The articles in this special issue of the Journal of Speculative Philosophy were selected from revised versions of papers that were originally presented at the fifty-ninth annual meeting of the Society for Phenomenology and Existential Philosophy (SPEP) in September 2021. This virtual conference took place on September 17–18 and 23–26 after the cancellation of the 2020 conference due to the COVID-19 pandemic.Bonnie Honig and Mel Y. Chen gave the SPEP 2021 Plenary Addresses and we are grateful to be able to include Honig’s plenary, “Taking Back the Camera: Race and Agonism in Mr. Deeds and The Fits” in this special issue. Thinking both with and against Stanley Cavell’s and Giorgio Agamben’s respective readings of the camera as a “somatogram,” a “machine-reader of the body,” Honig brings Cavell’s and Agamben’s (as well as Walter Benjamin’s) discussions of the power of the camera into conversation with Georges Didi-Huberman’s analysis of the (overly) theatrical effects induced by the “normalizing camera of the clinic” in Charcot’s Salpêtrière patients to set up a central question: Should we understand the camera as reading (Cavell), normalizing (Agamben), and/or soliciting (Didi-Huberman) its subject’s gesture? Offering a close analysis of the “non-sovereign movements” of the title character in Mr. Deeds and Toni in The Fits, Honig argues that Toni’s ability to elude the camera’s gaze can be understood as an act of “cinematic agonism” that begins to remediate a long history of photographic violations of young black girls’ bodies.Though we are sorry that we are unable to include Mel Y. Chen’s plenary, “On the Edge,” in this volume, their talk offered a fascinating discussion of the novel intimacies and distances based on the reorganization of labor and capital that have emerged in response to the COVID-19 pandemic. Through an analysis of Vietnamese artist Mai-Thu Perret’s 2007 work “Underground” and Australian artist Fiona Foley’s 2006 multimedia installation, “Black Opium,” Chen suggested that queer choreographies of space as well as queer, crip, and racialized undergrounds can provide important sites of healing and respite from living “on the edge.” These queer spaces, they proposed, are also uniquely suited to promote interspecies forms of collective care.Bonnie Honig’s article is followed by “The Question of the Normal,” the 2021 SPEP Co-Director’s Address delivered by Gail Weiss. Through a critical focus on the normalizing power of the familiar, Weiss’s article shares with Honig’s a desire to place into question socially accepted definitions of normalcy. She turns to two literary works, Franz Kafka’s The Metamorphosis and E. M. Forster’s “The Machine Stops,” to reassess the frequently expressed, nostalgic longing to return to our pre-pandemic “normal.” Given that this pre-pandemic normal was sexist, racist, ableist, ageist, classist, homophobic, and transphobic, Weiss argues that it is not something we should be seeking to recover but rather to transform.The other articles in this special issue have been organized according to four broad groupings. The first section, “Critical Encounters: Philosophy, Literature, Psychoanalysis,” offers three original, interdisciplinary engagements with “subversive” texts that range from slave narratives, dreams, and literary fragments to the sadistic fantasies expressed by the Marquis de Sade’s infamous protagonist Juliette. In “The Dred Scott Ontology and the Philosophical Significance of Slave Narratives,” Robin M. Muller argues that slave narratives are uniquely capable of revealing the profound ontological dimensions of racialized harm, and thus deserve our serious philosophical attention. Jake Reeder’s essay, “The Condensation of the Secret: Dream Analysis and the Literary Fragment,” draws from Freud’s theory of dream condensation and Derrida’s and Blanchot’s respective discussions of the literary fragment, to address the secrets they contain and the forgettings that they necessarily involve. Following Derrida, Reed argues that these condensed, fragmented secrets are essentially irrecoverable, and it is precisely for this reason that they demand a response. The final article in this section, Nicole Yokum’s “A Foucauldian Feminist Juliette: The ‘Endless Prosperities’ of Sade’s Illustrious Villain” critically examines Foucault’s early reading of Juliette through a Lacanian view of desire alongside his later dismissal of her resistant potential in light of his analysis of subjection and power. A Foucauldian feminist interpretation of Juliette’s unbridled sadism, Yokum suggests, can serve as a powerful counterpoint to historical associations of femininity with masochistic tendencies.The three articles in the next section, “Queering/Questioning Gender,” address important “queer concerns” that warrant serious philosophical attention: the relationship of clothing to feminine shame, heteronormative legal restrictions on the use of artificial reproductive technologies, and the role of misgendering