This special issue on posthumanist perspectives on affect seeks to create a platform for thinking about the intersection of, on the one hand, the posthumanist project of radically reconfiguring the meaning of the “human” in light of the critiques of a unified and bounded subjectivity and, on the other, the insights coming from recent scholarship on affect and feeling about the subject, sociality, and connectivity. Posthumanism stands for diverse theoretical positions which together call into question the anthropocentric assertion of the (...) human as a distinctive, unique and dominant form of life – in turn, the concept of affect has been linked with ideas of increasing and decreasing energetic intensities, which underlie, but for some also precede, processes of individuation and subjectivation.The contributors to this issue consider critically the vistas opened by affect studies and by posthumanism. Coming from diverse disciplinary traditions, including literature, philosophy, critical sociology, visual arts, and heritage studies, the articles contribute to the four thematic idioms of this issue in an attempt to structure a dialogical space on posthumanist perspectives on affect and on affect-based politics. Questions of environmental governance, the critique of speciesism, the formation of cross-species solidarity, the politics of the “inhuman”, biopolitics and necropolitics form the intellectual mosaic of this issue. Finally, we pose the question of “academic affects”, in circulation in the researcher's encounter with her others – humans, insects, ghostly presences or inanimate objects – and we ask how these affects, including anger and mourning, but also joyful affirmation, are brought to bear on the process of writing. (shrink)

This article explores the place of the animal and animals in Lacanian psychoanalysis, arguing that the standard accounts of Lacan on the animal, including the influential intervention by Derrida, depend almost exclusively on the Écrits and Lacan’s early seminars, overlooking late Lacanian texts and seminars. It starts by examining perplexing instances in Lacan’s seminar of “silliness” or “stupidity” – what he himself calls bêtises. The bêtise, which Lacan says plays a critical role in clinical practice, is then treated as the (...) way into a discussion of the place of the animal in Lacan’s seminar, and how it changes between early and late seminars. Écrits and the early seminars consistently locate animals in the imaginary while denying them access to the symbolic, a realm exclusive to the human animal at this stage of Lacan’s thinking. The article then shows how this earlier work rests heavily on ethology, especially key figures such as Konrad Lorenz and Niko Tinbergen, who disappear entirely from the late Lacan, along with the assumption that animals are caught up purely in the imaginary. If the bees and rats of Seminar XX: Encore do not act as a language-less foil to the desiring human subject, the article asks, what function do they play in the later Lacan? Part of this reading is dedicated to a reassessment of Derrida’s account of the animal in Lacan, an account which is often taken to be the final word on the subject. (shrink)

Agrifood scholars commonly adopt “a matter of fact way of speaking” to talk about the extent of neoliberal rollout in the food sector and the viability of “alternatives” to capitalist food initiatives. Over the past few decades this matter of fact stance has resulted in heated debate in agrifood scholarship on two distinct battlegrounds namely, the corporate food regime and the alternative food regime. In this paper I identify some of the limitations of speaking in a matter of fact way (...) and of focusing on capitalist and neoliberal economies as the yardstick by which to assess all food economy initiatives. Using stories of bananas in Australia and the Philippines I advocate for a new mode of critical inquiry in food scholarship that focuses on matters of concern. Following Bruno Latour I use the term critical inquiry to refer to research methods and thinking practices that multiply possible ways of being and acting in the world. The new mode of critical inquiry I propose centers on enacting three broad research matters of concern. These are gathering and assembling economic diversity human actancy and nonhuman actancy. I argue that through becoming critical minds in the Latourian sense researchers can play a key role in enacting economic food futures in the Anthropocene. (shrink)