It’s our thirtieth anniversary here at Qui Parle. Wondering how to honor this milestone—in a year that gave more reason for outcry than celebration—we turned to our title as a guiding frame: who speaks? Formulated as a question in the first weeks of 2017, this was, most immediately, a turn to thinking about speech today, be it free, double, or squarely violent. At the same time, it was a self-referential move. Who speaks when Qui Parle speaks? From its beginnings, Qui Parle has been a deeply collective project, with an astoundingly rapid generational turnover, and to capture it in its broadest essence would prove nearly impossible. None of us currently on the board of editors has been around for more than five years, so in a sense, we approach this anniversary with something of a short-term memory. But perhaps these shortcomings are the best testament to pay to the future of this collectivity, that it might keep growing, expanding, giving voice. We decided to reach back in time, offering up the limits of our collective memory as the catalyst for reunion, and gathering past voices from across and throughout these thirty years to testify as they saw fit to the journal, to speech, or simply to use this occasion as a timely soapbox.Here’s what we wrote:Dear Past Contributors,On the occasion of its 30th anniversary, Qui Parle is publishing a special issue on speech, gathering articles that consider the act of speech, the conditions of its practice, and its political and aesthetic ramifications. As part of this anniversary issue, we are inviting you, our past contributors, to write a brief response to the question “Who Speaks?” We reach out to you at a time of deepening social and political uncertainty, one which calls for critical reflection in diverse forms. As such, we hope you’ll accept this invitation to reflect in whatever way you see fit: critique, satire, anecdote, poetry, even illustration. We will collect your impressions as a dossier in this special issue. Contributions should be between 1–1000 words (or a visual equivalent) and submitted to us by April 21, 2017.Thank you for your contributions to Qui Parle across these 30 years. We look forward to hearing and seeing what you have to say!Sincerely,The Editors of Qui ParleHere’s how they, you, responded, arranged chronologically in order of appearance in the pages of the journal. We were grateful to receive so many kind words, well-wishings, anecdotes, critical reflections, and acute interventions. In the end, we settled on thirty contributions to best reflect the occasion (and so as not to overwhelm our generous publishers). They appear in this issue next to other previous contributors, as well as a series of new voices. They speak to and resonate with one another, yet they do not always agree. Between disciplines, generations, and critical perspectives, the voices in this collection insist on openness of the question itself, “who speaks?” Now we share their responses—and this issue—with you, our readers, in hopes of opening the conversation further. So here they are, thirty voices for thirty years. And here’s to thirty more. Authors included:Jared SextonJean-Luc NancyJ. Hillis MillerLisa Myōbun FreinkelKaren JacobsJohn CulbertAlexander García DüttmannMichael NaasLisa SamuelsJeff FortAra H. MerjianStuart J. Murray and Sara KendallGerhard RichterKaren FeldmanAlphonso LingisPaola BacchettaMarjorie PerloffJames MartelEli FriedlanderWayne KoestenbaumSimon PorzakJohn BrenkmanJoseph VoglMieke BalChristopher BrackenStefanos GeroulanosMartin CrowleyMichael MarderLisa Hofmann-KurodaPeter Connor and Avital Ronell cofounded Qui Parle at the University of California, Berkeley, in the late 1980s. The journal set up shop at the height of the conservative restoration, against the Reagan-Thatcher alliance and its full-scale assault on the public sector, including the institutions of higher learning and every black community from sea to shining sea. Connor, now a professor of French at Barnard College, contributed a brief prefatory note entitled “Under Construction” to the first volume of the journal. He wrote there, “Were Qui Parle to be constituted as a question, its primary sounding would reside in de Man’s work illuminating prosopopeia.”1 There can be no simple reading of a text, be it literary, philosophical or scientific, nor of the social text in the most general sense. Rather, the question must turn upon itself, no less than its putative object, as a matter of interpretation and, more important, as a matter of the forces at work in the interpretative activity under way. There is always the ascription of voice to what is otherwise silent, the attribution of a face or the placement of a mask.Connor commented further: “The title of the journal was indeed conceived in the spirit of Nietzsche’s insistent question ‘who speaks?,’ but also echoes the unmarked qui parle of Beckett’s Textes pour rien: ‘un qui parle en disant, tout en parlant, Qui parle, et de quoi, et un qui en