longform essays and interviews stretching back to the mid-1970s, Wynter assembles an encyclopaedic array of cross-disciplinary sources to claim that the subject of European humanism is not in fact the human but actually “Man,” a specific mode of human life that universalises and naturalises its own culture, thereby “overrepresenting” itself as the human as such. This idea, along with Wynter’s proposed solution—a new counterhumanism devoted for the first time to the wellbeing of humanity in its entirety—is increasingly influential across the humanities. Part of the reason for this success may be Wynter’s relationship with European philosophy, which sets her apart from many of her contemporaries in decolonial studies. Unlike those who consider it to be irremediably infused with the axioms of coloniality, Wynter does not reject the tradition but engages with it, weaving carefully selected fragments of continental thought into her labyrinthine narratives. My paper will explore Wynter’s use of Jacques Derrida. Over the past 20 years, Derrida’s later works have become canonical for posthumanism in general and critical animal studies in particular: fields that are often criticised by scholars in decolonial and Black studies for their failure to adequately contend with colonialism and white supremacy. Wynter’s reading of Derrida repositions him within these debates without excusing his participation in a tradition that is yet to reckon with its colonial complicities. For such a reckoning to be possible, I want to suggest, the achievements of poststructuralism and deconstruction must be put to new use, not jettisoned altogether.
Conference Presentations by Christopher Griffin
Current efforts to account for the coloniality of our prevailing political formations must reckon with the contingency and constructedness of the narratives that have produced them. If this has so far proven impossible, it is not only because the “truthfulness” of these narratives is constitutive of the episteme of Man, thus shaping possibility itself, but also because this regime is sustained by the discursive form in which truthfulness is held in suspension: the novel. Representation is one lens through which to examine this relationship. As well as being a representational medium that is fundamentally depictive and symbolic, the novel is imaginative, requiring and inspiring representation in thought, while also being a forum for reconceiving the systems of representation and delegation intrinsic to contemporary electoral democracies. Because these three forms of representation have contributed to what Sylvia Wynter calls the “overrepresentation” of Man—the synecdochic belief that the subject of European humanism stands for the human in general—the novel is a potential source of anticolonial narratives.
In Annalee Newitz’s Autonomous, set in 2144, advances in artificial intelligence have seen robots gain consciousness. In its depiction of nonhuman thought processes, the novel reveals that one of the speculative narratives of Man—the Kantian-Hegelian claim that the putative universality of imaginative self-representation legitimises political representation—corresponds more closely with robot consciousness than it does with human consciousness. In showing that this narrative portrays the figure of mechanistic philosophy, not humanity in total, Autonomous prepares the way for a counternarrative of representation to appear.
Trans studies is at a crossroads, poised to make a postdisciplinary turn and forge meaningful connections across institutional silos for the first time. As we face this juncture, I suggest we take inspiration from Sylvia Wynter’s work on the role of academic disciplines within the knowledge regimes of coloniality. Crucial to the Western episteme, Wynter argues, is the belief that the founding sociogenic narratives of Man are universally true, a belief that is ratified and disseminated by the academy, especially via the disciplinary separation of the natural sciences from the humanities and social sciences (Wynter 2003). To transform the episteme and threaten the hegemony of Man that it sustains, it will thus be necessary to overcome this disciplinary schism. Because the model of immutable sexual dimorphism currently espoused by the anti-trans movement is a colonial construct that is enshrined as common sense within the present truth regime, a prerequisite for trans liberation is the end of the episteme of Man, as scholars have observed (e.g., Adamson 2022). My proposal, therefore, is that trans studies should seize the opportunity of its postdisciplinary turn in an ambitious effort to remake the disciplines as such. If we are transing trans studies, so to speak, let us also trans the disciplines through an avowedly anticolonial displacement of biocentric ontoepistemologies.
In conversation with scholars in Black studies, I argue that this transformation should be both transversal, cutting across existing lines of study and structure from within the crosscurrents and undercommons of the university with fugitivity (Snorton 2017), and trans/figurative, irreverently and nonhierarchically evoking the redefinition of the human produced by the divine metamorphosis of Christ (Bey 2022) while transforming the figures, tropes, and metaphors that regulate legibility and possibility. Finally, I propose that we break decisively with the epistemic conditions of sociogenic exclusion by asserting the specularity of our narratives. To reject of the doctrine of universal truth and embrace poiesis and invention is perhaps the most crucial step towards anticolonial trans liberation, but it is also the most difficult, demanding a critical examination of our attachments to scientific reason, including the temptation to historicise and universalise, thereby to legitimise, trans life (Everhart 2022). If this speculative leap represents a major challenge to all of us—desedimenting the projects of the humanities and social sciences as profoundly as the empiricism of the natural sciences—then perhaps this shared unmooring is a postdisciplinary ground zero from which we begin.
Artistic practices that envisage radical democratic futures do so from within the imbrications of three senses of “representation.” Firstly, artistic works may resemble, depict, or symbolically stand for objects and ideas. Secondly, as products of the imagination, such works require and inspire representation in thought. Thirdly, in reimagining political formations, they often query the systems of representation and delegation intrinsic to contemporary electoral democracies. Following Sylvia Wynter, I argue that it is crucial to examine how aesthetic practices explore and problematise these forms of representation (and the connections between them) in order to chart their political vectors. Wynter shows that the hegemony of “Man”—the subject modelled on the white cisheteronormative man of the Global North—was achieved via the creation of a universalised synecdoche in which part of humanity stands for the whole, allowing Man to “overrepresent” itself as the human as such. To what extent can prefigurative visions of radical futures, themselves synecdochic, unsettle colonial matrices of representation?
