Something that Feels Like Something

Abstract

This issue of Departures asks us to honor and reckon with how we might live—ethically, resiliently, poetically, politically, and unapologetically—as well as how we might die. The essays show us how our lives and what we create as artists and writers might perform life-saving and life-affirming work . They also demonstrate how the ordinary and the extraordinary intersect in our daily existences, giving us glimpses into what Kathleen Stewart has described as ordinary affects: the varied, surging capacities to affect and be affected that give everyday life the quality of a continual motion of relations, scenes, contingencies, and emergences. They're things that happen. They happen in impulses, sensations, expectations, daydreams, encounters, and habits of relating, in strategies and failures, in forms of persuasion, contagion, and compulsion, in modes of attention, attachment, and agency, and in publics and social worlds of all kinds that catch people up in something that feels like some thing.1Ordinary affects are “public feelings”—trauma, boundary crossing, shame, praise, systems that circulate knowledges and power relations—and also the intimacies and narratives that “give circuits and …