tend, muet, sans comprendre, loin de tous.’”2 Much has been made of Beckett’s complication of authorship, but the qui parle on offer is, on closer examination, both unmarked and marked. Beckett is, contrary to Foucault’s critical appropriation, not dissolving the author into author function but establishing a tension between that dissolution and the persistence of speaking from another scene. The noted playwright and novelist did not write in the aforementioned Textes, “what does it matter who is speaking,” but offered the very different rendering, “what matter who’s speaking.”3 What matter indeed: the question of when and how the qui parle is marked or unmarked or remarked is the aporia that constitutes the still-unfolding intellectual project of this esteemed publication.During my stint at Qui Parle, I coedited with Huey Copeland, professor of art history at Northwestern University, a dossier of articles solicited under the deceptively simple heading, “New Approaches to Race.” We wrote in the 2003 introduction, “Raw Life,” that these articlesaim to make visible the continuity of white supremacy’s modes of subjection, tactics of coercion, and rhetorics of representation, attesting to a fact of terrible if unassailable consequence: it is the black/the slave, in what Fanon terms its “absolute dereliction,” that provides the lynchpin of whiteness, that marks the horizon of its thought, and that is burdened with the cipher of negativity so central to western metaphysics. What’s more, this “fact of blackness” suggests the possibility that the color line as such marks out not only a division between white and non-white, but, as becomes increasingly clear, one between black and non-black as well.4We sought to intervene in the interdisciplinary study of race and its intersections with a range of critical issues as well as the institutional history of the publication venue itself. Thus we continued:It is perhaps fitting, then, that these texts should appear together in a journal such as Qui Parle, which has placed poststructuralist and psychoanalytic theory at the heart of its enterprise, yet has failed (or refused) to consistently and critically examine race, that “impermissible origin,” which would most radically complicate recent critical thinking a propos of the aporias of the subject. We have accordingly titled this dossier “History, Representation, and the Impossible Subject of Race,” to indicate not only the limits of any politics of representation and the inescapability of entanglement with an insane and absolute violence, but also to suggest the foreclosure of race—embodied most forcefully in the figure of the black body—from the cultural milieu of white institutionality. (rl, 58)We wondered then whether the aftermath of this double intervention would be characterized by departure along a new path or reactionary return to tradition. We hadn’t contemplated that both might happen or that some third way might be forged in between. So, while the journal is still very much recognizable as the project that got under way thirty years ago, we can note the regular appearance of scholarship in critical race studies within its precincts too.5 Some things have changed, for better or worse, and others have not. Reagan-Thatcher is now Trump–May et al., and what remains of the public sector is on life support, including the institutions of higher learning restructured by the protocols of neoliberalism. Black communities remain under siege, buzzing with renewed political motion in search of a sustainable twenty-first-century freedom movement, while the potentially transformative inroads of black students, faculty, and staff in the wake of civil rights and black power have come and gone, approximating pre–affirmative action levels of educational segregation, kindergarten through college.6It is worth mentioning that before the proper launch of Qui Parle, there was the faux pas, or false start, of 1985. A predecessor journal, Ça Parle, initiated from similar concerns in the same corner of the Berkeley campus, published a single issue on “the representation of otherness.” This earlier effort took its moniker from Lacan’s rereading of the Freudian conception of the unconscious, who wrote to that effect in his 1955 essay “The Freudian Thing”: “It [ça] speaks, precisely where it was least expected—namely, where it suffers.”7 This journal flashed up, and disappeared just as quickly, from the suffering of students “relegated to a marginal standing, to a position of otherness in the academic labyrinth.”8 Lisa Neal, then editor in chief and more recently a writer/translator teaching at the Université Populaire de Montauban, defined the short-lived initiative at some length:A certain insidious mutism launched our effort to found Ça Parle, a graduate student literary journal. To end silence one speaks—but from what privileged location, with what currency of exchange (what language, what medium, what money?) and above and in all, about what? . . . We