In Annalee Newitz’s Autonomous, set in 2144, advances in artificial intelligence have seen robots gain consciousness. In its depiction of nonhuman thought processes, the novel reveals that one of the speculative narratives of Man—the Kantian-Hegelian claim that the putative universality of imaginative self-representation legitimises political representation—corresponds more closely with robot consciousness than it does with human consciousness. In showing that this narrative portrays the figure of mechanistic philosophy, not humanity in total, Autonomous prepares the way for a counternarrative of representation to appear.
In her 1990 essay “Beyond Miranda’s Meanings,” Sylvia Wynter offers an adaptation of the notion of différance, substituting the motif of deferral for that of deference in order to name the forms of social domination and control that are produced when differences are ontologised by colonial narratives. Given that this can be explained without recourse to Derrida, we might wonder why Wynter alludes to him here; today’s decolonial scholars might even ask whether this represents Wynter’s own deference to the academic trend of deconstruction, a philosophical discourse that emerges from the very colonial narratives that Wynter aims to displace. Derrida scholars, on the other hand, could be forgiven for wondering what Wynter’s countersignature of différance contributes, given Derrida’s well-known attention to the hierarchies and priorities generated by oppositional binaries. In this paper, I argue that Wynter’s intervention is inventive and productive for both fields of study, giving decolonial scholars a promising way to unravel some of the complexities of Wynter’s epistemology, and Derrida scholars an example of how to address contemporary concerns that deconstructive approaches are irremediably beholden to the coloniality of their European context.
Wynter’s project is devoted to challenging the reign of Man, the form of life that demands deferential behaviour from the racialised and colonised groups that it constructs as less than human. According to Wynter, this domination can be unsettled with heretical counter-exertions: narratives of subjectivity formulated in breach of the logical or significatory terms of the prevailing episteme. Such breaches are comparable, I propose, to what Derrida calls a generalised anacoluthon, an interruption that introduces a new form, leaving the previous form unfinished. In an event of this kind, laws and conventions of imposed deference are interrupted, creating opportunities for alternative relationalities and socialities; such ruptures may contribute to an anacoluthic process in which the sociogenic codes of Man are rewritten. Turning to two foundational texts of deference and rebellion—The Tempest and Antigone—I ask whether figures of disobedience offer the chance for us to articulate a decolonial demand for the right to anacoluthon.
Despite growing awareness of the diversity of neurocognitive functioning, a matrix of norms that pathologise neurodivergent behaviours, bodyminds, and experiences remains operative. Forms of relationality and sociality associated with autism, for example, are routinely characterised as withdrawn, self- enclosed, and so on – testament to the persistence of a clinical tradition exemplified by Leo Kanner’s 1943 description of the “aloneness” of the neurodivergent children he studied, and their “inability to relate.” In this paper, I aim to contribute to the denaturalisation of these norms by historicising them and tracing the influence of one of their guiding presuppositions: the dialectic of recognition. As recent work from the neuroqueer movement has shown, the dialectic of recognition endows dominant notions of sameness and otherness with sociopolitical and medicolegal force, constructing neurodivergent people as developmentally disordered enigmas who lack full personhood, and interpellating them as patients to be subjected to diagnostic practices that have emerged from a violent tradition.
But how did the dialectic of recognition – a specific narrative of relational subjectivity – attain its hegemonic position? Among the many possible answers, the one I want to propose examines the literary dissemination of the dialectic, particularly its role in the emergence of the European novel form in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Literary critics such as Franco Moretti have argued that the Bildungsroman, for example, the coming-of-age story that portrays the character formation and individuation of its protagonist, closely follows the dialectic of recognition, producing a prescriptive genre that operates as a regulative technology of citizenship. My claim is that the image of mature, assimilated personality presented by the Bildungsroman shaped the work of Freud, Piaget, and other thinkers who would lay the groundwork for the concept of autism. By enshrining the dialectic within a scientific paradigm, the architects of neuronormativity facilitated the colonisation of subjectivity by a recognitive ideal, stigmatising opacity, interdependency, and non-normative relationalities.
In 1986, the Kenyan authorities attempted to apprehend a fictional character. Alarmed by reports of a mysterious stranger roaming the country making revolutionary pronouncements, President Daniel arap Moi issued a warrant for the arrest of the troublemaker, only to discover that this “Matigari” was merely the eponymous protagonist of Ngug̃ ĩ wa Thiong’o’s latest novel, the publication of which had caused a minor sensation within Kenya’s working class. Because the president’s next move was to ban the book, this strange incident, frequently discussed by Ngug̃ ĩ himself, is often used to illustrate the paranoia and heavy-handedness of the Moi regime. In this paper, I argue that the event has broader theoretical consequences than this. By showing the political and textual conditions that render the threshold between character and person permeable, the incident exposes the coloniality of our prevailing ontoepistemology of the human.
