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With this definition in hand, we can turn to the first moment of my method: anti-apocalypticism, or the challenges posed to apocalyptic thinking by political theorists. As noted in the introduction, political theorists have voiced suspicion about the end of the world. The first critique is that the apocalypse imposes a teleological narrative, involving a necessary movement from destruction to rebirth. For instance, mid-twentieth-century liberals argued that the apocalypse plays a role in the “origins of totalitarianism” (Landes Reference Landes, O’Leary and McGhee2005, 22; see also Cohn Reference Cohn1957; Tuveson Reference Tuveson1964). Similarly, postcolonial thinkers highlight that the apocalypse posits a progressive narrative that legitimizes violence in the colonial world (Villagrana Reference Villagrana2022; Westhelle Reference Westhelle2012). In both of these cases, the apocalypse imposes a fixed future on history, closing debate about, and dissension from, an already determined movement. Invocations of the end of the world involve a dangerous appeal to the transcendental, something given without question, that has no place in democratic societies (Voegelin Reference Voegelin1952). The apocalypse imparts a certainty that a totally liberated society will result from the destruction of the old order. The idea that utopia is the flipside of disaster can encourage rulers to hasten the apocalypse. Totalitarian states and colonial regimes believed that the violent end of the world, involving huge suffering, was necessary for the realization of a world of harmony, with their accounts of the future mimicking the certainty of theological modes of millenarianism (Landes Reference Landes, O’Leary and McGhee2005). By contrast, other critics have emphasized that the apocalypse induces conservatism. This line of critique is especially prominent in work by green thinkers on the climate apocalypse (Katz Reference Katz, Callari, Cullenberg and Biewener1995; Malm Reference Malm2021; Rothe Reference Rothe2020; Swyngedouw Reference Swyngedouw2010). The prediction that the wild weather of the future will result in the breakdown of contemporary society unless something is done creates a state of fear. Apocalyptic politics, rather than presenting the future as something that can be negotiated and reformed, suggests that the world is set on a trajectory toward catastrophe. It thus radically reduces people’s options: either the apocalypse will happen, and destruction will be our fate, or it will be prevented. The climate apocalypse is “a thoroughly depoliticized imaginary, one that does not revolve around choosing one trajectory rather than another” (Swyngedouw Reference Swyngedouw2010, 219). Apocalyptic politics produces a “totalizing narrative to end all totalizing narratives,” and for this reason, it is “politically disabling” (Katz Reference Katz, Callari, Cullenberg and Biewener1995, 277). If the apocalypse is taken as inevitable, it produces fatalism and passivity, fostering the dubious feeling of “we’re doomed—fall in peace” (Malm Reference Malm2021, 152). Alternatively, if the apocalypse is understood as preventable, it may justify otherwise unpalatable actions (from increased surveillance to military interventions) to protect populations from the threat identified (Ophir Reference Ophir2007). Moreover, the totalizing nature of the climate apocalypse involves a false universalism; it masks the parochialism of the fears expressed (Alt Reference Alt2023; Mitchell and Chaudhury Reference Mitchell and Chaudhury2020; Whyte Reference Whyte2018). For instance, in the case of the climate crisis, the end of the world often expresses the particular fears of prosperous populations in the Global North and sidelines the contributions of environmentalists in the Global South (Mitchell and Chaudhury Reference Mitchell and Chaudhury2020). These critiques take aim at different dimensions of apocalyptic politics. The first critique focuses on the positive dimension of the end of the world, the fact that it involves not only the end of the current world but also the beginning of a better one. By contrast, the second critique focuses on the negative moment, or what Günther Anders calls an “apocalypse without kingdom” where the end “consists in mere downfall and does not represent a prelude to a new […] state” (Anders Reference Anders1981, 207).Footnote 3 However, despite these differences, both critiques are centrally concerned with the association between the apocalypse and an authoritarian reading of history. The common worry is that apocalyptic politics, in declaring that history is set on a particular path, undercuts pluralism, debate, and dissent. There is one path of history, whether toward an ideal state or a catastrophic end, that all political actors must, in one way or another, accommodate themselves with; the future is dominated by visions of either liberation or disaster.

Mogul et al. 11 Mogul, Joey L, et al. [ JD CUNY School of Law, partner at the People’s Law Office] Queer (In)Justice: The Criminalization of LGBT People in the United States. Boston, Mass, Beacon; Enfield, 2011. (p. 88-95) //aa-ma

