Project MUSE®: Qui Parle: Critical Humanities and Social Sciences - Latest Articles
https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/477
Project MUSE®: Latest articles in Qui Parle: Critical Humanities and Social Sciences.daily12026-05-12T00:00:00-05:00text/htmlen-USVol. 18 (2009) through current issueLatest Articles: Qui Parle: Critical Humanities and Social SciencesTWOProject MUSE®Qui Parle: Critical Humanities and Social Sciences1938-80201041-8385Latest articles in Qui Parle: Critical Humanities and Social Sciences. Feed provided by Project MUSE®Form and Its Discontents: An Introduction
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/964785
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A dictionary begins when it no longer gives the meaning of words, but their tasks. Thus formless is not only an adjective having a given meaning, but a term that serves to bring things down in the world, generally requiring that each thing have its form. What it designates has no rights in any sense and gets itself squashed everywhere, like a spider or an earthworm. In fact, for academic men to be happy, the universe would have to take form [trans. mod.]. All of philosophy has no other goal: it is a matter of giving a frock coat to what is, a mathematical frock coat. On the other hand, affirming that the universe resembles nothing and is only formless amounts to saying that the universe is something like a spider
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-12T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/477/image/coversmallForm and Its Discontents: An Introduction2025-07-10text/htmlen-USForm and Its Discontents: An Introduction2025-07-102025TWOProject MUSE®648152026-05-12T00:00:00-05:002025-07-10Poor or Pure Form: On the Political Aesthetics of the Tent
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/964786
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The tent, the shelter of pro-Palestine protests on American campuses in spring 2024 and of global metropolitan marginality,1 is an infrastructure of the unthought,2 constantly under the joint attacks of capital and common sense. The precarious protection of the homeless, the displaced, those living amid rubble while at risk of annihilation, the tent also figures the possibility of dismantling Western architectural structures and their distribution of the sensible, their insurmountable givenness. The tent can be viewed as an undoing of all the material and immaterial concepts troped by the home: the individual, the self, the biologically sexed body, and whiteness as the unmarked condition (or sine qua non) of
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-12T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/477/image/coversmallPoor or Pure Form: On the Political Aesthetics of the Tent2025-07-10text/htmlen-USPoor or Pure Form: On the Political Aesthetics of the Tent2025-07-102025TWOProject MUSE®849612026-05-12T00:00:00-05:002025-07-10Form for All: Traversing the Skins of Human Bodies and Bodies of Discourse
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/964787
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To make Skin Film (UK, 16mm, black-and-white, 11 min, 2005–7), Emma Hart used "sellotape," or cellophane tape, to produce a map of her nude body from head to toe, picking up hairs, body oils, and skin cells. The 16mm film shows the triangular, branching, rhizomatic structures of the cells that make up the surface of Hart's skin, magnified and moving across the screen in various shades of gray and white, changing in texture depending on where the tape had been affixed to Hart's body: the forehead, the neck, the upper arm, the calf, the bottom of the foot. "By sticking sellotape to my skin and then peeling it off, I took off the top surface of my skin," Hart writes. "I then stuck the tape and the skin to clear 16mm
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-12T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/477/image/coversmallForm for All: Traversing the Skins of Human Bodies and Bodies of Discourse2025-07-10text/htmlen-USForm for All: Traversing the Skins of Human Bodies and Bodies of Discourse2025-07-102025TWOProject MUSE®1093882026-05-12T00:00:00-05:002025-07-10Excess and Formlessness: The Abang-guard and the Atmospheric
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/964788
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Visitors to the ARoS Museum in Denmark on a Saturday in August 2018 would have encountered a perplexing sight: a pair of uniformed guards moving in unison around the works of art. Instead of standing still, they performed a routine of physical and mental exercises designed to help prepare them for a day spent on their feet. They squatted, stretched, and did neck rolls, paying no mind to the visitors or to the art. These visitors may have been unsure where to direct their attention—to the modern art on display or the workers seemingly behaving out of turn. They may have felt discomfort or excitement at the possibility that the museum's norms were disrupted. In fact they were witnessing a performance by Abang-guard