The counterhegemonic implications of this interpretation become apparent when we consider the circumstances that made it possible for Matigari to be mistaken for a human agitator. A fraught libidinal economy – fear of uprising and longing for liberation – combined with Ngug̃ i’̃ s rejection of European literary conventions of linear and unitary characterisation. The result was a discursive register that anxiously traversed the interstices of the episteme, charting the contingency and constructedness of the boundary separating fiction and reality with such acuity as to momentarily deborder the epistemic binary. On this reading, the Matigari incident offers a glimpse of what Sylvia Wynter calls sociogeny, the process by which humans invent themselves socially and culturally, specifically through the telling of stories – origin stories, cosmogonies, and descriptive statements that claim to reveal the essence of the human. Bringing Wynter into conversation with Paul de Man (on allegory) and Jacques Derrida (on invention), I present Matigari’s intervention as a spectral effect of the incomplete repression of sociogeny by biocentric discourses of human life and subjectivity. My claim is that the dominance of the colonial vision of “Man” can be challenged by the dissemination of narratives that are avowedly sociogenic and willing to confront the political and philosophical consequences of a form of self-invention that has been defined as impossible.
According to a popular definition, speculative fiction differs from science fiction/fantasy in eschewing the supernatural, limiting its imaginative projections to new combinations of events that have actually occurred. This explains the politicality of speculative fiction: it often contains a warning about potential futures. But what are the risks of elevating the importance of “actual” events in this way? What ontoepistemological presuppositions guide the appeal to reality over the supernatural? In this paper, I argue that political visions of the future speculate in the economic sense of the term, staking their plausibility on the stability of the boundary between fact and fiction. But what this gesture also risks, however inadvertently, is the reinscription of the truth regime that underwrites the colonial logics of race and gender.
To explain this, I read Octavia E. Butler’s Earthseed books, Parable of the Sower and Parable of the Talents. Butler’s protagonist is Lauren, the young survivor of near- apocalyptic social collapse who wanders the wasteland of early twenty-first century America, guided by a spiritual calling. Lauren is the founder of Earthseed, the religion she has formed from her own personal reflections, and which she considers to be ‘the literal truth’. This unwavering faith provides the conviction and purpose that allows Lauren to inspire a small group of followers and create a self-sufficient community, a beacon of safety in a very dangerous world. However, Lauren’s denial of the fictive and metaphorical content of her discourse also authorises ‘the Destiny’, her eschatological prophecy that highlights the connection between specularity and coloniality.
The Handmaid’s Tale has become one of the most politically salient representations of slavery in recent decades, thanks, in part, to a high- profile television adaptation and the striking use of Handmaid costumes by reproductive rights activists. But Handmaid is a speculative story of white slavery, leading critics to accuse Atwood of erasing race and appropriating African American history. In this paper, I argue that the text’s deracination of slavery is not so much a matter of colour-blind racism or political insensitivity, but rather an intervention that attempts to map a metaphysical terrain of slavery by ontologising race and gender. This gesture cannot be explained away as a mere product of the text’s mid-eighties pre-intersectional context. As the ongoing fascination with Handmaid attests, the image of slavery that Atwood offers speaks directly to the questions of autonomy and agency that animate our current conjunctures.
My suggestion is that Handmaid deploys slavery as a discursive operator to organise and secure the affective and libidinal economies of ‘hegemonic feminism’ – a form of predominantly white feminism that mounts a dialectical battle with patriarchy by essentialising femininity and reproduction. As Sophie Lewis has recently explained, Handmaid offers a ‘wishful scenario’ in which the complicating factors of trans and nonbinary genders disappear along with Blackness, creating a cisheteronormative foundation for women’s rights while avoiding feminism’s troubling history of complicity with anti-Blackness. Drawing on the work of Saidiya Hartman and Sylvia Wynter, I argue that the text uses the figure of slavery to raise the stakes of this fantasy. Through close readings of Handmaid’s depiction of domestic servitude and its Linnaean naturalisation of hierarchical categories of race and gender, I unravel the narrational strategies that enable representations of enslavement to reinscribe the ontological premises of social death.
David Graeber’s Debt: The First 5,000 Years is a work of Left populism that attempts to displace hegemonic narratives of economic debt, particularly the moral axiom that debts must be repaid. It’s also an example of strategic foundationalism. Graeber sets out to prove that his counternarrative is supported by incontestable empirical evidence, giving him recourse to objectivism and positivism, and prompting him to dismiss Nietzsche’s influential work on debt as ‘fantasy’.
In this paper, I explain the political consequences of the different approaches taken by Graeber and Nietzsche. From this I suggest that Graeber is trying to mitigate the anxiety caused by the disappearance of the ground of signification. Hoping to produce a conceptually accessible and convincing text, Graeber offers what Derrida calls the ‘reassuring certitude’ of an illusory foundation. But this epistemic premise is a gamble. While the strategic foundationalism of Debt gives it counterhegemonic force, it risks reinscribing and perpetuating the very economic logic that Graeber aims to displace. To draw out the relationship between fictionality and risk, I describe Debt as a speculative narrative: an imaginative retelling of the past that also speculates in the economic sense, staking something on a profitable return in the future.
Given that we’re now living in a time of epistemic uncertainty – the so-called post-truth era – I think we should take the risks of strategic foundationalism seriously. What we owe to Graeber, perhaps, is to attend closely to the effects of his wager.
Over 20 years since it began, the recognition debate rages on in postcolonial thought, queer theory, and trans theory. The question of how we might act to resist or refuse the violent interpellations of liberal personhood seems more urgent today than ever. In this paper, I suggest that a way to think this resistance is through consideration of the neurotypicality of hegemonic subject formation.
Following Erin Manning and Fred Moten, I see neurotypicality as a matrix of regulatory norms that work to govern subjectivity through the construction of a purportedly neutral ground of rationality and propriety. As neurotypicality naturalises and enforces many of the political and ontological presuppositions of colonial cisheteropatriarchy – by, for example, pathologising dependence and relationality – I consider it to be a necessary site for resistance within and alongside the sexual politics of freedom.
