Retro I: Return Forward

Abstract

Retro I: Return Forward Alyson Cole and Kyoo Lee We thought we were going RETRO but then we could not proceed at all, and here we are beginning to return forward—still in the midst of the coronavirus pandemic. Preparation for this inaugural issue on RETRO, delayed due to COVID-19, has been particularly challenging. The anxiety, emergency, sickness, devastation, death, growing precarity on every register … all of that disrupted many lives so radically and rapidly, not to mention critically impacting our usual “scholarly productions.” Now, time itself seems to have some cuttingly new meanings. These days it also seems to have become quite common to refer to the “before time” to designate pre-Covid, and to hesitantly broach the possibility of a post-Covid existence. For now, though, and for the foreseeable, there’s just this Covid-time, a liminal void beyond the time/space continuum. Looking back at our “pre-Covid” call for papers for the RETRO issue and re-registering the core idea behind it, we are struck by some of its retroactive resonance with the current mid-pandemic pause we are grappling with across the globe. With all the rage and uncertainty today, the current affect of the moment seems somewhat regressive—a falling back, pulling back, a sensation of perpetual déjà vu accompanying a sense of setback. What happened to and is coming after the post-isms? Rather than going “forward” with all things [End Page iii] post-modern, post-structuralist, post-racial, post-feminist, post-political, etc., we seem to have turned, in part, to looking backward, reflectively or not. This “feel” (temporal, affective) is about a directionality that is potentially resurrectional or else just retraceable. The concept RETRO seems to capture those modes, moves, and moods. Retro can be an overview (a “retro-spective”), leading to a reactive relapse and retreat, or a reframed reinvention, even both. Our editorial thinking is prompted by the distinctively retrograde politics and culture currently on display, including retro-fashion, where what is old becomes “new” again—epochally or apocalyptically, depending on whom you ask. Sometimes performed ironically and/or cynically in cyclical cultural ecology, sometimes enacted as a reinvigorated return to a certain agenda and/or emancipatory project, often with self-balancing irony muted or sharpened, retro has become superlatively alive these days, like it or not, and such de/re-generative retro taken as a modal engine for re-formative and re-creative engagements needs to be theorized more fully. Jessica Locke and David M. Peña-Guzmán’s article, “The Groundlessness of Philosophy: Critiquing the Identity of a Discipline,” concerns re-forming and re-engaging philosophy as an academic discipline. Questioning the problematic presumption that has been marginalizing “non-Western” philosophy since the eighteenth century, and seeking to go beyond a “diversity and inclusion” model that simply revises the standard canon, they propose a more radically effective re-turn, while exploring the transhistorical and transnational concept and power of “groundlessness.” Jami Weinstein’s “Vital Philology: On How to Foil the Immanent Extinction of Critique,” a meta-critique of the neoliberal political economy of certain philosophical trends embodied, for instance, in the figures of the hipster and the anthropocence as the author sees them, proposes a kind of counter-retro approach, a “critical, vital form of philology—figured as both a scholarly practice and a way of life.” If the first two articles are (meta-)critiques of philosophical normativity including currency, the piece by Tuhin Bhattacharjee, “Antigone/Mother: Second Death and the Maternal in Lacan and Cavarero” reexamines and reworks psychoanalytic normativity and its reproductive futurism by refiguring Antigone’s “nothingness” as “the maternal body in all its traumatic fecundity.” Speaking of nothing complicated, Ruthann Robson’s article, “An Epistemology of the Envelope,” turns to the pre-digital mode of letters-in-envelopes to point to its feminist epistemological subversive potentials, the power of “the indecipherable retro.” Postmaster General DeJoy’s mucking with the USPS had not been exposed when this essay was accepted for publication, yet the themes of enveloping and cross-dressing were already central to it. [End Page iv] The tranScripts section in this issue features two sets of retro...