in preserving cisgender common sense. Through a critical examination of Kant’s interpretation of Eve’s “transgression” in the Garden of Eden, Amie Leigh Zimmer argues in “Kant Conjectures: The Genesis of the Feminine” that the shameful covering-up of women’s bodies plays an essential (albeit largely unrecognized) role in Kant’s account of moral agency. In “Queering Gestell: Thinking Outside Butler’s Frames and Inside Belu’s Reproductive Enframing,” Jill Drouillard draws from two feminist reworkings of Heidegger’s concept of Gestell, Judith Butler’s discussion of frames and framing and Dana S. Belu’s account of “reproductive enframing,” as well as Sara Ahmed’s work on queer orientations, to address the limitations of France’s new 2021 artificial reproduction technology bioethics legislation: “ART for all women” (PMA pour toutes). Given that the 2021 policy is not, in fact, for “all women” because it excludes transwomen (as well as transmen), Drouillard calls for using ART, against its transphobic aims, to queer heteronormative conceptions of parenthood. Megan Burke’s “Cis Sense and the Habit of Gender Assignment” coins a new term, “cis sense” to identify a phenomenon that occurs far too frequently, namely, the tendency of cisgender individuals to misgender queer people who defy the traditional, binary gender options. Drawing from Merleau-Ponty’s work on habit and institution, Burke argues for the recognition of “trans sense” as an “alternative form of gendered meaning.”The third grouping, “Deterritorializing Traditions,” includes three articles that discuss diverse philosophical traditions. In “Is Philosophy Western? Some Western and East Asian Perspectives on a Metaphilosophical Question,” Bret W. Davis questions the presumption, established in the late nineteenth century, that “philosophy” is exclusively Western by examining how East Asian, and in particular, Japanese scholars have characterized traditional Confucian, Daoist, and Buddhist thought. While they may be methodologically and conceptually unfamiliar, Davis argues that these East Asian discourses are sufficiently “philosophical” to warrant cross-cultural dialogue rather than exclusion. Gil Morejón, in “Negativity in Spinozist Politics,” questions the common reading, associated with both Deleuze and Negri, that Spinoza’s political philosophy is entirely affirmative; instead, he argues that given the inevitability of sad passions, real and unavoidable negativity must remain a part of any Spinozist politics. Closing out this grouping, Jeffrey A. Bell, in “Making Sense of Problems: Toward a Deleuzo-Humean Critical Theory,” draws on several Humean themes in Deleuze’s thought to explore how understanding social and economic contexts as “problematic fields” opens possibilities for new and imaginative solutions to problems raised by the emergence of capitalism.In the fourth and final grouping, “German Philosophy: Variations on a Historical Movement,” we have four articles addressing a variety of themes in the past two centuries of German philosophy. John Montani, in “The Rhythm of Hegel’s Speculative Logic,” examines the essentially rhythmic structure that guides Hegel’s speculative logic in the preface to the Phenomenology of Spirit and explores how this rhythmic structure is developed in the work of Hans-Georg Gadamer and Jean-Luc Nancy. Hanne Jacobs, in “A Phenomenology of the Work of Attention,” examines Aron Gurwitsch’s analyses of attention and shows how his account needs to be supplemented by Edmund Husserl’s account of attentive consciousness in order to fully understand why being attentive requires work. Renxiang Liu, in “Explaining It Away? On the Enigma of Time in Husserl’s Phenomenology of Time-Consciousness,” also addresses Husserlian phenomenology, arguing that a hermeneutic approach of retention and protention is needed to escape the inconsistency between the incompleteness of any temporal apprehension and the apparent completeness of temporal objects. Concluding this grouping and this special issue, Jessica S. Elkayam, in “Heidegger’s Nietzsche and The Origin of the Work of Art,” carefully documents how Heidegger’s Nietzsche lectures provide clues to the evental happening of truth that came to the fore in his later reflections on the question of art.On behalf of the Society for Phenomenology and Existential Philosophy and the Journal of Speculative Philosophy, the editors would like to thank all of the authors for allowing us to include their papers in this special issue. We would also like to express our gratitude to John Stuhr, Editor of the Journal of Speculative Philosophy, and Astrid Meyer, Leah Noel, Patty Mitchell, and the JSP production staff at the Pennsylvania State University press for their crucial assistance with the publication process. Final thanks go to all the participants at our first virtual SPEP conference. It was your sustained intellectual engagement that made this challenging, unprecedented situation into a resounding success.