Dear Reader,​

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We have learned to write from the midst of interregnum. Or perhaps, we have learned to write from crisis, afterlives, longue dureés, post-colonialisms, post-structuralisms, post-modernities—those presents which name the moment of theory as after that which has come before but lying in wait of what is yet to come. In response to the political relevance of Antonio Gramsci’s writings on the interregnum in his Prison Notebooks, Alenka Zupančič asks, “What if the ‘time of the monsters’ is not merely a transitional phase but the new world itself?” [1]. To call the present transitional is already to make a promise about its ending—to imagine, however faintly, another shore. But what becomes of theory if the interval ceases to be an interval? If the monsters do not announce the failure of one world to become another, but constitute the durable morphology of the world in which we have been asked to live? If theory remains caught in the time of the post-, diagnosing with ever greater precision the wreckage through which we move while possessing no corresponding grammar of the not-yet, then its revolutionary appearance begins to resemble belatedness: the arrival of thought following the catastrophe to give a name to said catastrophe. And yet, we continue to write because “[a]t the very least, it can provide some orientation in a thoroughly disorienting landscape" [2]. Orientation in itself may very well be stranger than it sounds—a presence only to discover that one is not alone in their lostness. The essays collected in this issue each reflect a sense of urgency to stay with the present, even amidst inherited legacies of violent pasts and the desire for alternative, liberatory futures.

 

To conjure theory from interregnum is already to enter the realm of the political, because abstraction has never meant an absence from the materiality of the world. The charge of abstraction levied against various expressions of the humanities is one which artificially separates the materiality of the world from the forms of relation which shape it. The worldliness of the present traversed across the issue is not the ruins on part of theory’s failure to spur revolutionary politics, but their necessary precondition [3]. It is also the condition under which people are required to “keep going through what is ‘almost unendurable’ as the normative, quotidian state of life" [4]. To think from within such a world demands, as Sheehi writes, that we not “be abstract, but [...] be both poetic and concrete" [5].

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In one of the essays that follows, Yegor Rubanov writes that although what we dream begins somewhere within “our conscious trudge through life,” dream-production nevertheless “always exceeds the amorphous conditions of its manifestation.” A world produces the conditions of its own apprehension, and yet what is made from those conditions need not remain commensurate with them. Something spills over. Rubanov names such an excess as a stream: a composition of relations producing a sensible world whose meaning lies partly in what exceeds those responsible for its conjuring, “an overflow forming a stream in which these very souls [...] can learn to swim.” The stream is fragile and “At each moment the prospect of waking lingers”—but it flows, nonetheless. Across this issue, collectivity is the language given to the lived experience of relationality.

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Collectivity is not political in itself but is the precondition for politics—the unification of the multitude required to arrive at an ethic of care, of attention, of recognition. Politics in the time of monsters requires a collective—a group with which to experience a living-with and ultimately a dying-with [6]. It requires forms capacious enough to register what their own structures have been trained not to hear. Theory can remain attentive to the wound that representation asks us not to perceive. Theory can give language to experiences whose intelligibility has been withheld, and, sometimes, disturb the language by which their withholding came to appear as natural. It can make available, however provisionally, a space in which we learn to hear one another differently. And perhaps this is what we mean by a collective—a provisional practice of living-with: an arrangement of attention, vulnerability, indebtedness, and care sustained among people who cannot know in advance what their relationship might make possible. Such a collective may require that we begin to lose ourselves. If it does, let us lose ourselves to theory, and to care for one another—because the self that emerges untouched by others is itself one of the fantasies we may have to surrender.

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And perhaps, we may find ourselves again there, there in the abyss; strangely out of time with the world that taught us what history could be—an anachronistic future—a new world we struggled to bear before we possessed the language necessary to recognize it. Such a future may even entail something beyond the collective we sustain, recalling from June Jordan that “When we get the monsters off our backs all of us may want to run in very different directions" [7]. And there is a tenderness in the allowance of such a dispersal. The collective need not survive the world it was needed to survive.

 

We write from the interregnum. We write because the stream is fragile. Because the stream flows. Because there remain bodies sensing what the concept has yet to learn to recognize. Because the unlived life remains among us [8]. Because another’s horizon opens ours. Because somewhere between the scream and the structure that calls it justice, there persists the possibility of hearing otherwise [9].

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Sincerely,

The Editorial Collective