Close scrutiny of the nation’s courts reveals a system rife with anti-LGBT bias. Within it, discriminatory laws are enforced, queers are often treated with derision, if not outright contempt, and queer criminalizing archetypes are deployed in full force. Only seventeen years before its landmark decision in Lawrence v. Texas that struck down sodomy statutes in 2003, 9 the Supreme Court upheld laws that criminalized private sexual acts committed by “homosexuals” in the case of Bowers v. Hardwick. 10 By finding that “homosexuals” did not have a right to have consensual sex within the privacy of their own homes, while refusing to punish the same acts by heterosexuals, the Court in effect ruled that queers as a class of people were worthy of punishment. Adding insult to injury, Chief Justice Warren Burger’s concurring opinion argued that the condemnation of “homosexual sodomy” otherwise known as a “crime against nature” was “firmly rooted in Judeo-Christian moral and ethical standards” and “millennia of moral teaching.” 11 The ruling gave renewed legal weight to the message that queer people are immoral, sinful, and deserving of criminal punishment. While the sodomy laws challenged in Bowers were often not or only selectively enforced, they have a lasting, stigmatizing impact that helps strip queer people’s liberty, dignity, and ability to lead full, unencumbered lives. 12 In states with sodomy laws, and even in some where they were struck down before Lawrence, sodomy convictions for consensual same-sex acts forced many to register as sex offenders. 13 The criminalization of queer sexualities through sodomy laws was also used to deny people employment and the ability to raise their children. In 1995, the Supreme Court of Virginia denied Sharon bottoms, a working-class white woman, custody of her child based in part on the fact that she is a lesbian and allowed her partner to help her care for her child, noting that “conduct inherent in lesbianism is punishable” as a felony under Virginia’s “crimes against nature” law. 14 Similarly, sumptuary and vagrancy laws served to criminalize people who transgressed gender norms. The law in Chicago, Illinois, forbade “appear[ing] in a public place in a state of nudity, or in a dress not belonging to his or her sex,” while a Toledo, Ohio, law made it illegal for any “perverted person” to appear in clothing belonging to “the opposite” sex. 15 In New York, an appeals court upheld Mauricio Archibald’s conviction in 1968 for being a “vagrant” “who… [had] his face painted, discolored, covered, or concealed, or being otherwise disguised, in a matter calculated to prevent his being identified”. After appearing in a subway station wearing a white evening dress, high-heeled shoes, a blond wig, women’s undergarments, and facial makeup, Archibald was found guilty, despite being neither unemployed nor homeless. The court found the crime to be one of “conceal[ing] his [sic] true gender,” although Archibald’s true transgression may have been winking at the officer. 16 As another court declared, “cross-dressing” must be punished because “the desire of concealment of a change of sex by the transsexual is outweighed by the public interest for protection against fraud.” 17 Although for the most part sumptuary laws were struck down in the 1970s, and vagrancy laws were either held unconstitutional or redrafted in the 1970s and 1980s, their effects linger to this day. In 1989, a New Jersey trial court denied a transgender woman the right to change her name, holding that it is inherently fraudulent for a person who is physically a male to assume an obviously ‘female’ name for the sole purpose of representing himself to future employers and society as a female.” 18 In other instances, courts have denied transgender people survivor benefits from their deceased spouse on the grounds that their marriages were either void or based in fraud because the transgender person concealed their “true” identity. 19 The stigma of laws explicitly criminalizing queer identities and sexualities has left an enduring stain on the notion of justice, continuing to inform the treatment of queers in courts, particularly when accused in criminal cases. According to former Philadelphia public defender Abbe Smith, queer criminal defendants “are notoriously badly treated throughout the criminal justice system: police are nasty to them … court personnel often mock them; it is the rare judge or magistrate who treats these defendants with dignity or respect.” 20 Other attorneys report that transgender people “continue to experience more overt and unabashed bigotry within the legal system than almost any other group” and are routinely denied basic human dignity when referred to by judges as “it”. 21 Anonymous surveys conducted by judicial commissions and bar associations to determine the level of bias or prejudice suffered by gay and lesbian court users and employees found that homophobic prejudices continue to permeate courthouses across the country. 22 These studies – though limited because they fail to examine the treatment litigants experienced on the basis of race, gender identity, and class, along with sexual orientation – universally concluded that the majority of gay and lesbian litigants experienced courthouses as hostile and threatening environments, whether in criminal or civil cases. A study of the California state court system in 2001 found that 56 percent of gay and lesbian litigants experienced or observed a “negative comment or action” and “one out of every five court employees heard derogatory terms, ridicule, snickering or jokes about gay men or lesbians in open court, with the comments being made most frequently by judges, lawyers, or court employees.” 23 A 1997 study by the Lesbian and Gay Law Association of Greater New York (LeGal) similarly found that 56 percent of respondents witnessed bias-related incidents in the courts of the Second Circuit, including “’gay bashing’ remarks”; “gay jokes,” “express references to ‘homos’”; “’gay male’ mimicry of the limp wrist genre”; and comments suggesting that judge Deborah Batts, an “out” Black lesbian federal judge, “looked like a man.” 24 A 1998 study of the New Jersey State court system found that 79 percent of gay and lesbian respondents reported observing offensive gestures, disparaging remarks, or offensive jokes. Forty-five percent of gay and lesbian respondents said they observed litigants or witnesses being treated disadvantageously because they were perceived to be gay or lesbian. One gay father reported that “’the judge wanted to force me to take an HIV test.’” Other reports indicated that women openly identified as lesbians were “treated rudely” in family court. In another case “’a lawyer, his client and several witnesses used the other litigants’ homosexuality to assert [that] both the defendants and [their] witnesses were alcoholic and sexually promiscuous and predatory.’” 25 Gay and gender-nonconforming people are also repeatedly denied professional, effective, and competent legal services by attorneys who represent them. According to law professor Dean Spade, gender-nonconforming people “consistently report experiencing extreme disrespect when attempting to access legal services, having their cases rejected or ignored by the agencies they turn to, and feeling so unwelcome and humiliated that they often do not return for services.” 26 Even well-intentioned legal advocates are often unprepared to skillfully represent LGBT people because they have limited knowledge of their clients’ lived realities. Spade writes of one instance where a criminal defense attorney prevented a judge from sentencing her clients, two transgender women, to a women’s drug treatment facility because the lawyer was under the misapprehension that this was somehow improper, and had failed to discuss gender identity and safety in sec-segregated programs with her clients. 27 Lack of information and understanding about the needs and experiences of LGBT litigants poses a particular problem in cases when they are accused of violent crimes. The circumstances of a queer person’s life may include severe discrimination and suffering that could, if presented to a judge or jury by an informed and skilled advocate, mitigate the sentence imposed, particularly in capital cases. The quality of representation provided to LGBT people in criminal cases, many of whom are poor and working class, is further compromised by the lack of resourced available to attorneys who represent indigent defendants. The presumption of criminality stemming from laws expressly punishing homosexuality and gender nonconformity, courtroom practices further stigmatizing LGBT people, and the promulgation of archetypal narratives that brand queers as deceptive has effectively eroded the credibility of queer people in the court system. Thirty-nine percent of gay and lesbian respondents in the California State survey believed their sexual orientation was used to devalue their credibility”. In one instance “jury members suggested that [a] witness was gay and therefore his testimony could not be trusted,” and another in which a gay respondent said, “I was discredited as a witness because they said I was probably ‘out at a club or something’ before I witnessed the accident.” 28 In Chicago in August 2007 a Black transgender woman named Monica James was charged with attempted murder and a host of other crimes against a white, gay, off-duty police officer. The prosecution deployed the archetype of transgender people as inherently deceptive by asking the jury point blank, "How can you trust this person? He tells you he is a woman; he is clearly a man," and insisted on referring to James using male pronouns throughout the trial. The state also argued that James' self-defense claim was "insane" because the off-duty police officer was gay. Owen Daniel-McCarter, an attorney with the Transformative Justice Law Project (TJLP), later remarked, "That argument ignores the intricacies of race and gender... in the gay community." As James explained on the stand, "He [the officer] doesn't like my kind of faggot." Ultimately, James was acquitted of the more serious criminal charges, but found Lilty of aggravated battery.29 This hostile and prejudicial environment makes it difficult at best, and sometimes impossible, for queer people to vindicate their rights or be heard in court. This is particularly true in cases involving alleged "sex-related offenses," in which queer criminalizing archetypes have particular resonance. Respondents to the 1998 LEGAL survey reported "a belief that judges automatically assume[d] a gay man is guilty of any sexual act with which he is charged.'"30 Gay men, transgender women, and gender-nonconforming people are commonly overcharged in connection with sex-related incidents, facing substantial jail time or sex offender registration if convicted.31 Such overcharging, with the accompanying threat of incarceration, can have a coercive effect on queer defendants, who are vulnerable to violence and rape while imprisoned. Similarly, the archetypal narrative that casts queers as inherently deceptive undermines LGBT defendants' ability to challenge sex-related charges based on arrests by undercover officers. In such cases, the word of a queer defendant—already marked as dishonest and perverted-is pitted against the word of law enforcement officers, whose testimony is generally afforded more credibility than that of civilians. In light of these circumstances, queer defendants often accept less than equitable guilty pleas to escape the humiliation of defending against such charges and the harsher / punishments they risk if convicted after a trial. The acceptance of such deals is also driven by shame, fear of family or community members' discovery of sexual orientation or gender identity, or simply a desire to put the entire incident behind them. According to Thomas Andrew, a defense attorney in San Antonio, Texas, "The biggest problem we are having from the standpoint of wrongfully charge defendants is that 95 percent of them are so embarrassed by the [sex-related] charge... they are afraid to fight."32 Regardless of whether a queer defendant receives a favorable or unfair plea bargain, the arrest and subsequent conviction leaves a mark, in the form of a criminal record, that silently follows many queers for the rest of their lives, impacting employment opportunities, professional licenses, the ability to overcome considerable barriers faced by LGBT people seeking to become foster or adoptive parents, and immigration status. For instance, immigrants can be removed from the United States if "convicted of a crime involving moral turpitude." 33 The 1994 prosecution of Sean O'Neil, a white transgender man in Colorado Springs, Colorado, illustrates the operation of many criminalizing dynamics in sex-related cases. O'Neil, who was in his late teens, had consensual romantic relationships with four underage teenage girls. One of the girls obtained a restraining order against him for making threatening phone calls. When serving the restraining order, a police officer frisked O'Neil and discovered an identification card bearing the name "Sharon Clark." The police subsequently obtained a court-ordered gynecological exam that "sexed [O'Neil] as female." The girls with whom O'Neil had relationships acknowledged that the sex was consensual when they believed he was male. Nonetheless, the girls and their parents claimed it somehow became involuntary after they learned he was transgender and willingly participated in O'Neil's prosecution. Throughout the case, prosecutors deployed the overarching archetypal theme of the deceptive gender transgressor, charging O'Neil with "criminal impersonation" in addition to sexual assault. This framing influenced the judge, who, proclaimed during the sentencing hearing, **What this case is about is deceit.'" According to Deputy Sheriff Tonye Barreto-Neto, then director of Transgender Officers Protect and Serve (TOPS), the motivations for the prosecutors' charging decisions were clear: "This case would never ever have been facing 32 years in prison if the issue here wasn't some homophobia or transphobia. And the fact that Sean anatomically is female, because if it were a 19 year-old boy and 14 year-old girl—and I deal in child abuse and I deal in these cases all the time-they never really get to court. And if they do, they're misdemeanors." Facing a minimum sentence of twenty years imprisonment if convicted, O'Neil opted to plead guilty to second-degree sexual assault. His sentencing hearing was attended by a courtroom full of transgender people and other supporters organized by FTM (Female to Male) International. He was ultimately sentenced to three months in a women's prison and was required to register as a sex offender.34 In addition to coercive pleas and wrongful convictions, queers facing sex-related charges face disproportionate and excessive sentences. For example, Mathew Limon, who had just turned eighteen, was sentenced in 2002 to serve seventeen years in prison for having oral sex with a fourteen-year-old boy (who was a month shy of fifteen) whom he lived with in a home for developmentally disabled people in Kansas. His sentence was fifteen times longer than it would have been if he had engaged in the same conduct with a fourteen-year-old girl under a "Romeo and Juliet" statute that reduced the punishment for teenagers who engaged in consensual sex with minors of the opposite sex. Notwithstanding the U.S. Supreme Court's decision in Lawrence, the Kansas Court of Appeals nevertheless upheld Limon's disproportionately excessive sentence, finding that his punishment was necessary to protect and preserve "traditional sexual mores of society" and to protect "the historical sexual development of children."35 Fortunately, the Kansas Supreme Court overruled this decision and he was released after spending an additional four years in prison.36 Limon's case was not as unusual as it may seem. Queer criminal archetypes all too often influence the sentence upon conviction. For example, in New Jersey, gay men convicted of loitering when suspected of "cruising" in a park were ordered by a judge to undergo psychiatric evaluation. According to a social worker in New Jersey, "Sentencing patterns are clearly stricter [for homosexual sex offenders] than [for] heterosexual sex offenders." 37 Unfortunately, the same dynamics that serve to criminalize adults in the courts operate to damn LGBT youth in the juvenile system. A study titled Hidden Injustice: Lesbian, Gay; Bisexual and Transgender Youth in Juvenile Courts, completed by the National Center for Lesbian Rights (NCLR), the National Juvenile Defender Center, and Legal Services for Children in 2009 concluded that LGBT youth are "disproportionately charged with and adjudicated for sex offenses in cases that the system typically overlooks when heterosexual youth are involved. Even in cases involving nonsexual offenses, courts sometimes order LGBT youth to submit to ... sex offender treatment programs based merely on their sexual orientation or gender identity." The study also found that LGBT youth are unnecessarily and disproportionately detained pending trial, based on the perception of LGBT youth as sexually predatory and on the lack of services and placements for LGBT youth.38 The pernicious criminalizing effects of queer criminal archetypes in court proceedings are particularly disturbing when examined in the context of cases involving the most severe charges and sentences in the criminal legal system— capital cases.