I approach this topic through a reading of a recent neuroqueer science fiction novel, An Unkindness of Ghosts by Rivers Solomon. The protagonist, Aster, is an enslaved subaltern worker in the isolated community of a huge ship lost in deep space. Being black, queer, and non-binary, Aster struggles to survive within the oppressive caste system that orders the society of the ship. But her neurodivergence makes her an actively disruptive force. Unable to conform to the strictures of deference and proper behaviour, Aster operates outside the frame of recognition with a strategic fugitivity that the ruling class cannot contain.
In this paper I explain how Derrida developed ‘ex-appropriation’, his term for the movement of expropriation that accompanies every appropriation. More than a simple deconstruction of the appropriation/expropriation binary, Derrida wants ex-appropriation to name the interruption or displacement of any dialectic of appropriation, such as those proposed by Hegel and Marx. I aim to provide some context for Derrida’s intervention by looking at his early suggestions that différance exceeds both speculative and materialist dialectical systems. I also try to show that ex-appropriation has fruitful connections to more familiar Derridean themes, like justice and the gift.
Why would anyone wish to claim the right not to have rights? According to Giorgio Agamben, this is precisely what was attempted by the Franciscan monks of the thirteenth century, as part of their struggle to live without worldly goods. In renouncing all forms of ownership, the monks argued that they should be allowed to use goods and services for free without possessing them; recognising that they would therefore be living outside the law, the monks proposed to give up their rights as well as their duties and responsibilities. Agamben goes on to develop a philosophy of use as an alternative to ownership. This is central to his theory of antinomianism and his critique of biopolitics.
In this paper, I will consider the implications of these ideas for human rights law. Is there a way to enable people who have lost their rights, the stateless, for example, to use rights rather than possess them? This leads us to reflect on the fact that human rights law presupposes that rights are possessive. Even while asserting rights as ‘inalienable’, the aspirational early documents such as the UDHR accept that rights can be claimed, granted, or withheld. This gives nation-states huge power over citizens and noncitizens alike. Even states that have agreed to ratify aspects of international human rights law retain the ability to dispossess citizens of rights.
The history of rights reveals them to be a technology of control rather than liberation. Developed alongside proprietary notions of subjectivity in early capitalism, rights were simply another possession that enabled propertied men to codify their social power in politico-juridical terms. The wider distribution of rights in the modern era has not changed their possessive nature.
Drawing from contemporary fiction and continental political philosophy, I argue that what prevents human rights law from ensuring that humans have safe, happy, and liveable lives is the fact that rights are possessive. What we need instead is a new concept of collective sovereignty in which power and goods cannot be individually owned and thus not taken away.
To read about refugees today is to encounter the unapologetic brutality of contemporary biopolitics. Stories and reports constantly remind us that western immigration policies are regimes of exclusion and abandonment that deny certain groups the rights to move, enter, and seek safety. But can such narratives hope to do more than simply expose these injustices? Can fiction, in particular, challenge the conceptual premises of closed borders?
In this paper, I look for answers in four recent texts: Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie’s Americanah, Mohsin Hamid’s Exit West, Bhanu Kapil’s Ban en Banlieue, and Nam Le’s The Boat. These works all assert the right to movement. They show the disastrous consequences of fortress states, and some of them also test the conventions of the novel form, breaching the boundaries of discipline to enact a vision of unhindered mobility.
But the radical potential of these texts is defined, I argue, by their approach to subjectivity. Stories about travel have a tendency to employ tropes of linear character development: physical journeys, with their attendant hardships, culture shocks, and notions of arrival, happen to occur alongside internal journeys of selfhood, in which the protagonist develops and matures into a complete person. This literary technique produces texts that have a persuasive symmetry and disseminate a story of human life that has political effects. As Joseph Slaughter has observed, the concept of subjectivity presented in the coming-of-age story reinforces the model of citizenship codified in national constitutions and human rights discourses: citizens gradually develop the social and political skills necessary to act responsibly and earn the rights bestowed by the state. This conception of the citizen-subject empowers the state with biopolitical tools to determine who may join the polity.
To avoid complicity with the very doctrines that they seek to question, fictions of movement must reject myths of individual development and contend with the political implications of the image of human life that they present.
This is an open access article distributed under the terms of a Creative Commons license (CC BY-NC-ND 3.0).
Drawing on Derrida's motifs of the gift and the dance, I offer a topology of birthsex, the ontological category produced by Orbán's law of immutable, dichotomous sexual dimorphism. I observe the movements of ipseity to show how Orbán's placement of the birthsex legislation within his pandemic programme enabled him to define transgenderism as a dangerous and foreign illness that requires an immunising response. Finally, to consider the racial and colonial context of this assault on trans, intersex, and nonbinary lives, I turn to María Lugones and her work on the coloniality of gender, finding her choreography of resistance to be in step with Derrida's.
