Introduction

Issue 14.2 features five articles that extend contemporary thinking about politics and ontology. They grapple with conditions for perception and agency, philosophy and art. Put in the terms offered by Darin Barney, author of our opening piece, they take up the problem of "encouraging"—that is, creating possibilities for courage—as they attend to the ways poetry, things, art, and photography detourn expectations. For example, one might expect images of wounded, bleeding Afghans to rip away the antiseptic, technical veneer of a war by drone and missile. Yet Louie Palu, currently the most experienced photographer of the war in Afghanistan in the world, ponders the conditions where words may be more powerful, more expressive, more wrenching than images, perhaps more capable of imparting an experience. Palu's essay, which includes photographs and diary entries from time he spent with US Marines in the Kandahar Province, can be openly accessed here.

The first article is Darin Barney's, "Eat your Vegetables: Courage and the Possibility of Politics." One of two pieces in this issue working with the thought of Alain Badiou, Barney's essay reconceives the classical virtue of courage as contemporary, materialist, and post-masculinist. In Barney's account, courage involves uncertainty and contingency, a capacity to "be let go" into action. Like Badiou, Barney emphasizes that courage is a verb; it is, he writes, "a contradictory state that combines holding-on and being let-go, in which the possibility of politics turns not so much on the moral(izing) question of whether we have courage or lack it but, rather on the material question of whether we find ourselves in encouraging or discouraging circumstances."

Vincent W. J. van Gerven Oei and John Van Houdt take up another element of Badiou's thought, the question of the ontological status of mathematics. In "Circulating Philosophy—A Note on Two Apparent Misquotations in Alain Badiou's Logics of Worlds," van Gerven Oei and Van Houdt consider Badiou's remark that philosophy circulates between ontology (mathematics), theories of the subject, and its own history. If this is correct, they ask, then what makes philosophy circulate and what are the consequences of the fact of its circulation? As they consider these questions, van Gerven Oei and Van Houdt argue for the citational structure of philosophy (and reject claims raised by speculative realists). Truths (mathematics, art, politics, and love) are external to philosophy. Philosophy cites them, uses them as examples, and circulates through them. Likewise, it is activated and interrupted by them. Yet philosophy cannot be fully sutured to any of these conditions.

Gijs van Oenen draws from a different archive in his approach to contemporary ontology, juxtaposing G. W. F. Hegel and Bruno Latour. "Interpassive Agency: Engaging Actor-Network-Theory's View on the Agency of Objects" asks about the conditions under which objects acquired agency: when was the historical setting in which this happened? Van Oenen provocatively argues that objects became actors in the 80s and 90s because we outsourced our activity to them. To this end, he uses the notion of "interpassivity" to explain the ways objects sustain our emancipatory ambitions by relieving us of the burdens of emancipation (our cell phones and computers communicate with each so that we can feel ourselves to be communicating without having actually to communicate). As van Oenen explains, our environments exercise normative effects on us because we can't bring ourselves to follow norms that we have interactively validated.

Like van Oenen, Anatoli Ignatov is also interested in the agency of things. His essay, "Practices of Eco-sensation: Opening Doors of Perception to the Nonhuman," advocates looking to art for an ethico-political strategy that can challenge anthropocentrism and cultivate a sensibility to interconnectedness. For Ignatov, art offers indirect modes of political agency—what Barney might call encouraging circumstances. The intensifications art stimulates work affectively on bodies, engendering new sensations of time and duration and so expanding fields, possibilities, and perceptions of action.

Our final article is Louie Palu's photo-essay, "Kandahar Dispatches: Notebooks, Diaries + Photographs." A trained artist who became a photojournalist and combat photographer, Palu has worked in Afghanistan on seven different occasions, over a period of five years. Part of the force of his work extends out of the tension between his artistic eye and the realism of his photojournalism. As his diary suggests, this tension emerges out of the exhaustion and horror of working under combat conditions. A photo of a floor smeared with bright red blood, the brown boots of standing soldiers stretching across the top of the image like a broken, militarized sky, is a striking example of such a tension as its horrific beauty goes beyond the sheerness of documentary journalism. The courage of Palu's work, the way it gives itself over to cruelty and contingency (as he writes in his journal on an unknown date in August 2010: "in Afghanistan all your friends can become your enemies, all your enemies have the potential to become your friends") hijacks both moralizing and ostensibly objective expectations about photojournalism. In so doing, it hits viewers with the force of a truth, a truth which can seize and en-courage them.

Following the articles, we include an exchange between Paul Apostolidis and Kathleen Arnold. Apostolidis asked for the opportunity to respond to some of the points Arnold raises in her recent review of his book, Breaks in the Chain (Theory & Event 14.1). The Co-Editors and the Review Editor agreed. We provided Arnold with an opportunity to respond to Apostolidis's response, and for both to see one another's responses.

The issue closes with four reviews: Torrey Shanks reviews Jane Bennett's Vibrant Matter: A Political Ecology of Things; Jason Frank reviews Jacqueline Stevens' States without Nations: Citizenship for Mortals; Jacqueline Stevens reviews Vicki Hsueh's Hybrid Constitutions: Challenging Legacies of Law, Privilege, and Culture in Colonial America; and Vicki Hsueh reviews Jason Frank's Constituent Moments Enacting the People in Postrevolutionary America.