Subjectivity is shameful—"subjects are born quite as much from misery as from triumph" (N, 151). It grows from the seeds of a "composite feeling" made from the compromises with our time: the shame of being alive, the shame of indignity, the shame that it happens to others, the shame that others can do it, and the shame of not being able to prevent it (WP, 108, 225). Existence is the result of a disaster, yet it says very little about us; it does not explain but rather must be explained. This is what makes shame "one of philosophy's most powerful motifs" (108). The subject is always something derivative that "comes into being and vanishes in the fabric of what one says, what one sees," resembling "specks dancing in the dust of the visible and permutations in an anonymous babble" (N, 108). This does not keep some from clinging to their shame. On this account, Deleuze has nothing but scorn for identity politics—"we have to counter people who think 'I'm this, I'm that' . . . arguments from one's own privileged experience are bad and reactionary arguments" (N, 11-12). Shame is our defense against these people, queer theorists remind us, and it must be put to work on them as a weapon—an affect that acts as a solvent to dissolve whatever binds it to an identity (Halperin and Traub, "Beyond Gay Pride," 25). There are those who have worked to square identity with Deleuze (Donna Haraway, Tim Dean, Jasbir Puar, Edouard Glissant). Their theorizations only avoid the problem of shame to the extent that they make identity's many perforations into points of leverage and transformed differences into a million cutting edges.

For some, the world is made up of assemblages, and all assemblages are subjects. In no time, people, hurricanes, and battles all get addressed in the same register (as all subjects should be afforded proper names)! Although this is, perhaps, technically true, such assemblage-thinking misses the point—it reduces subjectivity to the name we use to pin down the sum of a body's capacities (AT, 256-57). It sanctifies a bloodless world by cataloging the networks that make up its many attributes. This is why assemblage-modeling is a perfect fit in a world where capitalism produces subjectivity "the same way it produces Prell shampoo or Ford cars" (AO, 245). Further proof of its noxious conservativsm is arch-thinkers Manuel DeLanda's and Bruno Latour's dismissive rejection of Marxism. Fortunately, Deleuze already warned us by channeling Spinoza on the limits of adequate knowledge, in the often-repeated words that "we do not know what a body is capable of" (NP, 39). The phrase should not be read as an appeal to some evasive essence but simply as applying a principle of Deleuze's transcendental empiricism, which holds that the conditions of actual experience are not represented through empirical tracing (DR, 95, 221, 321). This is crucial, because philosophy is too easily thrown back into the transcendental illusions through the personal identitarian experiences built by self-centered habits of mind (DR, 207-8, 73, 119). The pitfall of run-of-the-mill empiricists is that even in the best-case scenario, when they step out of the perspective of the subject, they still reduce existence to conditions of reproduction or chart something's "degree of freedom." For us, then, the subject should be spoken about scornfully as simply the sum of a body's habits, most of which are marshaled to evade thought.

Puar posits a reformulated radical queer subjectivity as a counter and corrective logic to black feminism and black political tactics more broadly. Staging a critique against formulations of intersectionality, Puar asserts:

For while intersectionality and its underpinnings—an unrelenting epistemological will to truth—presupposes identity and thus disavows futurity, or, perhaps more accurately, prematurely anticipates and thus fixes a permanence to forever, assemblage, in its debt to ontology and its espousal of what cannot be known, seen, or heard, or has yet to known, seen, or heard, allows for becoming beyond or without being (Puar 2007, 216).

A Spinozian concern (with or without the Deleuzian mediation) with the body as the ontological ground of Human encounters has become quite appealing to critical theory, especially in the footsteps of the “affective turn” and “nomadic” decenterings of the subject. Perceptions that precarity is ineliminable and persistent severely disrupted older signposts of progress—labor, gender, or national social inclusion—and revealed anxieties with recuperating precarity itself within a relational ontology. The mission seems to be the rescue of “living labor”32 (Virno 1999) as inherent to worker’s bodies belonging to the Human family, leaving to the Slave the permanent, thus deathly, separation of “labor power” from the flesh, and the ensuing impossibility of social inclusion and recognition.33 In Negri’s reflection, it is indeed the possibility of encounter and the promise of relationality that infuse work with a new ontological status, keeping it on the Human side of precarity and preventing it from falling into the abjection of enslavement. Negri’s redemption of work not as labor but as relation thus entails a revitalizing “ontology of work” centered on “immaterial” properties that are “intellectual, communicational, relational, affective, which are expressed by subjects and social movements, thereby leading to production.”34 Critical theory’s conceptual and ethical investment in the encounter as the force deemed to restore potential, becoming, and equlibrium to bodies—singular as well as social—otherwise constantly and vehemently stimulated to be “out of step with themselves,” to recall Simondon’s formulation,35 is thus overtly aimed at conjuring away slaveness as the haunting absence-presence of stasis and permanent disequilibrium without potential. The specter of slaveness is, on the other hand, as constantly and menacingly alluded to, like the abyss out of which Humanity must be kept, in the Spinozian fold of post-Marxist critical theory, as this allusion systematically disavows the structural isomorphism between Slaveness and Blackness. Thus, Frédéric Lordon’s image of neoliberal subjectivities turned into “willing slaves of capital,” self-entrepeneurial actors motivated to pursue their own exploitation, rests not on classical notions of ideology and hegemony, but, Spinozistically, on the hypothesis that the Human’s essential capacity to desire has been twisted toward a fleetingly joyful but ultimately oppressive encounter with capital and consumption.36 In a praising review of Lordon, Jason Read reminds the readers of what is the touchstone of coherence for this peculiar version of the Human “drama of value”: Spinoza considers the historical transformation of desire primarily in terms of the biography of an individual. The movement from bondage, from domination by the affects, to liberation, to the rational comprehension of the affects, is the trajectory of liberation that defines the Ethics. Hartman’s “Venus” provides, of course, a far more structurally accurate and ethically rigorous, because less generically “human,” characterization of the position of being “dominated by affect,” one in which White affect simultaneously determines antiblack violence, the terror of enslavement, and the possibility of desire and encounter for those whose freedom means staying clear of racial bondage. If the ominous evocation of slaveness—on condition that it completely disavows the violence defining racial blackness—is a somewhat unspoken asset in the critical vis of the Spinozian moment, its adamant opposition to the very notion of structural positionality, without which blackness becomes literally unthinkable at an ontological level, is a far more pronounced, perhaps even “programmatic,” aspect in contemporary theorizations of the encounter. For Brian Massumi, for example, the very existence of the social field as something distinct from a thingly “universe” of “death” rests on the “ontogenetic priority” of movement and becoming over stasis and position, a priority practically expressing itself through an expansive notion of affect and desire, not limited to emotions and feelings, but designating bodily intensive capacity for attractions that “affect” singularities in their collective assembling.38 Inspired by Massumi, Rosi Braidotti and Jasbir Puar directly target radical projects they regard as anachronistically wedded to, respectively, “negativity” and “identity” as impediments to an affect-driven post-modern and post-human reconstitution of the social.39 Patrice Douglass has convincingly shown how such critical turns—which I trace back to various influences of Deleuzian Spinozism—delineate their conceptual capaciousness through a deprecating allusion, which is often not even so implicit, to blackness (and, in political terms, Black radicalism and radical Black feminism) as a condition putatively obsessed with immobility, loss, and grief.40 In its very allusiveness and persistent refusal to engage questions of racialized violence and structural positionality raised by Black critique (rather than the more academically en vogue “people-of-color” critique), however, the Spinozian celebration of movement, affect, and becoming is self-fulfilling, since it fixes blackness as conceptually immobile, hence the constitutive outside for the flourishing horizon of Massumi’s, Puar’s, and Braidotti’s joyous and positive Human assemblages. The coerced conceptual immobility and policed practical objecthood of blackness, Douglass concludes, fuel the “theoretical mobility” of critical theory and its manifold desired subjectivities.

It follows that queerness, as the figure of such a radical unbecoming, maintains a persistently negative link to the logic of education. Queerness, wherever it shows itself (in the form of a catachresis), effects a counterpedagogy, refuting, by its mere appearance, the reality that offers it no place—or that grants it the place of what nullifies as well as the nonplace of the null. Like poetry in W. H. Auden’s well-known phrase, queerness makes nothing happen; it incises that nothing in reality with an acid’s caustic bite. Like a flame that affords the hapless moth an unsentimental education, so queerness dissolves the coherence to which our reality pretends, belying the comprehension, the unifying framework of the world, that the Child as meaning’s cynosure ostensibly preserves.3 Futurism compels us to indoctrinate children in what ought to be, not what is, shrouding them in the blinder of the putative innocence associated with the Child and imposed onchildren the better to enable the social control of adults. In the eyes of this all-pervasive regime, “the queer,” like a counterfactual assertion produced in the land of the Houyhnhnms, represents, wherever the Child is concerned, the Swiftian thing which is not: it represents, that is, the being who intends the negation of being as such—the negation of being as defined, at least, by reproductive futurism. Thus queerness, from the normative perspective, promotes what I’m calling here bad education, the education that teaches us nothing but the nothing of the thing which is not. Like the Child, the queer is a fantasy figure catachrestically produced to fill in the void that precludes the world’s totalization. The Child, however, signals the attainment of that totality in the future while the queer stands in for the obstacle impeding its realization in the present. Fleshing out the cut of division in terms of contingent historical identities constructed to ontologize ontological exclu - sion, those who are queered are libidinally stained with the negativity of the thing which is not. They threaten the Child, and therefore the future, by desublimating its “innocence,” reducing it from privileged object of desire to the void at the core of the drive.