Sylvia Wynter is one of the key thinkers in decolonial studies today. In a series of longform essays and interviews stretching back to the mid-1970s, Wynter assembles an encyclopaedic array of cross-disciplinary sources to claim that the subject of European humanism is not in fact the human but actually “Man,” a specific mode of human life that universalises and naturalises its own culture, thereby “overrepresenting” itself as the human as such. This idea, along with Wynter’s proposed solution—a new counterhumanism devoted for the first time to the wellbeing of humanity in its entirety—is increasingly influential across the humanities. Part of the reason for this success may be Wynter’s relationship with European philosophy, which sets her apart from many of her contemporaries in decolonial studies. Unlike those who consider it to be irremediably infused with the axioms of coloniality, Wynter does not reject the tradition but engages with it, weaving carefully selected fragments of continental thought into her labyrinthine narratives. My paper will explore Wynter’s use of Jacques Derrida. Over the past 20 years, Derrida’s later works have become canonical for posthumanism in general and critical animal studies in particular: fields that are often criticised by scholars in decolonial and Black studies for their failure to adequately contend with colonialism and white supremacy. Wynter’s reading of Derrida repositions him within these debates without excusing his participation in a tradition that is yet to reckon with its colonial complicities. For such a reckoning to be possible, I want to suggest, the achievements of poststructuralism and deconstruction must be put to new use, not jettisoned altogether.
Current efforts to account for the coloniality of our prevailing political formations must reckon with the contingency and constructedness of the narratives that have produced them. If this has so far proven impossible, it is not only because the “truthfulness” of these narratives is constitutive of the episteme of Man, thus shaping possibility itself, but also because this regime is sustained by the discursive form in which truthfulness is held in suspension: the novel. Representation is one lens through which to examine this relationship. As well as being a representational medium that is fundamentally depictive and symbolic, the novel is imaginative, requiring and inspiring representation in thought, while also being a forum for reconceiving the systems of representation and delegation intrinsic to contemporary electoral democracies. Because these three forms of representation have contributed to what Sylvia Wynter calls the “overrepresentation” of Man—the synecdochic belief that the subject of European humanism stands for the human in general—the novel is a potential source of anticolonial narratives.
In Annalee Newitz’s Autonomous, set in 2144, advances in artificial intelligence have seen robots gain consciousness. In its depiction of nonhuman thought processes, the novel reveals that one of the speculative narratives of Man—the Kantian-Hegelian claim that the putative universality of imaginative self-representation legitimises political representation—corresponds more closely with robot consciousness than it does with human consciousness. In showing that this narrative portrays the figure of mechanistic philosophy, not humanity in total, Autonomous prepares the way for a counternarrative of representation to appear.
Trans studies is at a crossroads, poised to make a postdisciplinary turn and forge meaningful connections across institutional silos for the first time. As we face this juncture, I suggest we take inspiration from Sylvia Wynter’s work on the role of academic disciplines within the knowledge regimes of coloniality. Crucial to the Western episteme, Wynter argues, is the belief that the founding sociogenic narratives of Man are universally true, a belief that is ratified and disseminated by the academy, especially via the disciplinary separation of the natural sciences from the humanities and social sciences (Wynter 2003). To transform the episteme and threaten the hegemony of Man that it sustains, it will thus be necessary to overcome this disciplinary schism. Because the model of immutable sexual dimorphism currently espoused by the anti-trans movement is a colonial construct that is enshrined as common sense within the present truth regime, a prerequisite for trans liberation is the end of the episteme of Man, as scholars have observed (e.g., Adamson 2022). My proposal, therefore, is that trans studies should seize the opportunity of its postdisciplinary turn in an ambitious effort to remake the disciplines as such. If we are transing trans studies, so to speak, let us also trans the disciplines through an avowedly anticolonial displacement of biocentric ontoepistemologies.
In conversation with scholars in Black studies, I argue that this transformation should be both transversal, cutting across existing lines of study and structure from within the crosscurrents and undercommons of the university with fugitivity (Snorton 2017), and trans/figurative, irreverently and nonhierarchically evoking the redefinition of the human produced by the divine metamorphosis of Christ (Bey 2022) while transforming the figures, tropes, and metaphors that regulate legibility and possibility. Finally, I propose that we break decisively with the epistemic conditions of sociogenic exclusion by asserting the specularity of our narratives. To reject of the doctrine of universal truth and embrace poiesis and invention is perhaps the most crucial step towards anticolonial trans liberation, but it is also the most difficult, demanding a critical examination of our attachments to scientific reason, including the temptation to historicise and universalise, thereby to legitimise, trans life (Everhart 2022). If this speculative leap represents a major challenge to all of us—desedimenting the projects of the humanities and social sciences as profoundly as the empiricism of the natural sciences—then perhaps this shared unmooring is a postdisciplinary ground zero from which we begin.
Artistic practices that envisage radical democratic futures do so from within the imbrications of three senses of “representation.” Firstly, artistic works may resemble, depict, or symbolically stand for objects and ideas. Secondly, as products of the imagination, such works require and inspire representation in thought. Thirdly, in reimagining political formations, they often query the systems of representation and delegation intrinsic to contemporary electoral democracies. Following Sylvia Wynter, I argue that it is crucial to examine how aesthetic practices explore and problematise these forms of representation (and the connections between them) in order to chart their political vectors. Wynter shows that the hegemony of “Man”—the subject modelled on the white cisheteronormative man of the Global North—was achieved via the creation of a universalised synecdoche in which part of humanity stands for the whole, allowing Man to “overrepresent” itself as the human as such. To what extent can prefigurative visions of radical futures, themselves synecdochic, unsettle colonial matrices of representation?
In Annalee Newitz’s Autonomous, set in 2144, advances in artificial intelligence have seen robots gain consciousness. In its depiction of nonhuman thought processes, the novel reveals that one of the speculative narratives of Man—the Kantian-Hegelian claim that the putative universality of imaginative self-representation legitimises political representation—corresponds more closely with robot consciousness than it does with human consciousness. In showing that this narrative portrays the figure of mechanistic philosophy, not humanity in total, Autonomous prepares the way for a counternarrative of representation to appear.
