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The Body of the Cross is a study of holy victims in Western Christian history, and how their deaths led to the idea of the cross as a substitutionary sacrifice. Since its first centuries, Christianity has traded on the suffering of victims who were substitutes for the Christian social body. They secured holiness for the church by their own sacred power, or by their reprobation and rejection. Martyrs, mystics, and heretics suffered and died for the community, which expressed the power of their tortured flesh in eucharistic, social, and christological forms. Jesus Christ was one of those holy substitutes, but it was late in Western history that his body took on the status of the exemplary victim. This book traces that story, giving special attention to popular spirituality, religious dissent, and the writing of women. It examines how the symbol of the cross functioned in key moments in this history, including the parting of the ways of Judaism and Christianity, the gnostic debates, martyr traditions, and medieval mysticism and heresy. In a Reformation era haunted by divine wrath, these themes concentrated in a new idea: Jesus Christ died on the cross to absorb divine punishment for sin, a holy body and a rejected body in one.

Class Acts looks at two often neglected aspects of Jacques Derrida’s work as a philosopher, namely, his public presentations and his teaching, along with the question of the “speech act” that links them, that is, the question of what one is doing when one speaks in public in these ways. The work is divided into two parts, each of which follows Derrida’s itinerary with regard to speech act theory from the 1970s through the 1990s. Part I, titled “Derrida in Montreal,” analyzes Derrida’s critique of John Austin and his own subsequent redefinition of speech act theory over the course of three public lectures or events (in 1971, 1979, and 1997), all three, for reasons I try to identify and explain, in Montreal. Part II. “The Open Seminar,” begins with an overview of Derrida’s teaching career and his famous “seminar” presentations, along with his own explicit reflections on pedagogy and educational institutions beginning in the mid-1970s. It then turns to the way Derrida interrogated and himself redeployed speech act theory in three recently published seminars (on life-death, theory and practice, and forgiveness). We ultimately come to see through this juxtaposition that, whether he was in a conference hall or a classroom, Derrida was always interested in the way in which spoken or written words might not just communicate some meaning or intent but give rise to something like an event. This is a book about the possibility of such events in Derrida’s work as a pedagogue and public intellectual.

The Corpse in the Kitchen explores relationships between the dispossession of Indigenous peoples, the enclosure of Indigenous land and extraction of Indigenous resources, and settler colonialism as a technique of racial capitalism. Drawing upon the literature and historiography of the so-called Black Hawk War, it looks to the colonization of the upper Mississippi River lead region as one instance of primitive accumulation for purposes of mineral accretion. While conventional histories of the Black Hawk War have treated the conflict as gratuitous and tragic, The Corpse in the Kitchen argues that the conflict between Black Hawk, settler militias, and the federal military were part of a struggle over the dispensation of mineral resources, specifically, mineral lead. The elemental basis for the fabrication of bullets, the federal state had a vested interest in control over regional lead resources, as a means of manufacturing the implements by which it would secure its sovereignty over North America. As the basis for metallic type, the abundance of lead drawn from the mines of the upper Mississippi would also occasion an expansion of printing, creating new technologies of memory and forgetting. The Corpse in the Kitchen explores the intimacies between extraction and killing, writing, printing, memory, and forgetting, a story of settlers as rapacious consumers of Indigenous peoples.

This book considers a promise left unfulfilled in Sigmund Freud’s Beyond the Principle of Pleasure. There Freud suggests that he will investigate a psychic tendency that is not subject to the pleasure principle, but in fact for Freud the latter remains sovereign. Following Jacques Derrida, Martínez argues that when the pleasure principle comes into contact with the death drive (a tendency toward aggression or cruelty), the psyche can take detours that, without exceeding the limit of the pleasure principle, can nevertheless defer it. Eros: Beyond the Death Drive reflects on these deviations of the pleasure principle, which Martínez finds both in the political sphere and in intimate relations. Following these erotic paths, Martínez argues that the forces of the death drive can only be resisted if resistance is understood as an ongoing process in which erotic action and the construction of pathways for sublimation are interminable tasks. We know that the final accomplishment of these tasks is impossible, but, like Freud’s “impossible professions,” they remain imperative. Though always incomplete, they remain undeniably urgent, and psychoanalysis and deconstruction remind us of their urgency. In complementary ways, both Freud and Derrida teach us that the death drive is insurmountable, but that through political action we can delay, defer, and postpone it. Martínez shows us that this effort of resistance must be uninterrupted. Calling for the creation and maintenance of a “community of mourning duelists,” this book builds toward the affirmation of the kind of “erotic battalion” that must always be mobilized.

Filipino Time examines how a variety of immaterial labor performed by Filipinos in the Philippines and around the world, while producing bodily and affective disciplines and dislocations, also generate and explore vital affects, multiple networks, and other worlds. Whether in representations of death in a musical or keeping work time at bay in a call center, these forms of living emerge from and even work alongside capitalist exploitation of affective labor. Affective labor involves human intersubjective interaction and creative capacities. Thus, through creative labor, subjects make communal worlds out of one colonized by capital time. In reading these cultural productions, the book traces concurrent chronicities, ways of sensing and making sense of time alongside capital’s dominant narrative. From the hostile but habitable textures of labor-time, migratory subjects live and weave narratives of place and belonging, produce new modes of connections and ways to feel time with others.The book explores how these chronicities are re-articulated in a capacious archive of storytelling about the Filipino labor diaspora in fiction, in a musical, in an ethnography, and in a documentary film. Each of the genres demonstrates how time and space are manifest in deformations by narrative and genre. These cultural expressions capture life-making capacities within the capitalist world of disruptions and circulations of bodies and time. Thus, they index how selves go out of bounds beyond the economic contract to transform, even momentarily, self, others, time, and their surroundings.

