Chiasma: A Site for Thought is pleased to invite submissions for its eighth issue, on theoretical and philosophical investigations on the ‘non.’ Considerations of the ‘non’ arise as a parados in Western philosophical inquiry as early as Plato’s Sophist, with the Eleatic Stranger’s account of non-being as the capacity for change in Being. Here, ‘non-being’ instigates a position as both negative and positive: both lack of being or nothing and the productive motor of being via becoming. More recent theoretical investigation has charged the ‘non’ as a fundamental and paradoxical attribute of being: seen in Gilles Deleuze’s non-being or ?being and Theodor Adorno’s nonconceptualities and nonidentity. The paradoxical positioning of the ‘non’ has been applied to philosophy as well, with the centring of the problematic of philosophy in the non-philosophy of François Laruelle. This issue of Chiasma seeks out works that dwell in the tension of the ‘non’ as paradoxically negative and positive. We are interested in papers that deal with non, non-being, and negativity more broadly within various discourses.
Topics might include, but are not limited to:
- Non-being (Plato) and Non-Contradiction (Aristotle) in Hellenic Philosophy
- ‘Non’ as problematic (Althusser) in French philosophy: Seen in the case of ?being or non-being (Deleuze), non-philosophy (Laruelle), negativity and supplementarity (Derrida), Philosophy of the non/Philosophy of the no (Bachelard), Nonknowledge (Bataille)
- Blackness and Anti-Blackness: Afro-Pessimism, Black Fugitivity, and Black Fungibility
- Pessimism of Indigenous Resurgence including negativity relating to decoloniality, land, and Indigenous nationhood
- Dialectical Negativity: Negative Dialectics (Adorno), the role of negativity in dialectics (Hegel, Marx), and the unground ground (Schelling)
- Negativity within and outside of Psychoanalysis: Erasure of femininity, negation [Verneinung] and denial [Verleugnung] after Freud and Lacan
- Queer negativity and refusing the future (Halberstam, Edelman)
- Solitude and non-community.
- Non-being and/against nothingness in Modernist literature (e.g. Beckett’s “unnullable least”).
- Abstract entities/(n)ontology: questions of how abstract entities (taken either in the traditional analytic sense, e.g. Meinong, Caplan, Cowling, etc., or in the more recent hyperstitional sense, e.g. Harman, CCRU, etc.) ‘exist’ or function in the world of political (or liberatory) philosophy.
- Extinction and annihilation after apocalypse (Kant’s “The End of All Things”, Benjamin’s idea of catastrophe, existential risk, Thomas Moynihan’s histories of extinction and catastrophism)
- Philosophical and Political Quietism
Articles should be 5,000-10,000 words long, formatted according to the Chicago Manual of Style 16th Edition, and cited with footnotes. Articles should include abstracts of ~150 words. Please send anonymized articles with abstracts (with the subject of the email reading: “[Author Name], Submission to Issue 8”) to chiasma.asiteforthought@gmail.com by July 15, 2021. Please include in the body of the email the name, title, affiliation, and correspondence email of the author(s). Full submission guidelines can be found here. Expected publication in Fall 2022.
Chiasma: A Site for Thought was established in September 2013 as an annual, double-blind, peer-reviewed journal for the generation and dispersion of theory and philosophy, emphasizing contemporary continental philosophy. While recognizing the theoretical humanities as a pursuit born of the crossing of continental philosophy, social and political theory, literary criticism, media studies, and cultural studies, Chiasma: A Site for Thought places emphasis on those genetic moments that displace theory and philosophy from their histories, without abandoning them to an auxiliary position between disciplines. The journal therefore aims at the affirmation of the power of speculative thought across disciplines to recombine and mutate the societal, historical, and academic coordinates from which it comes.
For more information, please visit the call for papers webpage here.