In her 1990 essay “Beyond Miranda’s Meanings,” Sylvia Wynter offers an adaptation of the notion of différance, substituting the motif of deferral for that of deference in order to name the forms of social domination and control that are produced when differences are ontologised by colonial narratives. Given that this can be explained without recourse to Derrida, we might wonder why Wynter alludes to him here; today’s decolonial scholars might even ask whether this represents Wynter’s own deference to the academic trend of deconstruction, a philosophical discourse that emerges from the very colonial narratives that Wynter aims to displace. Derrida scholars, on the other hand, could be forgiven for wondering what Wynter’s countersignature of différance contributes, given Derrida’s well-known attention to the hierarchies and priorities generated by oppositional binaries. In this paper, I argue that Wynter’s intervention is inventive and productive for both fields of study, giving decolonial scholars a promising way to unravel some of the complexities of Wynter’s epistemology, and Derrida scholars an example of how to address contemporary concerns that deconstructive approaches are irremediably beholden to the coloniality of their European context.
Wynter’s project is devoted to challenging the reign of Man, the form of life that demands deferential behaviour from the racialised and colonised groups that it constructs as less than human. According to Wynter, this domination can be unsettled with heretical counter-exertions: narratives of subjectivity formulated in breach of the logical or significatory terms of the prevailing episteme. Such breaches are comparable, I propose, to what Derrida calls a generalised anacoluthon, an interruption that introduces a new form, leaving the previous form unfinished. In an event of this kind, laws and conventions of imposed deference are interrupted, creating opportunities for alternative relationalities and socialities; such ruptures may contribute to an anacoluthic process in which the sociogenic codes of Man are rewritten. Turning to two foundational texts of deference and rebellion—The Tempest and Antigone—I ask whether figures of disobedience offer the chance for us to articulate a decolonial demand for the right to anacoluthon.
Despite growing awareness of the diversity of neurocognitive functioning, a matrix of norms that pathologise neurodivergent behaviours, bodyminds, and experiences remains operative. Forms of relationality and sociality associated with autism, for example, are routinely characterised as withdrawn, self- enclosed, and so on – testament to the persistence of a clinical tradition exemplified by Leo Kanner’s 1943 description of the “aloneness” of the neurodivergent children he studied, and their “inability to relate.” In this paper, I aim to contribute to the denaturalisation of these norms by historicising them and tracing the influence of one of their guiding presuppositions: the dialectic of recognition. As recent work from the neuroqueer movement has shown, the dialectic of recognition endows dominant notions of sameness and otherness with sociopolitical and medicolegal force, constructing neurodivergent people as developmentally disordered enigmas who lack full personhood, and interpellating them as patients to be subjected to diagnostic practices that have emerged from a violent tradition.
But how did the dialectic of recognition – a specific narrative of relational subjectivity – attain its hegemonic position? Among the many possible answers, the one I want to propose examines the literary dissemination of the dialectic, particularly its role in the emergence of the European novel form in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Literary critics such as Franco Moretti have argued that the Bildungsroman, for example, the coming-of-age story that portrays the character formation and individuation of its protagonist, closely follows the dialectic of recognition, producing a prescriptive genre that operates as a regulative technology of citizenship. My claim is that the image of mature, assimilated personality presented by the Bildungsroman shaped the work of Freud, Piaget, and other thinkers who would lay the groundwork for the concept of autism. By enshrining the dialectic within a scientific paradigm, the architects of neuronormativity facilitated the colonisation of subjectivity by a recognitive ideal, stigmatising opacity, interdependency, and non-normative relationalities.
In 1986, the Kenyan authorities attempted to apprehend a fictional character. Alarmed by reports of a mysterious stranger roaming the country making revolutionary pronouncements, President Daniel arap Moi issued a warrant for the arrest of the troublemaker, only to discover that this “Matigari” was merely the eponymous protagonist of Ngug̃ ĩ wa Thiong’o’s latest novel, the publication of which had caused a minor sensation within Kenya’s working class. Because the president’s next move was to ban the book, this strange incident, frequently discussed by Ngug̃ ĩ himself, is often used to illustrate the paranoia and heavy-handedness of the Moi regime. In this paper, I argue that the event has broader theoretical consequences than this. By showing the political and textual conditions that render the threshold between character and person permeable, the incident exposes the coloniality of our prevailing ontoepistemology of the human.
The counterhegemonic implications of this interpretation become apparent when we consider the circumstances that made it possible for Matigari to be mistaken for a human agitator. A fraught libidinal economy – fear of uprising and longing for liberation – combined with Ngug̃ i’̃ s rejection of European literary conventions of linear and unitary characterisation. The result was a discursive register that anxiously traversed the interstices of the episteme, charting the contingency and constructedness of the boundary separating fiction and reality with such acuity as to momentarily deborder the epistemic binary. On this reading, the Matigari incident offers a glimpse of what Sylvia Wynter calls sociogeny, the process by which humans invent themselves socially and culturally, specifically through the telling of stories – origin stories, cosmogonies, and descriptive statements that claim to reveal the essence of the human. Bringing Wynter into conversation with Paul de Man (on allegory) and Jacques Derrida (on invention), I present Matigari’s intervention as a spectral effect of the incomplete repression of sociogeny by biocentric discourses of human life and subjectivity. My claim is that the dominance of the colonial vision of “Man” can be challenged by the dissemination of narratives that are avowedly sociogenic and willing to confront the political and philosophical consequences of a form of self-invention that has been defined as impossible.
