Editors' Introduction

The articles in this special issue of the Journal of Speculative Philosophy were selected from revised versions of papers that were originally presented at the fifty-ninth annual meeting of the Society for Phenomenology and Existential Philosophy (SPEP) in September 2021. This virtual conference took place on September 17–18 and 23–26 after the cancellation of the 2020 conference due to the COVID-19 pandemic.

Bonnie Honig and Mel Y. Chen gave the SPEP 2021 Plenary Addresses and we are grateful to be able to include Honig's plenary, "Taking Back the Camera: Race and Agonism in Mr. Deeds and The Fits" in this special issue. Thinking both with and against Stanley Cavell's and Giorgio Agamben's respective readings of the camera as a "somatogram," a "machine-reader of the body," Honig brings Cavell's and Agamben's (as well as Walter Benjamin's) discussions of the power of the camera into conversation with Georges Didi-Huberman's analysis of the (overly) theatrical effects induced by the "normalizing camera of the clinic" in Charcot's Salpêtrière patients to set up a central question: Should we understand the camera as reading (Cavell), normalizing (Agamben), and/or soliciting (Didi-Huberman) its subject's gesture? Offering a close analysis of the "non-sovereign movements" of the title character in Mr. Deeds and Toni in The Fits, Honig argues that Toni's ability to elude the camera's gaze can be understood as an act of "cinematic agonism" that begins to remediate a long history of photographic violations of young black girls' bodies.

Though we are sorry that we are unable to include Mel Y. Chen's plenary, "On the Edge," in this volume, their talk offered a fascinating discussion of the novel intimacies and distances based on the reorganization of labor and capital that have emerged in response to the COVID-19 pandemic. Through an analysis of Vietnamese artist Mai-Thu Perret's 2007 work "Underground" and Australian artist Fiona Foley's 2006 multimedia installation, "Black Opium," Chen suggested that queer choreographies of space as well as queer, crip, and racialized undergrounds can provide important sites of healing and respite from living "on the edge." These queer spaces, they proposed, are also uniquely suited to promote interspecies forms of collective care.

Bonnie Honig's article is followed by "The Question of the Normal," the 2021 SPEP Co-Director's Address delivered by Gail Weiss. Through a critical focus on the normalizing power of the familiar, Weiss's article shares with Honig's a desire to place into question socially accepted definitions of normalcy. She turns to two literary works, Franz Kafka's The Metamorphosis and E. M. Forster's "The Machine Stops," to reassess the frequently expressed, nostalgic longing to return to our pre-pandemic "normal." Given that this pre-pandemic normal was sexist, racist, ableist, ageist, classist, homophobic, and transphobic, Weiss argues that it is not something we should be seeking to recover but rather to transform.

The other articles in this special issue have been organized according to four broad groupings. The first section, "Critical Encounters: Philosophy, Literature, Psychoanalysis," offers three original, interdisciplinary engagements with "subversive" texts that range from slave narratives, dreams, and literary fragments to the sadistic fantasies expressed by the Marquis de Sade's infamous protagonist Juliette. In "The Dred Scott Ontology and the Philosophical Significance of Slave Narratives," Robin M. Muller argues that slave narratives are uniquely capable of revealing the profound onto-logical dimensions of racialized harm, and thus deserve our serious philosophical attention. Jake Reeder's essay, "The Condensation of the Secret: Dream Analysis and the Literary Fragment," draws from Freud's theory of dream condensation and Derrida's and Blanchot's respective discussions of the literary fragment, to address the secrets they contain and the for-gettings that they necessarily involve. Following Derrida, Reed argues that these condensed, fragmented secrets are essentially irrecoverable, and it is precisely for this reason that they demand a response. The final article in this section, Nicole Yokum's "A Foucauldian Feminist Juliette: The 'Endless Prosperities' of Sade's Illustrious Villain...