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-12T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/477/image/coversmallExcess and Formlessness: The Abang-guard and the Atmospheric2025-07-10text/htmlen-USExcess and Formlessness: The Abang-guard and the Atmospheric2025-07-102025TWOProject MUSE®459062026-05-12T00:00:00-05:002025-07-10Unable to Be Titled: Form/lessness, Asian Americanist Critique, and the Destitution of Worlds
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/964789
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There is an uncanny poetry to Cato Ouyang's solo exhibition, it has always been the perfect instrument, which opened on the last day of February 2020, scarcely three months into what became the COVID-19 pandemic.1 Across the unfinished concrete floor of the Knockdown Center (Queens, NYC) unfolded a constellation of mutilated figures arranged around a screen corridor—two television sets, each gouged into a depleted chaise longue ossified by papiermâché (fig. 1). Proffering itself at the center of the screen corridor, with head upturned and a smile cornrowed by sharp kernels of gray teeth, is the magnificently harrowing figure of the bitch bench (fig. 2). One is invited to sit on the grooved side of the bitch, to
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-12T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/477/image/coversmallUnable to Be Titled: Form/lessness, Asian Americanist Critique, and the Destitution of Worlds2025-07-10text/htmlen-USUnable to Be Titled: Form/lessness, Asian Americanist Critique, and the Destitution of Worlds2025-07-102025TWOProject MUSE®1634702026-05-12T00:00:00-05:002025-07-10Deformation; or, Catachresis and Silk Stalkings
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/964790
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From a perspective that I can handily imagine, there is something absurd, bordering on self-parody, about conjuring together, as I have done in this essay's subtitle, catachresis—ararefied, even highfalutin term for overextended metaphor—and Silk Stalkings, a lurid and tawdry police procedural televised on the USA Network in the 1990s. That perspective would not be mine, of course; after all, I made the move, and it is a local manifestation of a more global tendency that I have often (half-)jokingly described as making an academic career from colliding high theory with low objects. The serious, if implicit, half of the joke stems from my conviction that the best theory is born of experience, which may well go low
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-12T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/477/image/coversmallDeformation; or, Catachresis and Silk Stalkings2025-07-10text/htmlen-USDeformation; or, Catachresis and Silk Stalkings2025-07-102025TWOProject MUSE®605102026-05-12T00:00:00-05:002025-07-10The Intoxicating Image: Antonin Artaud and Jean Epstein's Impossible Search for Formlessness
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/964791
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There is only one logical rationale for an attack on opium use: that its personal enjoyment will somehow infect the quaking innocents of society. This argument is false. We are born corrupted in body and spirit; we are congenitally fucked up. By eliminating opium, one doesn't eliminate the criminal impulse, the malignancies of body and soul, the propensity to despair, the wailing cretin, the pox-ridden infant, nor the progressive crumbling of the instincts…. There are incurable, crude spirits that will never be part of society, but if you remove their tools of folly, they will create ten thousand new ones.There is no doubt that this alcoholic dreaminess and, therefore alcoholism, was, to a large extent, also needed
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-12T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/477/image/coversmallThe Intoxicating Image: Antonin Artaud and Jean Epstein's Impossible Search for Formlessness2025-07-10text/htmlen-USThe Intoxicating Image: Antonin Artaud and Jean Epstein's Impossible Search for Formlessness2025-07-102025TWOProject MUSE®844182026-05-12T00:00:00-05:002025-07-10Species-Being, Metabolism, and Natural Limits
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/964792
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The broad aim of this article is to reconsider the concept of species-being by approaching it not as a question primarily about human essence, but as the orienting normative framework of Marx's critical project, where I take that project to be broadly continuous with the Kantian and post-Kantian conception of "critique." In what can be considered one of his earliest attempts to spell out the general project of a critique of political economy—which initially moved between a critique of religion and a critique of the political state—Marx draws on several features of Kant's notion of critique and adopts them for his own purposes. The first is the idea of a Copernican revolution in philosophy, which Marx interprets in