began to speak and the sounds we emitted came sometimes from the institutional authority (the father?) still reigning above and through us; sometimes from the mother, that tongue which founds our speaking selves; but sometimes from a third yet undetermined origin, perhaps a fusion of mother and father, of male and female. When we collected our voices we realized that it was always already a recollection and a mimesis, a thinking back and a resounding, indeed, a representation. The texts included in this and future issues of Ça Parle come out of and speak the languages of our formation in the literatures and theories of Western Europe. In this inaugural issue they speak around and to the question of the “other” and the representation of otherness in writing, both fictional and critical. (çp, iv)The challenge from before the beginning—across the doubled origins and changes of title—was and remains “the question of the ‘other’ and the representation of otherness” in the economies and societies as much as “the literatures and theories of Western Europe” and its Euro-American expansion and reconfiguration. At the midpoint of its young life, a dossier on the impossible subject of race marked an unwitting repetition with a difference of that inaugural gesture of defiance and submerged political sensibility, a black shadow drawn from antagonistic causes of suffering and cast over the whole enterprise of collective recollected polyvocal speaking, of sounding and resounding; signifying enigmatically from “one who hears, mute, uncomprehending, far from all,” one that predates and prefigures the subject of the journal’s subsequent life: the ça within the qui, the it, the internal difference that displaces and disperses every gathering under the heading of identity, the unthought or unthinkable thing, the always strange and other, the interference and interruption that speaks the truth before you, me, us.Jared Sexton teaches African American studies and film and media studies at the University of California, Irvine. His article “Raw Life: An Introduction” (with Huey Copeland) appeared in Qui Parle 13:2, 2003.Jean-Luc Nancy is professor emeritus of philosophy at the University of Strasbourg. He has published three other pieces in this journal: “Intervention,” Qui Parle 1:2, 1987; “Beheaded Sun” (“Soleil cou coupé”), Qui Parle 3:2, 1989; and “Critique, Crisis, Cri,” Qui Parle 26:1, 2017.Who speaks when a lie is spoken? That question seems easy to answer. The speaker of the lie speaks the lie. That speaker is a person in full possession of his or her senses who, knowing the truth, deliberately speaks a falsehood.Matters are not quite so simple with lies, however. My question about who speaks a lie is by no means trivial or merely theoretical in these bad days. In my analysis, I have especially in mind the manifold lies that President Donald Trump has spoken or tweeted and goes on daily speaking and tweeting. Trump seemingly cannot open his mouth or touch the keypad to tweet at five in the morning or whenever without lying. He is a congenital and pathological liar. This would not matter so much if he were not president of the United States. Trump’s lies are sometimes false assertions of what he claims are facts, as when he says climate change is a hoax perpetrated by the Chinese to destroy the US economy. Sometimes Trump’s lies are promises that he cannot or does not intend to keep, as when he promises to put all those unemployed coal miners back to work in reopened coal mines, or to bring back lost manufacturing jobs to the United States, or to deport all 11 million illegal immigrants out of the country, or to build that famous wall keeping new illegal immigrants from crossing into the United States from Mexico, or when he asserts that authorizing the Keystone XL pipeline will create thousands of new permanent jobs in the United States, whereas it will create a few dozen permanent maintenance jobs at most.The list of Trump’s lies is almost interminable. It is growing daily, whenever he tweets again. Of course, many members of Trump’s administration, as well as members of his family and his other private advisers, also lie habitually. His budget director recently said that no more federal money would be allotted to climate change study and mitigation because “we consider that to be a waste of your money to go out and do that.”9Immanuel Kant, in a famous passage in The Critique of Practical Reason, “On a Supposed Right to Lie from Altruistic Motives,” asserts that it would be immoral to lie to a murderer who has asked whether our friend who is pursued by him had taken refuge in our house.10 I should tell the murderer that my friend is in my house.Why would it be wrong to lie on such an occasion? Because the entire successful living-together of human beings in families and communities of all sorts and kinds, including political ones, depends on strict and universal truth telling. Of course, all politicians tell whoppers now and