I’ve already defined this child-aversive, future-negating force, answering so well to the inspiriting needs of a moribund familialism, as sinthomosexuality, a term that links the jouissance to which we gain access through the sinthome with a homosexuality made to figure the lack in Symbolic meaning-production on account of which, as Lacan declares, ‘‘there is no sexual relation.’’ Designating a locus of enjoyment beyond the logic of interpretation, and thus beyond the correlative logic of the symptom and its cure, the sinthome refers to the mode of jouissance constitutive of the subject, which defines it no longer as subject of desire, but rather as subject of the drive. For the subject of desire now comes to be seen as a symptomatic misprision, within the language of the law, of the subject’s sinthomatic access to the force of a jouissance played out in the pulsions of the drive. Where the symptom sustains the subject’s relation to the reproduction of meaning, sustains, that is, the fantasy of meaning that futurism constantly weaves, the sinthome unravels those fantasies by and within which the subject means. And because, as Bruce Fink puts it, ‘‘the drives always seek a form of satisfaction that, from a Freudian or traditional moralistic standpoint, is considered perverse,’’ the sinthome that drives the subject, that renders him subject of the drive, thus engages, on a figural level, a discourse of what, because incapable of assimilation to heterosexual genitality, gets read, as if by default, as a version of homosexuality, itself conceived as a mode of enjoyment at the social order’s expense. As Fink goes on to observe: ‘‘What the drives seek is not heterosexual genital reproductive sexuality, but a partial object that provides jouissance.’’ 2 Sinthomosexuality, then, only means by figuring a threat to meaning, which depends on the promise of coming, in a future continuously deferred, into the presence that reconciles meaning with being in a fantasy of completion—a fantasy on which every subject’s cathexis of the signifying system depends. As the shadow of death that would put out the light of heterosexual reproduction, however, sinthomosexuality provides familial ideology, and the futurity whose cause it serves, with a paradoxical life support system by providing the occasion for both family and future to solicit our compassionate intervention insofar as they seem, like Tiny Tim, to be always on their last legs.

Language itself, as a technique of coercion, is inseparable from dynamics of power and it “can facilitate the most violent exercise of power against somebody.” 87 Violence includes a deranged semiotic capacity that serves as a constant mechanism meant to distort perception and influence personal principles. In most applications, this clandestine procedure is robust and unchecked—relying upon “authoritarian, monological, aggressive, and calculative methods” as well as the “institutional use of obedience, suggestibility, idealism and social skills” enacted through language.88 In a world of domination and exploitation, of war and injustice, language gives a structure to consciousness which guides action and informs perception, influencing our thoughts and resulting behaviors. In short, “language, which is rarely neutral, shapes perception and behavior. Language can be used to demean differences and inflict violence or to affirm diversity and achieve recognition.” 89 Although likely a point of contention, Scientology has “accrue[d] enormous linguistic capital” via “institutionally sanctioned demeaning terminology…which they generally use to advance their interests to the detriment of the social masses.” 90 By classifying linguistic violence in its “multifarious and nefarious manifestations,” the oppressive dimension of language becomes so pronounced that it would be negligent to ignore it.91 Language itself, as a social institution, reflects and perpetuates power. Language is not a neutral medium for the description of an objective reality but is manipulated to “actively shap[e] and giv[e] meaning to human experience.” 92 Therefore, language communicates ideologies, which in turn mold group attitudes and justify social practices that likely sustain the use of more overt forms of violence. Like Žižek, I am taking the position that semiology, as it is absorbed in all written language, is distorted in a manner that can be traced to an influencer and necessarily results in exclusion of some sort to some social party. To be succinct, semiology is ideology. According to Dr. Gay, “language does harm when, with its differential terms, it elevates one group and devalues another.” 93 In Scientology, this is accomplished and codified in scores of books and hundreds of writings by L. Ron Hubbard, with Dianetics serving as the authentic and authoritative source. The lexicon of Dianetics reflects oppressive, institutional covert violence insofar as it provides a framework of human behavior reliant upon the “socially sanctioned use of demeaning terms to refer to specific social groups.” 94 The language in Dianetics is a set of certain conventions held and recorded by a venerated prophet—they are largely beyond the control of the practitioners “who are socialized and conditioned to passively assimilate it.” 95 Dr. Gay authenticates this reality by commenting, “ [an] arena in which abusive language abounds is in the derogatory terminology used to describe the lifestyles of lesbians and gay males. The longstanding, and often physically violent reinforcement of the heterosexism of established discourse often makes an open discussion of sexual orientation quite difficult.”

Beyond obvious hate speech as a fundamental form of symbolic violence, discursive practices that attempt to appropriate or commandeer human individuality through linguistic description are equally as malignant. Žižek writes, “language simplifies the designated thing, reducing it to a single feature…It dismembers the thing, destroying its organic unity, treating its parts and properties as autonomous. It inserts the thing into a field of meaning which is ultimately external to it.” 64 He then further proposes, “this is why language itself, the very medium of nonviolence, of mutual recognition, involves unconditional violence.” The ability to negotiate, reason, and locate common ground as humans capable of linguistic communication is all stripped away through Scientology’s established canonical texts that restrict debate— Substantially reinforced and legitimized through the religious fixture of a founding prophet (L. Ron Subbard). Words themselves do not hold within them an invaluable quintessence, or in other terms, “a stable core that guarantees the identity of a thing.” 65 Rather, essence is created and recreated through an active rhetorical process—“essencing”—that occurs within a specific historical context and is dependent upon an established ideology.66 Because language is not imbued with an inherent truth, this task is undertaken by way of specialized intention on behalf of the author; which, in turn, affects the way a human (as an absorber of information) interacts with the presented literature. I surmise that the notions constructed in Dianetics by author L. Ron Hubbard, predetermine as well as “overdetermine” the ways in which his readers and Dianetics practitioners experience queer bodies in authentic encounters.67 Thus, their “change in sensitivity is sustained by language; it hinges on the shift in [their] symbolic universe. A fundamental violence exists in this ‘essencing’ ability of language: [their] world is given a partial twist, it loses its balanced innocence, one partial color gives the tone of the whole.”

CMS is a network of management and business school academics, who publish mostly Marxist and some feminist and limited post-colonial perspectives on the contemporary organisation of capitalist work. This literature intends to place the dominantly pro-capitalist OMS literature in a critical perspective. These attempts to influence discourse by writing follows the interpretation of performativity as language creating realities. Critical performativity is therefore the attempt to influence organisational reality by writing from the academy. The term critical performativity then leads to roughly two sections, a larger theoretical section on meta-theory discussing what CMS should be about and what kind of critical knowledges should it support, and a smaller practical section creating critically performative knowledge in interaction with a situated organisational practises usually in the form of academics working with non-for-profit or anticapitalist organisations. The critical performativity literature developed out of discussions on the performativity of capitalist organising pushing for efficiency. One fundamental reading was the article by Fournier and Grey (2000) “At the critical moment: Conditions and prospects for critical management studies” in which they argued that OMS was creating knowledge under the paradigm of increasing efficiency and growth. To counter this, they called for non-performative academic research that does not participate in the growth narrative and even counters it critically. They wrote: “the aim [of OMS research] is to contribute to the effectiveness of managerial practise, or to build a better model or understanding thereof. Management is taken as a given, and a desirable given at that, and is not interrogated except in so far as this will contribute to its improved effectiveness. Critical work is not performative in this meaning, even though it may well have some intention to achieve (e.g. to achieve a better world or to end exploitation, etc.). […] One way in which the demarcation between the non-performative and the performative, the critical and the non-critical is mediated and may be recognized lies in the lexicon of concepts which are deployed within the different styles of work. For example, the invocation of notions such as power, control and inequality typically betoken some form of critical approach whilst efficiency, effectiveness and profitability do not.” (Fournier & Grey, 2000, p.180) Fournier and Grey’s call for non- or anti-performative research has led to the development of the term critical performativity in CMS (Cabantous et al., 2016). Despite the 20 years that have passed since this first call, critical performativity can be considered as still within development, maybe because organisation scholars are not always clear what they mean by the term performativity (Gond et al., 2015). Each philosophical meaning provides a different perspective on how social reality could be influenced by research. In addition, there is an even wider spectrum of ideas on what a better world, that Fournier and Grey mention in brackets, could look like and how it could be achieved. In response Spicer, Alvesson and Kärreman (2009) argued that CMS as a whole should be a performative project to intervene in discussion on management and thereby affect organisational practise to stop CMS from withdrawing into safe intellectual cynicism. They proposed a framework for critically performative research. Research as critique should be affirmative to the organisation under study for example by affirming the complexity and ambiguity present in their practises. Research as critique should base on ethics of care to the people one is studying by taking them seriously but also being critically friendly in discussing their practises with them. It should be pragmatic by rejecting the metaphor of the corporation as indefeasible evil but instead finding pragmatic “incremental incisions into particular processes” (ibid., p. 550). Doing so critique should be potential focused and find utopias in the existing working life. Finally, a critically performative research practise should be normative, therefore base criticism on an articulated set of normative ideas on what a good organisation would be like. This proposal of critical performativity clearly breaks, as the authors stated, with Fournier and Grey’s (2000) call to be non-performative, therefore, not to participate in the production of knowledge for the sake of capital. It advocates to reform the corporation, instead of abandoning it, through “[m]icroemancipations [that] involve specific and focused attempts to create spaces of autonomy among institutionalized relations of power.” The paper shares some references on performativity theory with this thesis but was based on a surface interpretation of the performativity of gender. The proposal to alter management practise from the point of academic writing was based on an interpretation of performativity following Austin and Butler. They have argued that speech acts and embodied performances create social realities. Spicer, Alvesson and Kärreman (2009) heavily borrowed from an interpretation of Butler’s work, queer theory, which they do not explicitly reference. Instead, they summarise performativity theory as “[t]hrough being made performative, discourses create spaces where we are able to rework them” (ibid., p.544) based on the understanding that queer theory has made gender performative. However, with a closer reading of Butler (2004), the argument of queer theory is not, that discourses have been made performative through academic theory, but that academic theory has provided the perspective to understand gender as performative social practise that does not mirror a biological reality. While theory can help to become conscious of taken-for-granted knowledges, in this case gender norms, and try to challenge them through queer practises, this does not make one less or more performative. A critical performativity based on queer theory would be a conscious, intended performance instead of normed performances that reproduce what is already set in dominant discourses. I mention queer theory here to make the lived experiences visible on which the academic theory was later developed. Queer theory and Butler’s (ibid.) work on gender as performance is based on the experiences of people, who faced and face violence for daring to queer gender norms. When Spicer, Alvesson and Kärreman (2016) later reject criticism for incorrectly applying Butler’s theory, they defend themselves against “intellectual authoritarianism” (p. 231). More problematic than misunderstanding a philosophical framework for the sake of academic rigour are the ethical questions about appropriating queer situated knowledges, taking them out of context and then applying them to create minor reforms in capitalist organising. By today queer theory has branched out from the study of gender to a political epistemology (Sedgwick, 2003; Halberstam, 2011). De Souza, Brewis and Rumens (2016) have offered a first conceptualisation of queer methodologies for the study of organisations. My argument here is not, that queer theory should not be applied outside its original use, but that any application of it should make the effort to understand the context of its development. Doing so will also help to understand the limits of power that queer theory has been pointing out. The ignorance of the limits that power places to the alteration of discourses was later also pointed out by Fleming and Banerjee (2016). Fleming and Banerjee (2016) critiqued Spicer, Alvesson and Kärreman’s (2009) conceptualisation of critical performativity as both overemphasising the effect of language and the role of CMS in OMS scholarship as a whole. Seeing little perspective in engaging with managers and trying to change capitalism from within the corporation, they argued that even if individual managers would like to change practises, the institutional conditions would prevent them from doing so. They pointed out that attempts of a critical subversion of discourse need to take into account the conditions of speech. In his conceptualisation of how language created reality Austin (1975) included the perlocutionary speech act, a speech act that calls out a reality but has the potential to fail if, simply put, the audience denies to listen and enact it. Translated to the case of critical performativity in CMS, this would mean that writing about potentially less exploitative managerial practises would not necessarily bring about change if nobody decides to listen to them because they do not fit with the dominant pro-capitalist discourse.

