José Esteban Muñoz

Hope and hopelessness: A dialogue

This article is a critical dialogue between Lisa Duggan and José Esteban Muñoz that meditates on questions of public feelings and politics. The authors approach hope and hopelessness as a dialectical formation, ultimately calling for both a critical modality of hope and insisting on the political necessity of engaging feelings of hopelessness that do not simply lead to complacency. The essay melds social theory with concepts from the psychological.

Vitalism's after-burn: The sense of Ana Mendieta

This article considers the influential work of Ana Mendieta. Focusing on her siluetas series, Muñoz describes Mendietas art as performing a modality of brownness that leaves resonant indentions on the world, what he calls vital materialist after-burns. Mendietas after-burns are read alongside the poets of Négritude and their investment in a critical élan vital that speaks to the historical precariousness of dispossessed people. The artists work is explained as a meditation on a critical brownness that is theorized as the sharing out of the unshareable, the invaluable and the incalculable. Mendietas intervention is ultimately described as the work of offering a brown sense of the world in which singularities flow into a politically enabling common.

From surface to depth, between psychoanalysis and affect

This introduction contextualizes this special issue by comparing different aspects of affect studies and psychoanalysis. It also meditates on the work of artist D-L Alvarez. Questions regarding the relation of surface and depth in critical theory are central to this introduction.

Performing the State of Exception: Coco Fusco's Operation Atropos and A Room of One's Own

Fuscos monologue addresses the role of female interrogators in the War on Terror. The piece is staged as a briefing by an intelligence officer who rationalizes the use of sexual harassment by female interrogators of Islamic fundamentalist detainees.