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-12T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/477/image/coversmallSpecies-Being, Metabolism, and Natural Limits2025-07-10text/htmlen-USSpecies-Being, Metabolism, and Natural Limits2025-07-102025TWOProject MUSE®943262026-05-12T00:00:00-05:002025-07-10Abjection and Formlessness: Value, Digitality, and the Differential Allocation of Form
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/964793
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Capital is wealth possessed of an imperious social form with an icy purpose. Tendencies to abstraction are endemic to capital.We can think abstractly about the world only to the degree to which the world itself has already become abstract.The last few years have witnessed a "second wave of algorithmic accountability" driven by the strenuous work and vibrant debates sparked by activists, academics, and journalists.1 As a result, public opinion has become more open to the idea that contemporary digital technologies are anything but neutral.2 Critical scholarship has exposed patterns of discrimination and domination ingrained in technological systems, from the racial biases of predictive policing and facial
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-12T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/477/image/coversmallAbjection and Formlessness: Value, Digitality, and the Differential Allocation of Form2025-07-10text/htmlen-USAbjection and Formlessness: Value, Digitality, and the Differential Allocation of Form2025-07-102025TWOProject MUSE®1453892026-05-12T00:00:00-05:002025-07-10The Enduring Problem: An Interview about Form
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/964794
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When you came to Berkeley in spring 2024, you led a workshop on radical formalism. I recall that your phrase "reading without guarantee" quickly became the center of gravity for our conversation, and it does seem to encapsulate much of your research's stakes, claims, and even its crucial methodological wager. So, perhaps we can begin here: What is "reading without guarantee"?Reading without guarantee means that the terms and the stakes of reading cannot be guaranteed or secured in advance. You read to discover something, and you read to actually encounter and regard and linger with the specificity of the particular object that you're encountering, which in turn will induce surprises and changes and detours in
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-12T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/477/image/coversmallThe Enduring Problem: An Interview about Form2025-07-10text/htmlen-USThe Enduring Problem: An Interview about Form2025-07-102025TWOProject MUSE®910872026-05-12T00:00:00-05:002025-07-10For the Sake of Appearing: An Interview on the Diversity of Queer Forms
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/964795
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Your work in Queer Forms (2022) advocates for a renewed emphasis on form within queer theory, a discipline that, as you write, has largely coalesced around a belief in the personal and political expediency of the formless. How did you become frustrated with this emphasis on formlessness, and what have you found enabling about form for queer and feminist purposes?I was inspired to write Queer Forms, in part, as an intellectual response to two developments in queer studies that I found deeply troubling: first was the field's increasing obsession with framing queerness as an abstract, ephemeral, even otherworldly force that somehow transcends lived social relations; and second was the elevation of certain key works in
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-12T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/477/image/coversmallFor the Sake of Appearing: An Interview on the Diversity of Queer Forms2025-07-10text/htmlen-USFor the Sake of Appearing: An Interview on the Diversity of Queer Forms2025-07-102025TWOProject MUSE®822122026-05-12T00:00:00-05:002025-07-10Pattern beyond Form
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/964796
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In Han Kang's novel Greek Lessons, a woman loses her speech but continues her studies of Ancient Greek, remaining silent when the class repeats back to the teacher their lessons. One day she writes fragmentary sentences in her notebook, following an example from the lesson, "a woman lies on the ground." Her fragments read: "Snow in throat" / "Earth in eyes."1 Another student, peering over her shoulder, curious, points out "laughingly … that the woman had written poetry in Greek."2 In response, she "doesn't get flustered, doesn't hastily shut the notebook. She musters all her strength and looks at the young man's eyes as though into depths of ice."3The student is not wrong. The woman is a poet, and the lines
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-12T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/477/image/coversmallPattern beyond Form2025-07-10text/htmlen-USPattern beyond Form2025-07-102025TWOProject MUSE®360552026-05-12T00:00:00-05:002025-07-10