The first chapter of Part II opens the project of de- centering queer theory by focusing on the epistemology of sexuality in Soviet Marxism. While some studies have concentrated on comparing different countries during the Cold War with regard to specific gender policies (e.g., reproduction and abortion), my strategy is to interrogate Cold War epistemologies of bodies. By interpreting theoretical and visual Marxist materials from the Soviet Union and Romania, the role of the chapter was twofold. First, it introduced the argument that the conceptualization of gender identity is in conflict with eastern European socialism. Bodies and sexuality in Productive bodies in east European Marxism early Soviet Marxism gesture to an abolitionist politics that has been ignored as a theoretical resource by critics of queer liberalism. Second, my analysis revealed not only that corporal productivism constituted an important thread in Marxist cinema, but also that it was gradually transformed by Cold War dynamics. In historicizing the epistemology of productive bodies, I analyzed a Romanian Marxist film from the mid- 1960s, which incorporated conservative western tropes of abortion. This chapter has offered only a brief introduction to the question of conflict in the political contrast between two epistemologies, however. More research is required to understand the various evolutions of different socialist cinemas in their relation to sexuality during the Cold War. This investigation is needed, given that, at least in Anglo- American theory, the archive of Marxist cinema does not have an important role in queer studies. In bypassing this resource, the danger is that queer theorists can replicate the liberal anti- communist discourse that saw eastern European Marxism as a historical void. Two consequences emerge from this chapter. First, the epistemology of productivist bodies offer a powerful challenge to Productivism was an important theoretical thread in Soviet Marxism, particularly in its emphasis on destroying an old capitalist system by abolishing its epistemological ideas. Instead of merely living in the world, productive bodies were designed to be theoretical accounts that work with the analytic of gender. Katherine Verdery’s deployment of gender consolidated the perception that eastern European Marxism was an authoritarian regime, unlike those in the free countries of the Anglo- American world. In opposition to this argument, I have provided an account that sees productivist bodies as part of an emancipatory and dialectical project to abolish capitalist sex roles. Soviet Marxism offers a counternarrative to the contemporary assumption that bodies have to be theorized in alignment with values such as freedom and individuality. Similarly, I contested Kligman’s idea that Romanian anti- abortion politics is a direct result of communist ideology. Studies such as Kligman’s that trace in a causal argumentation abortion bans to communism miss not only the history of abortion laws in State socialism, but also historical developments that were part of the Cold War. In turn, I suggested that the ideological underpinnings of Marxism offer a strong progressive epistemology that was directly affected by the rise of conservative ideas on sexual reproduction. Second, the epistemology of a productivist body offers a window onto not only eastern European Marxism, but also its rival developments in the West. Eastern European epistemology is not the only body of analysis that is affected by this theoretical account, given that the Cold War shaped the politics of decolonization in Africa, Asia and Latin America. To rephrase Verdery’s formulation that gender is “a symbol system by which bodies enter into sociality,” gender appears to be a symbol system by which bodies entered in the Cold War.70 Yet, while gender became a dominant theory in social sciences, particularly after the 1990s, political dynamics during the Cold War are not perfectly aligned to the binary between communism and liberal capitalism. As I have shown, Romanian socialists have integrated a conservative rhetoric to justify anti- abortion restrictions. Also, I suggested that future detailed historical work can identify different turns and trajectories for Marxist sexuality in an eastern European context. This chapter introduces the possibility that the analytic of gender needs to transform its epistemological assumptions. The danger is that its emphasis on individualism and freedom can block projects designed to lead to collective emancipation. I resume my historical analysis by looking at the emergence of gender in North America, concentrating on the sexology literature. I focus on John Money’s texts between the 1950s and the 1970s, given his prominence in the rise of sexuality studies. The chapter continues the work of tracing the difference between productivist bodies and gender identity, but this time it provides a historical reading of Money’s logic as part of US anti- communism during the Cold War.

The cleaving of Marxism from queer studies — indeed, the atomization of sexuality, race, and class as antagonistic and incompatible identities separated by distinct politics and platforms — returns in an especially lethal form with the contemporary rise of right-wing nationalisms and call-out cultures across the political spectrum. These movements pit white, black, brown, and yellow as well as straight, gay, and trans against one another, undoing long histories of political coalition building, trenchant critical analyses of racial capitalism, and influential theories of intersectionality and assemblage that have emerged from fields as diverse as Black feminisms and decolonial theory. Insofar as poststructuralist Marxisms also have critiques of identity and identity politics that exceed the primacy of the classed subject, the impasse between queer studies and Marxism is less about which identities matter and more about the divergent ways in which the fields interrogate relations of social structuration. In his opening contribution to this special issue, “Queer Theory and the Specter of Materialism,” Petrus Liu turns a fresh eye to this problem. He insists that the sexual subject of queer studies and the class subject of Marxism are not distinct entities. Both must relinquish their proprietary relationship over these categories. Instead, Liu conceives both queer theory and Marxism as materialist theories foregrounding the constitutive sociality of the self. Liu’s approach to subjectless critique as one grounded in processes of social structuration that cut across the two fields allows him to bring together Judith Butler’s “view of gender as the constitutive sociality of the self” and Marx’s “labor theory of value as the ethical imbrication of self and Other.” Refusing to reduce queer theory to the primacy of sexuality and Marxism to the primacy of the economic and the material, Liu observes that the ascription of positivistic content, political priority, or moral urgency to the laboring subject in the latter field is predicated on forgetting the fact that “Marx is interested not in the stand - point of the immediate producer but in the fact that under capitalism labor becomes both a commodity (that one can sell) and a social relation.” Both Marxism and queer studies underscore the fact that the subject is necessarily opaque to itself and eminently imbricated in a web of social relations and responsibilities, a self with primary ties to unknown and unknowable others. As such, Marxism and queer theory are better approached not as oppositional but as dialectical. In effect, disavowals of Marxist analyses as hostile toward sexuality, and repudiations of sexuality as “merely cultural” from a Marxian point of view prevent us from understanding the production and reproduction of subjects precisely as recognizable identities. Indeed, Liu’s turn to “queer Marxism” as a common ground for examining materialist predications of the subject focuses our attention away from the reproduction of the means of production and toward the reproduction of the relations of production, to borrow a critical concept from Louis Althusser.12 This move allows us to index multiple approaches to materialism in global Marxisms and connect them to the predication, history, and relations of the subject in ways that pose significant geopolitical implications for what’s “left of queer.” For example, the evolution of LGBTQ+ in US identity politics finds its global corollary today in a discourse of international human rights in which sexuality becomes a privileged metric to assess “civilized” and “barbaric” cultures. The “woman question” (how illiberal nations and peoples in the Third World treat their women) in prior decades has now evolved into the “homosexual question” (how illiberal nations and peoples in the global South treat their LGBTQ communities). This developmentalist narrative presumes a universal subject and history, not only of queerness but also and notably of capitalism, as scholars such as Rosemary Hennessy, Miranda Joseph, and Kevin Floyd underscore.13 Through the maintenance of a reductive opposition between global North and global South, the developmentalist use of queer as identity thus becomes an important foil for the globalization of capital in its imperial travels, fostering the production as well as erasure of particular queer subjects and subjectivities. In the age of neoliberalism and human rights, the colonial dynamic of white men saving brown women from brown men has been reconditioned as white folks (straight and gay) saving brown homosexuals from brown heterosexuals.14 As sexuality becomes a primary language—perhaps the primary language—of modern citizenship, a model of queer rights and representation in the West assumes an ever-expanding ambit in a global politics of recognition. Focusing on the predication of the queer subject of geopolitics exposes a problematic and antagonistic relationship between sexuality and class that denies histories of coevalness. This relationship underwrites particular parochialisms as universal discourses of neoliberal development on both the individual and the structural level. In sum, returning subjectless critique to the geopolitical field allows us to apprehend both US queer studies and area studies as particular forms of specialized, regional knowledge, with specific histories of social production beyond the subject of the Western gay consumer-tourist or the queer native informant. It allows us to apprehend the emergence of both a universal queer subject of rights and recognition and a particular queer native informant consigned to the waiting room of history as two sides of the same representational coin. The Western queer and the post - colonial queer — including the “transnational activist” that sutures them together — are neither developmental nor oppositional categories. Rather, they must be approached as dialectic counterparts created through the same social relations of production that expose the capitalist (economic), nationalist (political), and liberal individualist (cultural) assumptions foreclosing other histories of materiality and other social relations and relationalities. Therefore, to reframe these debates, we must expand our queer archives and attend to the complexity and porosity of what is signaled by materiality in the first instance.