then, but no others that I know of lie so habitually as Trump. That constant lying by someone in his position of sovereignty is why so much is at stake in Trump’s everyday untrue discourse. His perpetual lying and that of his associates is radically endangering US democracy.A lie is a peculiar kind of speech act. Its referential or constative value is nil. What it says does not correspond to anything in the real world. Climate change is not a hoax perpetrated by the Chinese or by self-serving scientists at the US National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration or by those in the US National Aeronautics and Space Administration.A “felicitous” speech act or “performative utterance,” the speech act specialist J. L. Austin observes at one point in How to Do Things with Words, must be spoken by someone in the right situation and in his or her right mind with deliberate intent to bring about a desired effect in the real world. As Austin elsewhere says, “A performative utterance will, for example, be in a peculiar way hollow or void if said by an actor on the stage, or if introduced in a poem, or spoken in soliloquy.”11What Austin says in How to Do Things with Words is complex and fascinating. It would be impossible to recapitulate here what takes me a whole book elsewhere to investigate.12 Austin has a great deal to say about promises as a particular form of speech act. What about the promises Trump utters, intending not to keep them? Austin waffles, however, on the question of whether, on the one hand, a felicitous speech act utterance must be “sincere,” as opposed to being said with crossed fingers, so to speak, or whether, on the other hand, the form of words by itself makes the speech act do something, whatever my intent, sincerity, or lack of them. Austin’s bottom line, I argue, is his assertion that “accuracy and morality alike are on the side of the plain saying that our word is our bond.”13 I obligate myself willy-nilly even with a lying promise.What goes on in Donald Trump’s mind when he says that climate change is a hoax perpetrated by the Chinese or promises jobs that he cannot possibly produce is unfathomable, unascertainable, and probably extremely strange. Trump must nevertheless be held accountable for his lies on the principle that his word is his bond. A lie is a felicitous speech act if it is believed. Trump’s many lies and false promises were believed by enough deluded people to get him elected president of the United States. This has had catastrophic consequences for the American people and for people throughout the world. We have only seen the beginnings of these consequences.Qui parle un mensonge? Who speaks a lie? Obviously it is whoever utters the lie. Trump evidently believes that whatever he says, however outrageously and demonstrably false it is, will be true or will come true, by a species of word magic. He says, “I declare climate change is a hoax,” and behold, it becomes a hoax. Trump’s words have results, to some degree unpredictable ones, if they are believed, or even if they are disbelieved. Trump’s lies repeated over and over in the media have such effects as they do on those who read the media reports, including the effects of outrage, anxiety, and outright fear in people like me who know that he is lying but who fear that his words will bring about nuclear war, or irreversibly accelerate climate change, or vastly increase the discrepancy between rich and poor in the United States, or cause untold misery among immigrants here, or deprive twenty-four million American people of health care insurance. After all, how can I be sure that Trump’s word magic does not work to a tiny degree on me and that some obscure corner of my mind is not led by Trump’s lie to suspect that climate change may actually be a hoax?J. Hillis Miller is distinguished research professor of comparative literature and English at the University of California, Irvine. He has published two other articles in this journal: “The Other’s Other: Jealousy and Art in Proust,” Qui Parle 9:1, 1995; and “Intervention,” Qui Parle 1:2, 1997.The Japanese founder of my Zen lineage, the thirteenth-century monk known as Dōgen Zenji, exhorts us to a Way that recognizes two things: in the first place, the all-pervading and absolutely immaculate nature of our world of practice—there is nothing to be extracted from or separated out from this world where all things co-arise, mutually interdependent within the beginningless, endless web of cause and effect, of impulse and repulse. And at the same time, precisely alongside this originally perfect Way, Dōgen calls for our wholehearted engagement with this world—our full-throttled activity and response to a world from which, in the end, we are not separate.Who speaks? This dust, in its immaculacy, speaks.My first glimmering understanding of this co-arising interdependence came from the same source as my first understanding of French poststructuralism. One afternoon in the late 1980s, my