“They Paint Sedition on the Walls”: Towards a University of “Immigrants”

While publicly funded institutions in India have provoked the punitive ire of the ruling Hindu Right and systematically invited acts of state terror, a new education policy drafted by the same ruling party advocates a wholesale return to a “liberal arts” curriculum. The essay attempts to demonstrate how the “liberal” has become the cultural logic of a communal-fascist regime, insofar as the regime is harnessing universities to its project of redefining citizenship as exclusionary, with a special rejection of the citizenship claims of Muslims. In this context, how might we rally our forces behind a hijacked “idea” of the university—and what are the possible futures of such a political maneuver? This essay suggests how a practice of imaginative labor at the university might be leveled not toward citizenship, but toward lessons in immigrancy. It will also address how a mass online transition—prompted by policy in the name of a pandemic—reconfigures rights of entry to this imaginative labor.

What Kind of Freedom is Academic Freedom?

In this essay, I argue for a definition of academic freedom that does not confuse it with what is considered to be a human right—the individual right to free speech. This is a freedom granted in principle by the state to scholars (usually within educational institutions: schools, colleges, and universities) because their critical activity has been considered vital to the public good, and because it is a self-regulated activity committed to processes of relentless questioning that require disciplined forms of reading and reasoning. Neoliberal practices have undermined the basis for this classic definition of academic freedom. The essay explores the alternatives to state-ensured academic freedom that have emerged both within and outside the university, focusing particular attention on Turkey’s Solidarity Academies. It concludes by insisting that the critical function of producing knowledge for the common good must be protected by non-state actors if the state has broken the covenant upon which academic freedom once rested.

On Zionism and the Concept of Deferral

This paper offers a set of conceptual reflections on the politics of deferral. Beginning with an examination of this idea in analyses of colonialism, human rights, and liberalism, the paper turns to Gershom Scholem’s well-known opposition between Jewish messianism (“life lived in deferral”) and Zionism (concrete political action). The paper troubles this distinction by tracing the concept of deferral back into Scholem’s earliest writings on messianism and by showing the term’s genealogical reliance on the theological-political vocabulary of sovereignty. Against this critical background, the paper returns to the present, in order to reframe Scholem’s distinction and suggest that, far from negating messianic deferral, Zionism and Israeli colonial rule capture and redeploy its logic as a secular modality of power. The paper concludes by inscribing this secular, political theology of Zionism within a Christian history of deferral, messianism, and empire.

Requiem: Roundtable on Tendayi Sithole's The Black Register

This special section of the issue offers a discussion of South African theorist Tendayi Sithole's book The Black Register (2020). The section's essays explore the stakes of Sithole's work as well as its implications. They unpack the book around questions of geography, historicity, and visual representation.

On Crystallization

This essay considers the various meanings of the word “crystallization” in Frantz Fanon's main theses on national culture and his political philosophy more generally. It also further considers the implications of crystallization alongside Fanon's notion of the “nation to come” for an understanding of his approach to art, history, philosophy, and religion. This philosophy of crystallization, of which there has been little or no mention in Fanonian studies, is also contrasted with and compared to works by the Guinean poet Keita Fodéba and the Iranian critic Ali Shariʿati.

The Life Strike

This article examines the forms of disobedience practiced by migrants at the European border to circumvent biotechnological modes of surveillance and identification, which are rooted in involuntary movements that can be used as evidence against migrants. What actually happens when bodily growth, heart rate, respiration, and body heat are integrated into technologies for the detection of life with a view to their measurement (biometrics) and the constitution of a database needed for border surveillance? What happens when life is turned against itself? How to disobey when the involuntary dimensions of the body—not only one's appearance but the body's very organicity and biochemistry—become the sites of a surveillance from which one can only escape by holding one's breath or burning one's fingerprints? This essay asks how the emerging tactics of migrants seek to escape their interior, organic lives, and identifies the “life strike” as a form of thanato-mimesis that consists in playing dead and limiting what in organic life is recognizable as such in order to go unnoticed and to interrupt racial interpellations.

The Value of the Surface

Through an unorthodox reading of Hannah Arendt, this article argues that her political thought contains unacknowledged resources for conceptualizing embodiment in politics, and in relation to the economy, physical needs, and appearance. In contrast to the way she is typically read, this essay develops an affirmative account of embodiment in Arendt's work. Arendt not only recognizes the role of the appearing body in action but also underscores the importance of labor and necessity for a human sense of reality. Throughout her oeuvre, she presents a historical analysis of the rise of a functionalist, processual understanding of life under capitalist modernity. She also develops an alternative, nonfunctionalist framing of living bodies, highlighting a gratitude for “given” aspects of existence and the value of the bodily surface as a sentient interface between embodied needs and the common world. The article tracks the development of these reflections in Arendt's engagements with Karl Marx, Simone Weil, and Adolf Portmann.