The third reason why Marxists failed to develop Marxist framing for queer politics is homophobia and transphobia. As late as 2001, Maoist groups in the United States were still describing homosexuality as a ‘bourgeois deviation’. Some Marxists engaged in apologetics for regimes that persecuted queer people under the banner of Marxism. Trotskyist sects were marginally better in that they supported gay and lesbian demands, but this did not translate to support for queer politics as queer politics: despite endless grumbling about identity politics, in the 1990s, it was common among Anglophone Trotskyist groups to demand that queer people abandon the word ‘queer’ in favor of political subject positions like ‘gay’ and ‘lesbian’. Some (mostly straight) members of these sects even made political arguments in favor of the term lesbigay over queer. Beyond the obvious exclusion of trans and nonbinary people, it was the very dissolution of particularistic identities into a larger, more militant political grouping that disturbed them. These Marxists reduced queer oppression to capitalism’s failure to meet the needs of gays and lesbians. The subtext of this argument was that human nature itself was heteronormative, and it was sufficient for Marxists to focus on capitalism’s inhumane treatment of those who love differently. Criticism of heteronormativity was not on the table.1 Despite their complaints about capitalism’s mistreatment of gays and lesbians, the political interventions of such groups had a reputation for hostility toward queer activists, including shouting down queer speakers at conferences.2 At the height of the AIDS crisis, this approach was more than just petty; it indicated a Marxism that was insular and out of tune with the working class in its entirety. The task should have been winning straight working-class militants to fight beside working-class queer radicals, not micromanaging oppressed people’s identities and scolding queer activists for failing to embrace a Marxist class analysis that had yet to be connected to queer oppression. A fourth reason that Marxists were not framing queer oppression in terms of family structure and the social reproduction of racialized capitalism is that the Marxists most open to learning from queer people – those inspired by critical theory and the Frankfurt School – were largely seeking answers by examining the social and cultural effects of exchange and consumption under capitalism rather than looking at the processes of capitalist accumulation and production that made such exchange/consumption possible. Without that piece of the puzzle, critical theorists could not theorize the totality of capitalist production and reproduction and its effect on queer life. Hostilities between Marxists and queer theorists impeded the development of queer Marxism for two decades. Published at the turn of the millennium, at the height of this unnecessary bitterness between queer militants and Marxists, Rosemary Hennessy’s (2000) groundbreaking Profit and Pleasure made waves in Marxist-feminist circles but didn’t receive the full attention it deserved. It wasn’t until Kevin Floyd’s Reification of Desire: Towards a Queer Marxism was published in 2009 that Marxist circles began to take queer analysis seriously, and even queer Marxist circles themselves took a while to recognize the centrality of Marxist-feminist thought to queer Marxism. The republication of Lise Vogel’s Marxism and the Oppression of Women helped popularize the idea that the logic of capital regulates gender to advance profitability; however, communication between Marxist-feminist and queer Marxist circles had yet to be integrated, and so Marxist-feminist analysis tended to be heteronormative and cisnormative while queer Marxist analysis overemphasized cis gay male experience. Voices at the intersection of these Marxist debates struggled to be heard. (For example, Nat Raha’s (2021) paper ‘A Queer Marxist Transfeminism: Queer and Trans Social Reproduction’ has only recently been published as a chapter in Transgender Marxism, though Raha first gave the paper in 2015.) My own intervention during this period emphasized the relevance and validity of queer struggle to Marxism and attempted to situate queer struggle within Marxist-feminism; however, the ultimate purpose of The Politics of Everybody was to show that a Marxist understanding of capitalism was requisite to queer liberation

Perhaps the most overt instantiation of this resistance to difference can be found in the introduction to The Affect Theory Reader, where Gregg and Seigworth position affect (theory) as a transcendent force that allows us to move beyond the body’s “seeming surface-boundedness” by theorizing “bodies defined not by an outer skin-envelope . . . but by their potential to reciprocate or co-participate in the passages of affect.”31 One can interpret this as a gesture toward, and a moving-beyond, the “surface-boundedness” of race, in general, and blackness in particular, which is always already inscribed onto the skin. Implicit in much of the work within affect theory—even that which explicitly engages “race”32—is that an understanding of affect is central to moving beyond static conceptions of racial difference.

In her essay “Affective Economies,” Sara Ahmed mobilizes a Marxist framework in order to consider the ways in which affects/emotions circulate between bodies and objects. She argues that “emotions are not simply ‘within’ or ‘without’ . . . emotions do things, and they align individuals with communities . . . through the very intensity of their attachments.”33 Ahmed continues, “Emotions work as a form of capital [and are] produced only as an effect of [their] circulation.”34 In her move away from a conception of emotions as personal property—as residing solely within a subject— Ahmed posits a break from Lacanian and Freudian psychoanalysis through the decentering of the subject and the reframing of affective economies as social and material rather than solely psychic processes. She makes an important intervention by removing emotion from the realm of the individual, and pointing toward the ways in which feelings are “shaped by histories . . . of production, circulation [and] exchange.”35 However, her appraisal of emotion as social material that circulates between subjects assumes an equal structure of relation between all subjects. Taking the metaphor of emotion-as-currency a bit further, one might ask: What happens when one’s form of currency is not accepted? Ahmed’s affective economy is strained when one considers that “the Black has no social relation(s) to be either masked or unmasked . . . in a structural sense . . . the matrix of violence [in which blackness is imbricated] makes Black relationality an oxymoron.”36 The Black, instead, stands as a fungible object upon, around and through which affect accumulates, yet whose own affective power is of no consequence.

[Lee Edelman, prof of english at tufts university, December 5, 2022, “Bad Education Why Queer Theory Teaches Us Nothing”, Ch. 3, Duke University Press]//owen