professor Barbara Johnson told the class a terrible joke:A man came home one night to the tell-tale blinking light on his answering machine. “You have nine messages,” the metallic-voiced recording told him when he pressed play. The man was surprised; he’d only just relocated to this city to be closer to family. He barely knew a soul; indeed the house he was renting often seemed depressingly empty and far too big for just one person. The messages were all from the same unfamiliar caller. A deep male voice: “This is the Viper, I come to your house tonight,” said the first message. His voice sounded alien, creepy, dark. Beep. “This is the Viper. I come in three hours.” Beep. “This is the Viper. I come in two hours.” Beep. As each message played, the Viper’s visit grew closer and closer, and the man grew more and more frightened. “This is the Viper. I come now.” Beep. Suddenly there was a knock at the door. The man leaped up in terror—just as the door swung open.A short, balding gentleman stood on the doorstep. “Good evening. I am the Viper. I come to vash your vindows. Vhere should I start?”This joke is neither particularly funny nor scary, nor even scary-funny. But it does neatly illustrate a world shared by twentieth-century poststructuralism and thirteenth-century Zen Buddhism alike. This is our world. A world that we today call “global”—as if there were a choice, a choice to inhabit a planet that was not a globe. As if we could reject the world in its spherical, all-pervading, mutual co-arising. As if there might be an option to reject the globe and to become, again, flatlanders.As Barbara Johnson first and Dōgen Zenji second taught me: all things are known by their relationship to all other things. Letters and words are marks that help us define a thing as such but that are known only by dint of their relationship, their definition through other letters and words, which are themselves known only by dint of still more letters, more words, more vindow-vashing.This game of cross-reference gets even more interesting when we think about interlinguistic translation. In “The Task of the Translator” Walter Benjamin famously describes how translations are possible precisely insofar as all of the equivalencies we draw are only a matter of fitting together fragments of a vessel: the fragments come together around the empty hollow that defines the whole. The hole that makes the whole.15The older I get, the more I find myself trusting both hole and whole—trusting the deep ways that our mind lays claim to marks, identifies and knows things. Each word, each thought, each thing comes to us as such only insofar as the marks that define it as singular are also what connect it, enmesh it, to each and every thing. We get the fragment, but only insofar as there is also the entirety of the vessel, and the entirety of the vessel is possible only insofar as there is this emptiness that never gets spoken, never finds form, but instead is what enables the form as such to be articulated.So: things come to us by dint of other things. We know things by their marks. We know forms by these reflections. Whenever we see something, we are grabbing hold of it by something else—and this is true just by dint of seeing it as such. There is a profound movement that we might call “metaphorical” at the very heart of our most direct relationship to reality. The images that the poet offers are thus never “mere” images; there is never a more literal way to get at the truth. At the same time, these reflections help us know something, but they are not that thing. . . . No one thing is that thing (any word means something only because it refers us endlessly to all words and all things). Indeed, it is precisely because no reflection is equal to the form that the reflection actually captures the form.The precious mirror of our mind (and of mind as such)—that emptiness by means of which all of these marks are fragments of a whole—is the endlessly refracted reflection of all reflections of all things. And as mysteriously empty as this precious mirror is (Benjamin refers to this mirror as “pure language”), I nonetheless recognize this insight in homely and mundane ways. I recognize it on the meditation cushion—and I recognize it at my keyboard, when I ask myself: Who speaks? How do I know what and that I know?As I come to recognize my own activity of knowing, of recognizing, I directly come to experience the stillness against which these connections emerge. The water within which the fish of thought swim.Lisa Myōbun Freinkel is associate professor of English and comparative literature at the University of Oregon. She has published three other articles in this journal: “Reading’s Response,” Qui Parle 3:1, 1989; “The Analogy of Form: Mourning and Kant’s ‘Third Critique,’” Qui Parle 4:2, 1991; and “On John Rajchman Truth and Eros: Foucault, Lacan, and the Question of Ethics,” Qui Parle 5:2, 1992.Has the ancient practice of geomancy, through which sensitive interpreters