According to a popular definition, speculative fiction differs from science fiction/fantasy in eschewing the supernatural, limiting its imaginative projections to new combinations of events that have actually occurred. This explains the politicality of speculative fiction: it often contains a warning about potential futures. But what are the risks of elevating the importance of “actual” events in this way? What ontoepistemological presuppositions guide the appeal to reality over the supernatural? In this paper, I argue that political visions of the future speculate in the economic sense of the term, staking their plausibility on the stability of the boundary between fact and fiction. But what this gesture also risks, however inadvertently, is the reinscription of the truth regime that underwrites the colonial logics of race and gender.
To explain this, I read Octavia E. Butler’s Earthseed books, Parable of the Sower and Parable of the Talents. Butler’s protagonist is Lauren, the young survivor of near- apocalyptic social collapse who wanders the wasteland of early twenty-first century America, guided by a spiritual calling. Lauren is the founder of Earthseed, the religion she has formed from her own personal reflections, and which she considers to be ‘the literal truth’. This unwavering faith provides the conviction and purpose that allows Lauren to inspire a small group of followers and create a self-sufficient community, a beacon of safety in a very dangerous world. However, Lauren’s denial of the fictive and metaphorical content of her discourse also authorises ‘the Destiny’, her eschatological prophecy that highlights the connection between specularity and coloniality.
The Handmaid’s Tale has become one of the most politically salient representations of slavery in recent decades, thanks, in part, to a high- profile television adaptation and the striking use of Handmaid costumes by reproductive rights activists. But Handmaid is a speculative story of white slavery, leading critics to accuse Atwood of erasing race and appropriating African American history. In this paper, I argue that the text’s deracination of slavery is not so much a matter of colour-blind racism or political insensitivity, but rather an intervention that attempts to map a metaphysical terrain of slavery by ontologising race and gender. This gesture cannot be explained away as a mere product of the text’s mid-eighties pre-intersectional context. As the ongoing fascination with Handmaid attests, the image of slavery that Atwood offers speaks directly to the questions of autonomy and agency that animate our current conjunctures.
My suggestion is that Handmaid deploys slavery as a discursive operator to organise and secure the affective and libidinal economies of ‘hegemonic feminism’ – a form of predominantly white feminism that mounts a dialectical battle with patriarchy by essentialising femininity and reproduction. As Sophie Lewis has recently explained, Handmaid offers a ‘wishful scenario’ in which the complicating factors of trans and nonbinary genders disappear along with Blackness, creating a cisheteronormative foundation for women’s rights while avoiding feminism’s troubling history of complicity with anti-Blackness. Drawing on the work of Saidiya Hartman and Sylvia Wynter, I argue that the text uses the figure of slavery to raise the stakes of this fantasy. Through close readings of Handmaid’s depiction of domestic servitude and its Linnaean naturalisation of hierarchical categories of race and gender, I unravel the narrational strategies that enable representations of enslavement to reinscribe the ontological premises of social death.
David Graeber’s Debt: The First 5,000 Years is a work of Left populism that attempts to displace hegemonic narratives of economic debt, particularly the moral axiom that debts must be repaid. It’s also an example of strategic foundationalism. Graeber sets out to prove that his counternarrative is supported by incontestable empirical evidence, giving him recourse to objectivism and positivism, and prompting him to dismiss Nietzsche’s influential work on debt as ‘fantasy’.
In this paper, I explain the political consequences of the different approaches taken by Graeber and Nietzsche. From this I suggest that Graeber is trying to mitigate the anxiety caused by the disappearance of the ground of signification. Hoping to produce a conceptually accessible and convincing text, Graeber offers what Derrida calls the ‘reassuring certitude’ of an illusory foundation. But this epistemic premise is a gamble. While the strategic foundationalism of Debt gives it counterhegemonic force, it risks reinscribing and perpetuating the very economic logic that Graeber aims to displace. To draw out the relationship between fictionality and risk, I describe Debt as a speculative narrative: an imaginative retelling of the past that also speculates in the economic sense, staking something on a profitable return in the future.
Given that we’re now living in a time of epistemic uncertainty – the so-called post-truth era – I think we should take the risks of strategic foundationalism seriously. What we owe to Graeber, perhaps, is to attend closely to the effects of his wager.
Over 20 years since it began, the recognition debate rages on in postcolonial thought, queer theory, and trans theory. The question of how we might act to resist or refuse the violent interpellations of liberal personhood seems more urgent today than ever. In this paper, I suggest that a way to think this resistance is through consideration of the neurotypicality of hegemonic subject formation.
Following Erin Manning and Fred Moten, I see neurotypicality as a matrix of regulatory norms that work to govern subjectivity through the construction of a purportedly neutral ground of rationality and propriety. As neurotypicality naturalises and enforces many of the political and ontological presuppositions of colonial cisheteropatriarchy – by, for example, pathologising dependence and relationality – I consider it to be a necessary site for resistance within and alongside the sexual politics of freedom.
I approach this topic through a reading of a recent neuroqueer science fiction novel, An Unkindness of Ghosts by Rivers Solomon. The protagonist, Aster, is an enslaved subaltern worker in the isolated community of a huge ship lost in deep space. Being black, queer, and non-binary, Aster struggles to survive within the oppressive caste system that orders the society of the ship. But her neurodivergence makes her an actively disruptive force. Unable to conform to the strictures of deference and proper behaviour, Aster operates outside the frame of recognition with a strategic fugitivity that the ruling class cannot contain.