Thinking alongside Antonio Viego, whose important book, Dead Subjects: Toward a Politics of Loss in Latino Studies, he cites at the end of the following quotation, Benedicto voices “a sense of wariness about how the disavowal of the urge to dissolution—an urge that would indeed attest to a universal condition of loss—runs the risk of conjuring, explicitly or implicitly, the queer of color as a figure unfractured by any death instinct, and in turn of repeating, if only by leaving them unremarked, ‘the themes of wholeness, completeness, and transparency . . . (that) provide racist discourse with precisely the notion of subjectivity that it needs in order to function most effectively.’”41 Proceeding to consider “the relationship of homosexuality to death,” Benedicto acknowledges, like Eric Stanley and Calvin Warren, that “the threat of literalization [the literalization of homosexuality as a figure of the self ’s annihilation] . . . does not fall on all equally.”42 Writing about Luka Magnotta, who “murdered, dismembered, and decapitated Jun Lin, a Chinese international student whom he allegedly met on Craigslist, and on whose butchered body he performed acts of necrophilia and cannibalism,” Benedicto compellingly theorizes Lin’s “forced racial migration” by Magnotta from “benign invisibility” to “the nonontological place of those whose lives do not matter, the site of blackness.”43 In this context Benedicto asks, “What . . . might prompt Magnotta’s racism other than the fear of seeing, mirrored back at him, reflected in the other’s skin, the condition of nonbeing that is, by virtue of his [i.e., Lin’s] queerness, also necessarily his [i.e., Magnotta’s]?”44 Lin’s racialized Asian body comes to figure the Black body’s racial construction as the catachresis of Blackness itself, as an ontological negation conceivable only by (mis)taking that catachresis for a literal (id)entity: the Black, whose body can thereby signify, in its apparent legibility, nonbeing. At the same time, as Benedicto implies, Lin’s figural “blackness” (borrowed from the equally figural Blackness of those who are culturally literalized as Black) serves to figure, for Magnotta, a queerness that is equally catachrestic and equally literalized in whomever a culture designates as queer. This literalization of catachresis, which turns nonbeing into identity, repeats, of course, the zero’s sublimation into a one. It also shapes the (mis)readings of No Future by Ruti, Coffman, and Cole, all of whom base their arguments on misleading literalizations. Ruti’s contention that No Future advocates “selfdissolution,” for example—despite the book’s repeated assertion that those a culture reads as queer are always “Symbolic subjects consigned to figure the Symbolic’s undoing” (emphasis mine)—finds its counterpart in Coffman’s claim that No Future refuses “politics, futurity, and the symbolic order.”45 Cole then reminds us that such an escape from the Symbolic is impossible: “The real, contrary to Edelman’s claim, is not a place that queers or anyone else could occupy.”46 No Future, however, makes no such claim; instead, it makes the very point that Cole adduces against it: “The figural burden of queerness . . . is that of the force that shatters the fantasy of Imaginary unity, the force that insists on the void (replete, paradoxically, with jouissance) always already lodged within, though barred from, symbolization: the gap or wound of the Real that inhabits the Symbolic’s very core[.] Not that we are, or ever could be, outside the Symbolic ourselves; but we can, nonetheless, make the choice to accede to our cultural production as figures . . . for the dismantling of such a logic and thus for the death drive it harbors within.”47 Each of these critics thus literalizes what No Future describes as figural. By discrediting the straw men they conjure, Ruti, Coffman, and Cole obscure the antagonism that follows from Symbolic division and defend a progressive politics founded, like politics tout court, on the literalization of identities (national, racial, sexed, etc.) essential to the political fantasy “that knowledge could produce a totality.” Such literalizations, insofar as they posit a figural designation as literal, conform to the figural logic that is always, in its essence, a form of misnaming. To say this is not to reify the distinction between the literal and the figurative, but to show that those literalizations themselves aspire to such reification. Inseparable from every politics and therefore mobilized by the right and the left alike, they function as catachrestic identities (the Black, the woman, the alien, the queer) to give local habitation and a name to what, as nonbeing, undoes identity. We might call them, therefore, id-entities: entities, ones, created to embody the libidinal danger of the id’s resistance to the conscious subject’s “being”; entities called into being to be excluded as manifestations of nonbeing. The right repeats this ontological exclusion (which pertains to impossibility) in the form of a social exclusion (which pertains to prohibition). It generates for itself the enjoyment of exclusion by excluding embodiments of enjoyment from the social totality it promotes. The left, pursuing a different path toward the goal of totalization, normalizes the social identities of those produced to embody “nothing”—affirming the positivization that turns the zero into one—as part of an inclusive community whose coherence, in this like its right-wing counterpart’s, excludes the zero of jouissance it rests on nonetheless. Whatever figures that jouissance (the racist, the fascist, the homophobe) persists as a threat to community. To put this somewhat differently: politics functions allegorically, turning the social relations among persons into relations among types of persons (citizen and noncitizen, for example), some of whom come to stand in for the undoing of personhood as such. Once literalized, these identities permit us to know and to regulate a social body whose totality requires the exclusion of those id-entities that materialize ab-sens.48 As Judith Butler observes, “The question of who and what is considered real and true is apparently a question of knowledge. But it is also, as [Michel] Foucault makes plain, a question of power.”49 Allegory, as the figure of the knowledge achieved by negating, through narrative sequence, irony’s negation of determinate sense, expresses, as Walter Benjamin writes, “the voluptuousness with which significance rules, like a stern sultan in a harem of objects.”50 In its “voluptuous” display of power, allegory conjures the meaningfulness that irony empties out, proposing, through the temporal movement between past and present, between then and now, the possibility of arriving at knowledge, or, in Benjamin’s phrase, at “the ‘opening of the eyes.’”51 Insofar as it positivizes irony, though, by resolving it into sense, allegory itself is a figure of the irony it means to sublimate. Paul de Man expresses this cryptically: “To say then, as we are actually saying, that allegory (as sequential narration) is the trope of irony (as the one is the trope of zero) is to say something that is true enough but not intelligible.”52

But such a reading of Life is Strange (2015) would be incomplete. This application of cruel optimism works as a personal critique that emphasizes Max and Chloe’s character flaws: they both need to learn to accept what they cannot control—particularly to accept what is fated. The impulse to deny the inevitable is crazymaking. This lesson of compliance may not seem dangerous on the surface, but it brings to mind one question: How should queer people address oppression? Surely not through acceptance. Maybe Max’s experience with cruel optimism is not exclusive to her desire for Chloe but also applies to her potential to adhere to heterosexist reproductive futurity. In No Future: Queer Theory and the Death Drive, critical theorist Lee Edelman (2004) asserts that queerness is the antithesis of reproductive futurity, which is the habitual reiteration of oppressive practices that hold up hegemonic structures throughout time. Reproductive futurity imposes “an ideological limit on political discourse as such, preserving in the process the absolute privilege of heteronormativity by rendering unthinkable, by casting outside the political domain, the possibility of a queer resistance to this organizing principle of communal relations” (Edelman, 2004, p. 2). Because so many of our society’s institutions— especially the financial—rely on and benefit from the heterosexual, nuclear family configuration, the idea of queerness is systematically driven into invisibility. Even attempts at justice that aim to assimilate LGBT-identified people into cisgender and heterosexual society succeed only in recreating the nuclear family with slight changes. Edelman says this assimilatory practice does nothing to rectify the unjust expectations of heteropatriarchal society. Max is surrounded by pressure to comply with gendered expectations, which is exaggerated by Max’s nightmare in episode five, “Polarized.” In the dream, her teacher mentions Max was once “pure and innocent,” implying this is no longer true, likely as a result of her same-sex attraction. Her principal calls her a bad influence. Warren, a male friend who is the other romantic option aside from Chloe, is also present in the nightmare, guilt-tripping her for not loving him. This reveals the subconscious psychological impact of misogyny and heteronormativity on Max’s perception of herself and on the world with which she must interact. She is aware that she must uphold certain female expectations, like purity and emotional availability, in order to achieve the goals she had before gaining the ability to time travel. This is where cruel optimism strikes In “Cruel Optimism,” Berlant analyzes three literary pieces in terms of her theory. The first is an untitled John Ashbery poem about a secret, ephemeral queer moment in a suburban, religious neighborhood. She says the following: Cruel optimism about imminence[...]grows from a perception about the reasons people[...]do not prefer to interfere with varieties of immiseration, but choose to ride the wave of the system of attachment that they are used to. Or perhaps they move to normative form to get numb with the consensual promise and to misrecognize that promise as an achievement. (Berlant, 2011, p. 23) The cruel optimism in this case is about suffering discontent or even damage in order to conform to the hegemonic system in which one is born. There are psychologically and physically enforced incentives to comply with what is “normal.” It is an achievement to comply so effectively that nobody notices that one is actively self-assimilating. Berlant is fascinated by Ashbery’s poem because it is the documentation of an “impasse” within the systematic regime of cruel optimism—of reproductive futurity. She writes, “Queerness substitutes itself for religious affect’s space of reverence: in the end, life is at the best imaginable of impasses[...]where the people are now lost but alive and unvanquished in their displacement” (Berlant, 2011, p. 25). The same can and cannot be said about Max and Chloe. The two are not damaging themselves or corrupting each other through the act of queer desire but are actually grasping for control under an oppressive heterosexist regime with little success. Berlant (2011) says that Geoff Ryman’s historical novel, Was, contains several stories that are all about “the cruelty of optimism for people without control over the material conditions of their lives and whose relation to fantasy is all that protects them from being destroyed by other people and the nation” (p. 33). Max has no control over what must happen, but she attempts to subvert the impending devastation by trying to gain the upper hand on fate. Her fantasy is that her time-traveling ability came about for the purpose of saving Chloe as proof that Chloe deserves to be saved. The “other people and the nation” are the systemic force—futurity. In Life is Strange (2015), cruel optimism on a macro rather than interpersonal level is the supernatural realm of endlessly forward-marching temporality which comes to represent Edelman’s systemic reproductive futurity. Max’s resistance against this forward-marching temporality is her ability to travel time. She reaches back to the past in an attempt to alter the present, opening up a kind of queer impasse in the now, and she procrastinates the reproductive future she expects to soon inhabit in favor of the love and commitment that she has for Chloe. But the universe gave and the universe has taken away. Her timetravel ability turns out to be catastrophic. The impasse must fail.

The relationship between Berlant’s investment in the idea of the normal as a utopian desire mediated through and reflected in popular culture (which can be traced back to ‘Sex in public’),21 and her later reflection on the rise of an economic precarity that cuts across different identity markers in Cruel Optimism, deserves further, more nuanced attention. As Sianne Ngai observes in her incisive reading of the latter book, Berlant’s critique of the normative fantasy of the good life is deeply informed by her earlier work on sexuality, exemplifying ‘how queer theory, still regarded by many as a minoritizing-only discourse whose “proper object” must be limited to sex and issues related to sexual object choice, can directly contribute to debates about the universalizing concept of “precarity”’ (2013). Berlant’s reflection on the painful, injurious or, one could say, ‘negative’ attachments in contemporary social, cultural and political life aligns her work with the antisocial paradigm in queer studies, and the exploration of negativity that followed, as illustrated by Leo Bersani, Lee Edelman and, in more recent discussions of negative affect (though with a number of notable differences), by Jack Halberstam, Sara Ahmed, Heather Love and Sianne Ngai, among many others.22 More specifically, one could relate Berlant’s cruelly optimistic orientation toward the future, in a time when the fantasies of ‘upward mobility, job security, political and social equality, and lively, durable intimacy’ are fraying, to the heteronormative temporal regimes in Western cultures examined by these scholars. Writing in the context of the 1980s at the peak of the AIDS crisis in the United States, Bersani scrutinizes how the disease was discursively constructed as a threat to the (white, heterosexual, middle-class) family unit at the heart of capitalist society, the ‘homosexual body’ having been opposed to marriage, parenthood and property. Rather than actively countering this stigmatization, and the identification of queerness with social failure, Bersani embraces the politics of negativity as a form of resistance to the heteronormative social order. Following Bersani, Edelman draws on the antisocial thesis to rethink the questions of queer temporality and futurity. In his influential No Future: Queer Theory and the Death Drive, Edelman shows how the symbolic figure of ‘the Child’, standing in for the future horizon and the promise of a better tomorrow, is deeply rooted in the heterosexual nuclear family ideal and its temporal regime, ‘rendering unthinkable [ … ] the possibility of a queer resistance to this organizing principle of communal relations’. 26 Edelman celebrates queerness as invested in ‘no future’ – that is, as the threat to the ‘reproductive futurism’ 27 – refocusing, as Berlant also does, on the critical presentness and, in the process, challenging everyday notions of temporality (including linear narrative, teleology, progress, history, and so on).28 While coinciding with Edelman’s argument that we should focus on pathologized modes of living and the politics of negativity to undermine a normative future, Halberstam turns to ‘the potentiality of a life unscripted by the conventions of family, inheritance, and child-rearing’. 29 Drawing on Foucault’s notion of ‘way of life’, Halberstam suggests that queerness can be detached from sexual identity when it is thought of as ‘an outcome of strange temporalities, imaginative life schedules, and eccentric economic practices’. 30 Queer subjects are also those who live outside the logic of capitalist accumulation (crucially, not only deliberately, but also accidentally or of necessity): ‘those [ … ] who live without financial safety nets, without homes, without steady jobs, outside the organizations of time and space that have been established for the purposes of protecting the rich few from everyone else’. 31 Thus, Halberstam’s work, like Berlant’s, allows us to trace the connections between queerness, ‘strange temporalities’ and the scenarios of survival in the 21st-century landscape of precarity.