parse natural signs, been reconfigured as the means by which we denizens of the Anthropocene attend to nature’s speech? Such a “geomantic turn,” I suggest, aims to make legible a problem basic to vernacular environmental knowledge: that we now routinely face intractable epistemological challenges in relation to earthly signs and their ambiguous production. We aspire to access nature’s speech through anxious environmental reading that fuses the material and symbolic into an uncanny symbiosis with earth, albeit one that routinely stages the communicative failure of those efforts.Since the late fourteenth century, geomancy has been defined as the art of divination by means of signs derived from earth. To divine is to discover, whether by intuition, insight, or conjecture, those forms of knowledge that proceed from the divine. It is a reciprocal art. We divine through the divine, in other words; divination incarnates us as momentary gods. Geomancy furthermore presumes a relationship between the cosmic order and the human body, conceiving of the earth in effect as a body.16 Traditional geomancers practiced divination by earthly signs to maintain human harmony with what was conceived as a unified cosmic order. They conventionally attended to the placement, arrangement, situation, qualities, and boundary properties of such earthly materials as water, trees, stones, hills, sun, and megalithic structures, the patterns of which could either be discerned to facilitate harmonious relations or be disrupted at the risk of dire consequences. Perceiving local material forms and relationships as microcosmic reenactments of a divine macrocosmic scheme, geomancers sought to create equilibrium across a complex, sacralized network of human and nonhuman interactions.Of its many iterations, two traditions of geomancy have found particular resonance in the West: Chinese feng shui, which aims to regulate the flow of energy through the location and position of objects, buildings, and borders;17 and Britain’s terrestrial geometry, which discerns in the alignment of ancient sites meridional or “ley lines”—channels of energy claimed to correspond to ancient surveyors’ trackways.18 Since geomancy’s popular resurgence in 1960s America, its meanings have expanded to encompass virtually any occult or metaphysical practice anchored in earth. But that expansion hasn’t emptied geomancy of meaning, as one might suspect. Quite the contrary, geomancy’s reformation from the late 1980s and after shows the widening relevance of such discourses and practices to our rapidly changing planetary conditions, just as it exposes the growing limitations of Enlightenment tools to contend with them.Geomancy entails an acute level of environmental reading that sacralizes basic human tasks through studied and ritualized environmental interactions. It includes complementary concepts of a benign, harmonious earth and a malevolent, vengeful earth as part of a spectrum of relational possibilities, in which the varying patterns of environmental articulation are contingent on the sensitivities, skills, and failures of human agency. The rules governing geomantic time are fundamentally nonlinear; rather, they are circular, cyclical, and eschatologically informed (in the sense of recurrent unions with the divine). Geomancy draws variously from mathematics, astronomy, cosmology, and geophysics, codifying its “sacred geometries” in relational patterns the significances of which are likely unrecognizable in mainstream Western disciplinary contexts.19 Geomancy is incidentally rather than fundamentally a modality of the visible because it remains irreducible to measurable sense perceptions. From a Western philosophical perspective, geomancy approximates panpsychism and its view that all things have mind or mindlike qualities.I repurpose the term geomancy here as shorthand for the emergent epistemological paradigms and changed relations of definition that have evolved from the 1990s in the United States in response to three significant reconstellations of risk and their attendant forms of planetary awareness: the replacement of the Cold War’s binary global logic beginning in 1989 with a widely dispersed spectrum of potential harms hiding in plain site; the greater public consciousness of global warming, with its terrible revelation of the convergence of human and geological history; and the rise of the security state, particularly following 9/11, with its doctrine of preemption inscribed as a normative environmental power.20 As Paul N. A. Edwards notes, “With the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989 and the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991, the Cold War left in its wake a yawning ‘apocalypse gap’ that was readily filled, in political discourse, by environmental doomsday scenarios” such as nuclear winter and ozone depletion.21The new geomancy entails a crisis of knowing enacted through interpretations of geophysical space that are fueled by