Crisis & Critique 7(3): 2020 – The Year of the Virus. SARS 2 / COVID 19 (2020)

“The present issue of Crisis and Critique brings together an array of thinkers who all in their singular way deal with the effects of the virus, with how the pandemic was registered, with its resonances, with what kind of problems it potentially made visible or what kind of issues it brought to the fore, including the narcissistic tendency of “theory”, broadly speaking itself.”

Contributors: Étienne Balibar, Andrea Cavalletti, Justin Clemens, Alexander García Düttmann, Roberto Esposito, Isabelle Garo, Bue Rübner Hansen, Wang Hui, Elena Louisa Lange and Joshua Pickett-Depaolis, Álvaro García Linera, Michael Löwy, Artemy Magun & Michael Marder, Catherine Malabou, Todd McGowan, Warren Montag, Jean-Luc Nancy, Nick Nesbitt, Michael Roberts, Kim Stanley Robinson, Natalia Romé, Vladimir Safatle, Göran Therborn, Alberto Toscano, Gabriel Tupinambá et al, Raquel Varela & Roberto della Santa, Fabio Vighi, Sophie Wahnich, Slavoj Žižek, Mladen Dolar, Agon Hamza and Frank Ruda.

Edited by Agon Hamza & Frank Ruda
Publisher KMD (Kolektivi materializmi dialektik), Prishtina, November 2020
Open access
ISSN 2311-5475
502 pages

PDF, PDF
PDFs

Coronavirus and Philosophers (2020) [IT, EN, ES]

Debate on the current Coronavirus (COVID-19) events and the state of exception sparkled by Giorgio Agamben’s article with contributions from Jean-Luc Nancy, Roberto Esposito, Sergio Benvenuto, Divya Dwivedi, Shaj Mohan, Rocco Ronchi, Massimo de Carolis, and others, in the Italian journal Antinomie. Included is an excerpt from Michel Foucault’s Discipline and Punish on the measures taken in the wake of a plague in the 17th century.

English translations of selected texts have been published by the European Journal of Psychoanalysis.

An expanded edition in Spanish was edited by Pablo Amadeo and published by ASPO (Aislamiento Social Preventivo y Obligatorio).

Paradoxia epidemica (Italian, HTML)
Coronavirus and Philosophers (English, Mar 2020, HTML, subsequent texts)
Sopa de Wuhan (Spanish, 29 Mar 2020, PDF, added on 2020-4-18)

Achille Mbembe: Necropolitics (2016–) [ES, IT, EN]

“In Necropolitics Achille Mbembe, a leader in the new wave of francophone critical theory, theorizes the genealogy of the contemporary world, a world plagued by ever-increasing inequality, militarization, enmity, and terror as well as by a resurgence of racist, fascist, and nationalist forces determined to exclude and kill. He outlines how democracy has begun to embrace its dark side—what he calls its “nocturnal body”—which is based on the desires, fears, affects, relations, and violence that drove colonialism. This shift has hollowed out democracy, thereby eroding the very values, rights, and freedoms liberal democracy routinely celebrates. As a result, war has become the sacrament of our times in a conception of sovereignty that operates by annihilating all those considered enemies of the state. Despite his dire diagnosis, Mbembe draws on post-Foucauldian debates on biopolitics, war, and race as well as Fanon’s notion of care as a shared vulnerability to explore how new conceptions of the human that transcend humanism might come to pass. These new conceptions would allow us to encounter the Other not as a thing to exclude but as a person with whom to build a more just world.”

First published as Politiques de l’inimitié, La Découverte, Paris, 2016.

English edition
Translated by Steven Corcoran
Publisher Duke University Press, 2019
Theory in Forms series
ISBN 9781478005858, 1478005858
viii+213 pages

Reviews: Laurent Husson (Érudit, 2017, FR), Magali Bessone (L’Homme, 2016, FR), Guillaume G. Poirier (Ithaque, 2017, FR), Alexis Pierçon-Gnezda (Les Inrocks, 2016, FR), Jean Vettraino (Revue Projet, 2016, FR), Akono François-Xavier (Philosophie-politique, 2016, FR), Klaus Nüchtern (Zeit, DE, 2017), Jos Schnurer (socialnet.de, 2017, DE), Filippo La Porta (Laterza, 2019, IT), Tancredi Re (Economia Italiana, 2019, IT).

Publisher (EN)
WorldCat (EN)

Políticas de la enemistad (Spanish, trans. Victor Goldstein, 2018, via)
Nanorazzismo: il corpo notturno della democrazia (Italian, trans. Guido Lagomarsino, 2019)
Necropolitics (English, trans. Steven Corcoran, 2019)