Technologically radical innovations are a key success factor in many high technology industries. This study examines how firms can measure performance on this key dimension. I ask two questions: 1. How can patent data be used to measure innovation and its radicality?, and, 2. What are some of the empirical shortcomings with the current methods using patent data? These research questions are examined through a longitudinal data of 100 biopharmaceutical companies. Two main conclusions are drawn. First, patents and the subsequent patents that cite them provide a useful way to measure innovation performance. Patent data can be used to monitor activities of competitors, form a performance evaluation system in R&D organizations, and identify a specific technological trend. Second, in prior research, patent citation lags used to distinguish between innovations of different quality have been too short to distinguish between incremental and radical innovations. Lags of ten years and longer are recommended. Short lags may obscure patent-based comparisons of firm innovativeness.

We argue that knowledge cumulation in IR is a fantasy reified by paradigmatic clusters and the mimicry of research standards and practices in the natural sciences (e.g., Elman & Elman, 2001, 2003). The “evidence” of “knowledge cumulation” in IR comes as much from the ritualized practice of research behavior as it does from any “true” or genuine notion of knowledge cumulation. One has “succeeded” in the enterprise of IR by cumulating knowledge, and the work of “successful” scholars is by definition cumulated knowledge. Cumulation of knowledge as a standard of success is a condition of possibility for the desirability of success in the field. That ritualized practice at once is institutionalized as success and institutionalizes the need for research success, reified and reproduced by hiring, tenure, merit raise, and promotion standards.

This ritualization is a signifier that what counts as knowledge in the field, in particular research programs and more generally, is performative (Barad, 2007; Butler, 1990; Weber, 1998)—where standards are set by their utterance and repetition rather than by some external “objective” standards of (narrowly) good science or (more broadly) good research (Baudrillard, 1991; Shepherd, 2008; Williams, 2003). Scholars iterate and reify standards of measurement of knowledge in each piece of scholarship which “succeeds” in the field, and these iterations make it a paradox for scholars to both occupy the methodological, epistemological, and political space that falls outside of inherited standards and succeed. Outside -the -mainstream work’s underrepresentation in the places understood to be publishing “success” is overdetermined, and the correlation between mimicry of traditional scholarship and “success” of critical scholars a given.

Global Race War: International Politics and Racial Hierarchy examines the historical connections between race and violence from the early nineteenth to the early twenty-first centuries. My aim is, first, to show how racial violence and hierarchy were crucial for the development of the very idea of global order. Second, I examine how racial violence proliferated in defense of this global order when its racial hierarchy appeared to be in crisis. Third, this global racial order did not end with the Second World War and with the discrediting of scientific racism, the decolonization of the global South, and the expansion of the state system; rather it continued in different forms as the racialization of cultural or civilizational attributes that then resulted in further racial violence. Finally, examining global politics in terms of race and racial violence reveals a different spatial topology that imbricates the domestic and global in more complicated ways. As a consequence, global histories of racial hierarchy and violence have important implications for understanding the continued salience of race within Western polities. We live in a time when the crisis and waning of a white world order continues to nourish a politics of racial retrenchment and violence at home. The great American sociologist W. E. B. Du Bois famously called attention to the “color-line” as the problem of the twentieth century. For Du Bois, racial difference reflected the “relation of the darker to the lighter races of men in Asia and Africa, in America and the islands of the sea.”2 Du Bois specifically pointed to a racialized global political economy in which race and class conflict fuse together to perpetuate the conditions of transnational oppression and violence. Nowhere was this more prevalent than in the United States, where even in the aftermath of the Civil War and the emancipation of American slaves, “economic slavery, from which the only escape is death or the penitentiary,” continued unabated.3 “Negroes are a segregated servile caste,” Du Bois writes, “with restricted rights and privileges.”4 But what was true about an American political economy based on racial exploitation reflected the longue durée of a Western imperial political economy that gave rise to a sensus communis of racial hierarchy. From the development of the Atlantic slave trade in the fifteenth century to the spread of European empire, the global as we in the discipline of international relations have come to know it since the nineteenth century was not the European state system, notwithstanding all the historical fallacies surrounding Westphalia; rather, the very notion of the global emerged out of a crucible of violent settler appropriation and exploitation.5 Race and racial hierarchy then became the material and ideational scaffold of a global imaginary that took for granted the idea that certain peoples were to be considered naturally inferior and hence exploitable for a wide range of purposes.6 Nowhere is this more evident than in the crystallization of an anti-blackness that came to structure the very modern imaginary of the West itself. Specifically, as Achille Mbembe writes, the very notion of “blackness” was created to “designate not human beings like all others but rather a distinct humanity—one whose very humanity was (and still is) in question.”7 Racial categories became dialectical (without the possibility of reconciliation) in that they reflected the perceive attributes of the Western/white “self” in its attempt to designate an “other” as inherently inferior. More generally, as Afro-pessimist theorists point out, the very category of “blackness,” which is derived from and the “entrenchment” of enslaved objectification, supports the “anti-Black foundations of race and modern society . . . it is Blackness, and more specifically anti-Blackness that gives coherence to categories of non-Black—white, worker, gay, i.e., ‘human’ . . . it is Blackness that is the dark matter surrounding and holding together the categories of non-Black.”8 Thus, for example, according to the German ethnologist Leo Frobenius, “The idea of the barbaric Negro is a European invention”; but it was one that essentially became a political ontology that defined Western modernity through its nonbeing.9 The notion of the color line as an ontological claim is crucial for understanding what I think is an important consequence of this history of race and empire: only certain peoples, it was assumed by a wide range of European and American writers, were capable of creating genuinely political communities. European modernity importantly reflected the crystallization of a vague notion of common civilizational attributes— notwithstanding the incessant internal violence of this European society or community of sovereigns. Nonetheless, a common assumption within early modern Europe was that the establishment of the state and civil society represented a crucial development in political community that other civilizations did not possess. Whereas the Islamic world with the Ottoman Empire and China may have been accorded a certain political recognition, such was certainly withheld from Africa and Africans, for whom the nascent and evolving biological or zoological vocabulary of the eighteenth century came closest to a language deemed capable of describing their lifeworld. As I discuss in Chapter 1, the notion of the “swarm” came to describe a nonpolitical collectivity subject to European predations and extreme violence. The notion of the swarm precluded a recognition of a common political relationship and also, importantly, an ability to become present within a larger human world of collective action, as Hannah Arendt understood it.10 To be sure, Arendt herself is guilty of making the very same racial generalization that Africans were incapable of creating a lasting world of appearance necessary for something like politics to come into being. As she infamously wrote, “Under the merciless sun, surrounded by an entirely hostile nature, [Europeans] were confronted with human beings who, living without the future of a purpose and the past of an accomplishment, were as incomprehensible as the inmates of a madhouse.”11 It is this incomprehensibility that in a way created a certain distance or gulf that the notion of race helped to explain. For Orlando Patterson, the institution of slavery defined and codified this notion of distance between the European and the African, a distance that reinforced “the view that he [i.e., the Black servant] did not belong to the same of Christian, civilized European.”12 Explicitly, the reification of racial hierarchy over the course of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries precluded the possibility of a common world based on a notion of political or juridical equality. Instead, what crystalized this nexus between racial hierarchy and the beginnings of a global racialized imaginary was ultimately the proliferation of unrelenting violence necessary to maintain this order and to preclude its dismantlement.

In this introduction I wish to develop the theoretical lens that informs the historical story that makes up the following chapters. In particular, I want to explore why violence becomes an integral component of the processes of racialization that constituted the global as a specific racialized imaginary and why such racial violence becomes its ubiquitous feature over the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. To be sure, the history of what I call the global racial imaginary and its racial violence was not necessarily coterminous with the history of the state and its formation; it was never entirely institutionalized within the proto-state apparatuses that were congealing themselves on the frontiers of European empires.13 Racial violence could be perpetuated by a wide range of actors—slave traders, plantation owners, frontier settlers, and so on—who were involved in the various projects of colonial and imperial expansion. As time went forward, racial violence would come to fuse itself with state violence in catastrophic ways, leading to the genocidal projects of the twentieth century and fantasies of racial annihilation that completely overtook the logics of state reason. What then accounts for the proliferation of racialized violence? What explains the ferocity and intensity of such violence? In what follows I make the argument that racial violence represented a particular type of violence, a violence that reflects a crisis in the racial imaginary that structures the very “grid of intelligibility,” as Foucault would say—of the global as such.