This book looks at various ways freedom was both gained and lost during Reconstruction. Its unifying theme is the expansion and contraction of the many and varied manifestations and meanings of freedom. The central issue of the that shaped Reconstruction was freedom—but not always in the way we might expect. The essays explore the frequent “gaps” between legal and political gains supposedly secured in the statute books and people’s actual lived experience. Even after legal emancipation, formerly enslaved people faced a lack of economic freedom dependent on equal educational access and employment opportunity. Freedom was not just a question of being enslaved or not enslaved; nor was it just about access to the ballot. Freedom to be educated; freedom to testify in court; freedom from imprisonment; even economic opportunity was a form of freedom. The book takes an expansive approach to studying Reconstruction. This book reaches beyond just the American South, to consider Reconstruction’s impact on freedoms in border states, on northerners, in Brazil, and even in Australia. It also expands the traditional periodization beyond 1876, because Reconstruction—when seen as a series of conflicts in which freedoms were gained and lost—doesn’t end in 1876 but one might argue continues to this day. Approximately 150 years after this crucial period in American history—so often overlooked in popular memory—a group of scholars come together to demonstrate that struggles over the meaning of freedom not only defined Reconstruction but also continue to shape America to this day.

The personal is not political, even if politics marks it and, in many cases, determines it. Infrapolitics seeks to understand conditions of existence that are not reducible to political life and that exceed any definition of world bound to political determinations. It seeks to mobilize an exteriority without which politics could only be business or administration, that is, oppression. It demands a change in seeing and an everyday practice that subtracts from political totalization in the name of a new production of desire, of a new emancipation, and of a conception of experience that can breach the general captivation of life. Infrapolitics thinks of itself as both a general critique of the political apparatus and as an imperative horizon for existential self-understanding. It understands the intense politicity of its gesture while at the same time claiming an enabling distance from politics. It is a form of thought aiming to provide content for a form of life. It offers a new theoretical practice for concrete existence. This book provides a genealogy of the notion and places it within contemporary philosophical reflection, examining its deployment in the wake of postphenomenology and deconstruction, Lacanian analysis, the principle of anarchy, and an egalitarian symbolization of social life.

This volume develops new resources around the topic of political theology. The discourse of political theology is here situated on an edge, that is, on the edge of a world that is grappling with global warming, a brutal form of neoliberal capitalism, protests against racism and police brutality, and the COVID-19 pandemic. This edge is also a form of eschatology that forces us to imagine new ways of being religious and political in our cohabitation of a fragile and shared world. The tradition of political theology is often associated with philosophical responses to the work of Carl Schmitt, along with critical attempts to disengage religion from his right-wing politics. The contributors to this volume are informed by Schmitt but not limited to his perspectives. They engage and transform political theology from the standpoint of climate change, the politics of race and Black Lives Matter, and non-Christian political theologies including Islam and Sikhism. This book includes world-renowned scholars and emerging voices that together open up the tradition of political theology to new ideas and new ways of thinking.

Since Greek tragedy and philosophy, ethics has—more or less successfully—served as a bulwark against contingency; or at least to provide guidance in cases were decisions had to be taken in the face of the undecidable. The essays collected here tackle this problem against the background of an Enlightenment that has made the overcoming of contingency its raison d’être. However, contingency’s hardnosed existence subverts this success story. And it seems that Hegel’s dialectics—whose main goal it is to eliminate it—forms something like a last line of defence against it. Ranging from topics like community, environmental ethics, and agency to the goals of critical philosophy, the renowned scholars assembled in this volume show that it might be time to leave Hegel’s cosmological concept of reason behind.

This volume seeks to redress a gap in the study of Orthodox Christianity, which has largely remained gender blind. It engages women’s lifeworlds, practices, and experiences in relation to Orthodox Christianity in multiple, varied localities, discussing both contemporary and pre-1989 developments. The contributions in the volume critically engage the pluralist and changing character of Orthodox forms of institutional and social life in relation to gender by using feminist epistemologies and drawing on original ethnographic research to account for previously ignored themes, perspectives, knowledges, and experiences of women in Orthodox Christian contexts. The volume pushes out the understanding of Orthodox Christianity in new directions by looking at Orthodox women of diverse backgrounds in different settings: parishes, monasteries, the secular spaces of everyday life, and under shifting historical conditions and political regimes—and by offering new theoretical insights. The volume combines the depth of ethnographic analysis with geographical breadth. Employing various research approaches and methodologies, the contributions engage two major intertwined lines of analysis—continuity and transformation—in social practices, demographic trends, and larger material contexts at the intersection between gender, Orthodoxy, and locality. To be sure, continuity contains the seeds of change, and transformation emerges within seemingly rigid structures and practices, in defiance to claims—coming both from within and without Orthodox Christianity—that Orthodox Christianity is immutable and fixed in time.