In this paper I explain how Derrida developed ‘ex-appropriation’, his term for the movement of expropriation that accompanies every appropriation. More than a simple deconstruction of the appropriation/expropriation binary, Derrida wants ex-appropriation to name the interruption or displacement of any dialectic of appropriation, such as those proposed by Hegel and Marx. I aim to provide some context for Derrida’s intervention by looking at his early suggestions that différance exceeds both speculative and materialist dialectical systems. I also try to show that ex-appropriation has fruitful connections to more familiar Derridean themes, like justice and the gift.
Why would anyone wish to claim the right not to have rights? According to Giorgio Agamben, this is precisely what was attempted by the Franciscan monks of the thirteenth century, as part of their struggle to live without worldly goods. In renouncing all forms of ownership, the monks argued that they should be allowed to use goods and services for free without possessing them; recognising that they would therefore be living outside the law, the monks proposed to give up their rights as well as their duties and responsibilities. Agamben goes on to develop a philosophy of use as an alternative to ownership. This is central to his theory of antinomianism and his critique of biopolitics.
In this paper, I will consider the implications of these ideas for human rights law. Is there a way to enable people who have lost their rights, the stateless, for example, to use rights rather than possess them? This leads us to reflect on the fact that human rights law presupposes that rights are possessive. Even while asserting rights as ‘inalienable’, the aspirational early documents such as the UDHR accept that rights can be claimed, granted, or withheld. This gives nation-states huge power over citizens and noncitizens alike. Even states that have agreed to ratify aspects of international human rights law retain the ability to dispossess citizens of rights.
The history of rights reveals them to be a technology of control rather than liberation. Developed alongside proprietary notions of subjectivity in early capitalism, rights were simply another possession that enabled propertied men to codify their social power in politico-juridical terms. The wider distribution of rights in the modern era has not changed their possessive nature.
Drawing from contemporary fiction and continental political philosophy, I argue that what prevents human rights law from ensuring that humans have safe, happy, and liveable lives is the fact that rights are possessive. What we need instead is a new concept of collective sovereignty in which power and goods cannot be individually owned and thus not taken away.
To read about refugees today is to encounter the unapologetic brutality of contemporary biopolitics. Stories and reports constantly remind us that western immigration policies are regimes of exclusion and abandonment that deny certain groups the rights to move, enter, and seek safety. But can such narratives hope to do more than simply expose these injustices? Can fiction, in particular, challenge the conceptual premises of closed borders?
In this paper, I look for answers in four recent texts: Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie’s Americanah, Mohsin Hamid’s Exit West, Bhanu Kapil’s Ban en Banlieue, and Nam Le’s The Boat. These works all assert the right to movement. They show the disastrous consequences of fortress states, and some of them also test the conventions of the novel form, breaching the boundaries of discipline to enact a vision of unhindered mobility.
But the radical potential of these texts is defined, I argue, by their approach to subjectivity. Stories about travel have a tendency to employ tropes of linear character development: physical journeys, with their attendant hardships, culture shocks, and notions of arrival, happen to occur alongside internal journeys of selfhood, in which the protagonist develops and matures into a complete person. This literary technique produces texts that have a persuasive symmetry and disseminate a story of human life that has political effects. As Joseph Slaughter has observed, the concept of subjectivity presented in the coming-of-age story reinforces the model of citizenship codified in national constitutions and human rights discourses: citizens gradually develop the social and political skills necessary to act responsibly and earn the rights bestowed by the state. This conception of the citizen-subject empowers the state with biopolitical tools to determine who may join the polity.
To avoid complicity with the very doctrines that they seek to question, fictions of movement must reject myths of individual development and contend with the political implications of the image of human life that they present.
Agamben's critique of deconstruction culminates in the charge that Derrida offers no solutions to the violence of state sovereignty. For Agamben, Derrida's reading of the aporia of law amounts to an infinite deferral of the resolution to the dilemma. Dismissing Derrida's suggestion that we reform our political and legal institutions by embedding an ethics of hospitality, Agamben calls for an overturning of the law that inaugurates nothing less than a new era of humanity. Agamben's critique is valuable to scholars of deconstruction because his work is not directly antithetical to Derrida's — there are moments of intersection — and yet their conclusions remain incompatible. In this paper, I consider the intersection of citizenship, and locate the ontological foundations of their dispute over the nature of the messianic and the future of politics.
Both thinkers adapt Arendt's theory of citizenship, particularly her view that human rights fail to protect people from state violence. This becomes a cornerstone of Agamben's concept of biopolitics: the incorporation of rights in law simply captures human life within the political, by destroying the traditional division of zoē and bios. Derrida disputes Agamben's interpretation of these categories of life, arguing that citizenship can be redeemed if it incorporates an ethical responsibility to the Other. This commitment to alterity has its roots in Derrida's notion of the affirmative foundation of language, which also explains his approach to the messianic: the irreducible undecidability of both the promise and 'the perhaps' forecloses eschatology. Agamben also roots politics in an ontology of language, but concludes that the only way to recover 'language-in-itself' from its abandonment in politics is a redemptive deactivation of this modality of being.
The aim of my paper is to show that a close reading of citizenship provides a route through some of the more elusive moments in Derrida and Agamben. I also argue that this debate can inform political action; in the process of drawing their different conclusions about the future, the two thinkers reveal the nature and location of a constitutive violence that we may wish to challenge.