This essay is a critical response to the emergence of “care” as the antidote to the multiple crises that plague the present. The call for care— intramural care, radical care, mutual aid, etc.—has proliferated in gender and sexuality studies, black studies, critical ethnic studies, and a variety of Left political projects. This intervention foregrounds the exhausting nature of care, and calls for a feminist theory that centers exhaustion. The authors read an archive of black feminist texts, including work by Patricia J. Williams and Nella Larsen, for feminist attachments to exhaustion as a necessary position from which to root our theorizing.

Taking as its starting point that legibility is made perceptible by an implied outside of illegibility, this essay asks if the nature of inquiry—about questions of blackness and sexuality—is that of a deferred knowing or if it is knowable at all. Does the very distinction between legibility and illegibility impart an element of refusal? When is questioning as a will to know not so very different from the interrogative of scientific racism, with its reification of discourses of mastery? When no amount of negation can extricate blackness from the inchoate space in which it resides, the author suggests, a phantasmatic structure wherein trauma and play cathect a compulsion to repeat might provide a means to tolerate the intolerable. Blackness here is not a fantasy of object loss, but a phantasmatic chiasmus.

This essay is a study of the (black) infans in both psychoanalysis and philosophy, most notably, in Sigmund Freud’s Entwurf (1895) and Jean-François Lyotard’s essay “Emma” in Misère de la philosophie. The essay follows three main lines of argument : 1) Why does the infans seem to convey not merely a principle of error, lie, and deception (proton pseudos) but a deceit that is deeply deemed to be the origin of sexuality’s truth? 2) On one notable occasion, Freud illustrates the pseudos by suggesting that it arises from the way that what is geschwärzten is made sense of by the infans: but what is it about sexuality that blackens, and how does it convey the false, rather than the true, implantation of a proton pseudos? 3) Finally, and quite generally, the essay concludes with a reading of a recent court case in which that primal blackening, or one might say, the way in which it is written, or facilitated, has been seen to do considerable harm to the infans with regard to the questions posed to it by sexuality.

This essay considers the fragility of social relations through an understudied action that reveals the limits of sociality: laughter. In Latina artist Xandra Ibarra’s performance piece Nude Laughing, the artist’s manic fit of laughter goes on for several minutes, suggesting that to face the contorted body of another subject laughing is to face the uneasy reality of encounter. Analyzing three iterations of Nude Laughing across geographic locales, the essay focuses in particular on a performance in Mexico City that culminated in an act of male aggression. The author reads this instance of woman’s laughter that resulted in violent retribution from men who fear being laughed at to conclude that the encounter with an/other’s body made strange through laughter, especially across difference, offers a radical possibility to engage with a feminist and queer ethics of encounter.

Through close listening to recordings in the Pacifica Radio Archives of Audre Lorde’s public radio broadcasts on wbai 99.5fm, this essay reevaluates Lorde’s characterization of media technologies as among the master’s tools and examines how she puts the radio to use in her activism and literature. In her construction of the biomythography Zami, for example, Lorde interfaces with the form, logic, and material bases of radio broadcasting in a series of interrelated techniques defined here as the text’s radiophonics. Although Lorde’s feminism presupposes a fundamental difference between “the organism” and “the machine,” there are several instances across her thinking when such distinctions do not hold. Synthesizing Lorde’s cultural feminism with Donna Haraway’s subversive cyborg protocols, the essay likewise aims to synthesize (but by no means resolve) the differences between the organism and the machine—an endeavor of interest to feminists seeking to imagine new myths for our media-technological tools.

Gina Kim’s 3D immersive vr trilogy—Bloodless (2017), Tearless (2020), and Comfortless (2023)—traces the twin legacy of “comfort women” and u.s. militaristic settler imperialism in South Korea by drawing attention to the presence of sex workers who have often been disregarded, dismissed, or simply treated as a national embarrassment. While the signs of the women’s presence are omnipresent in Kim’s vr films, the women featured appear only as ghosts. Through the spectral gaze, the films produce an acute sense of trauma for the viewer, who experiences a sensation of being trapped in a space that is closing in and a feeling of being disembodied. Rather than attempt to make a case for identifying with ghosts or being able to feel their trauma, this essay considers how the sense of being immersed within such uncanny spaces produces its own sense of distance and proximity, a critical as well as an emotional understanding that does not rely on the creation of any form of individual subjectivity.

Putting the question of legibility raised by theories of ontological exclusion into conversation with the tropology of rhetoric discussed by Paul de Man, this essay thinks Blackness, queerness, and sex as elements of the set of illegibles. Drawing on Lacan’s evocation of set theory to describe a relation not based on analogy but not allergic to comparison, a relation that posits a unity among heterogeneous elements, the author argues that the catachreses that constitute the set of illegibles pertain to what Lacan calls “lalangue,” the pre-Symbolic substrate of the signification whose foreclosure enables the order of meaning to emerge through a logic of difference.

This essay provides an introduction to the special issue of differences titled Unaccountably Queer, which commemorates the twentieth anniversary of Judith Butler’s contribution to moral philosophy, Giving an Account of Oneself (2005). Through Butler’s work, the introduction theorizes queer metarelationality as a vernacular ethical practice that is vital to queer life. Reframing queer theory’s debates over the antisocial thesis, the essay argues that Giving an Account of Oneself offers valuable insight for contemporary debates over critique and postcritique, queer and trans kinship, and the relationship between ethics and politics. The essays in the special issue consider Butler’s Giving an Account of Oneself in relation to a range of fields, specifically queer theory, Black studies, trans studies, disability studies, postcolonial theory, feminism, psychoanalysis, life writing, and narratology.

What happens to ethical discourse when it begins by interrogating the givenness of the moral subject? This question lies at the heart of Butler’s ethics. The stakes of that question emerge most saliently in Butler’s reading of Foucault in Giving an Account of Oneself, where they engage, specifically, a famous Foucauldian line from 1968: “Discourse is not life; its time is not yours.” How might we read, today, the political stakes of Butler’s ethical uptake of Foucault against the backdrop of the anti-authoritarian, anticolonial 1960s Tunisian scene that gave rise to Foucault’s comments about discourse and time? Responding to this question, this essay reframes Foucault’s antihumanism as explicitly anticolonial. In doing so, it brings to the fore crucial differences and overlaps between Foucault and Butler with regard to subjectivity, politics, and the question of the human.