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Bleeding Forms: Beyond the Intifada

Abstract This essay considers the war in Gaza from the perspective of resistance as an anti-concept. It draws inspiration from the notion of the informe (formless) as described by Georges Bataille to understand how resistance acts as a formless operation that deforms the colonial structure. It argues that resistance overflows the condition it seeks to dismantle and bring down in the world. The paper explores the difference between Bataille's account of the operation of the formless and Frantz Fanon's understanding of the "tabula rasa," highlighting how resistance can break down, deform, and distort following this capacity to deform historically. However, the Palestinian resistance did not achieve the radical break, or what Frantz Fanon describes as the minimum demand of the colonized, the clean slate from which a genuine decolonization can ensue. The essay explores how the Palestinian resistance initiated on October 7 a meticulously orchestrated offensive maneuver that surpassed the spontaneous uprisings of previous intifadas. It was a calculated decision to deform the existing order. The essay points to the novel development in Palestinian resistance where the decision to instigate this process of decomposition has become wedded to a decider and a locus, while highlighting some of the pitfalls of this development. It argues that the current moment is marked by a decomposition of the colonial order without decolonization.

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Concretion

Abstract The ruins of wrecked ships are often so thoroughly dispersed by their submarine environments as to practically vanish. Sometimes, however, the conditions of a wreck's submergence create complex modes of material endurance. Concretion, which names both a substance that forms on certain immersed surfaces and the phenomenon of that substance's formation, is one such mode. Inspired by maritime-archeological objects and practices, this article asks how concretion—from the Latin concrēscĕre for “to grow together”—marks and reworks imperial (and other) presences at the seabed. The article develops a hermeneutics of benthic becoming at intersections in literary studies, critical theory, cultural geography, and recent subsea turns in the oceanic (and more broadly environmental) humanities. Wrecky concretion, I argue, configures the thickening presences of empire's remains in the course of their underwater lives and in company with seawater, marine organisms, and inanimate beings. In this way, manifestly imperial presences actively coincide with others—and with the agencies, memories, and affects such presences may be understood to express (and not). Pivotally informed by Édouard Glissant's critical deeps, Derek Walcott's “The Sea Is History” (1978), and the politics of memory enacted by the Slave Wrecks Project and Diving with a Purpose, I observe a few of the ways that concretion may be punctuating and revising oceanic spaces, memories, and times. If the world ocean has long been unevenly composed by modernity, capitalism, and empire, it has also been reforming the wrecked stuff it receives into unanticipated configurations, growings-together that these pages provisionally ascertain.

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The Modern, the Untimely, and the Planetary

Abstract This essay is a critical homage to Ranajit Guha, who passed away recently in his hundredth year. Through a rereading of Guha's bilingual oeuvre—including his later writings in Bengali—the essay explores Guha's rethinking of time as he started with Marxism, moved to a critique of historicism, then to a disavowal of history, on to postcolonial criticism, and ultimately to a cosmopolitical stance. It suggests that Guha's most important contribution to global critical theory is not his historiographical achievements but his unique phenomenology of time. Mobilizing both modern and nonmodern semiotic, grammatological, and aesthetic traditions, Guha reconceived time as a function of the limits and possibilities of human language and argued that common lives and subaltern subjects could not be accessed without admitting to the heterogenous temporal constitution—“time-knots” as he would call them—of the contemporary. Thinking with Guha helps us make the general argument that emancipatory politics demands a radical reopening of the question of time and a stepping aside of the framework of modernity—an argument that other erstwhile Subaltern Studies authors such as Dipesh Chakrabarty and Partha Chatterjee have recently made. The essay understands Guha's century-long political and intellectual journey as a metonym for our times, marked by an agonistic and unpredictable interplay of multiple pasts, losses, emergences, and futures.

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