Evelien Geerts

Sketched out against the backdrop of the far-right’s response to the Anthropocenic COVID-19 pandemic, this essay analyses Schild & Vrienden’s [Shield & Friends’] memetic activism. Part of the global far right, Schild & Vrienden (or S&V) positions itself as a Belgian Flemish alt-right youth movement out to culturally – or metapolitically – alter society (Pano 2018; Maly 2019). Digital meme-making is one of S&V’s most notorious metapolitical strategies. Arguing that digital memes that are spread and reworked by social media users have ‘making live and letting die’-powers (Lykke 2019) and are thus an important part of the far right and the alt-right’s investment in a dehumanising bio-/necropolitics, this chapter investigates S&V’s memetic activism before, during, and after the pandemic. This is done to gain a better understanding of their white supremacist and anti-LGBTQIA politics. The research presented in this essay furthermore contributes to memetic theory, Queer Death Studies (Radomska et al. 2019, 2020; MacCormack et al. 2021), and critical theory by zooming in on the affective hauntings of the ‘Kongo’ memetic assemblage, alt-right memes’ microspectropolitics, and memes’ queer(ing) potential via the posthumanising post-representational perspectives of Baradian (2007, 2010) agential realism and Deleuzoguattarian (2005) micropolitics.

A growing number of philosophical and critical theoretical studies are arguing for new frameworks from which to theorise and grapple with contemporary forms of violence that escape the overdetermined representations thereof that ensued in the decade or so following the terrorist attacks in the United States on 9/11 – which Jeffrey Di Leo and Uppinder Mehan aptly called critical ‘theory's “ground zero”’ (2012: 16). While it is true that these attacks transformed current-day perceptions and theorisations of violence, the ensuing so-called Wars on Terror led to reductionist treatments thereof, thereby eliding the incredibly complex, multi-layered, and lived phenomenon that violence can be. As lived, often bodily-felt, and traumatising phenomena that, consequently, cannot be captured in universal frameworks but must, instead, be situated in their material, immaterial, extramaterial or affective, and – more so than even before, as this double special issue also argues – digital contexts.

Our current era of crisis and neo-fascist revanches (see Lawtoo 2019) is rife with desires-driven mimesis, and more specifically, mimetic resentment or conflictual copycat behaviour. Traditionally conceptualised in relation to ressentiment, mimetic resentment (see Nietzsche [1887]2006; Girard [1961]1965, [1977]1992, and [1978]1987) is seldom analysed as a somatechnical phenomenon that meshes the corporeal and the technological (Sullivan 2005; Pugliese and Stryker 2009; Sullivan and Murray 2011), involving pre-personal and affective micropolitics, as well as social and environmental macropolitical characteristics. This article therefore seeks to map out resentment's contemporary somatechnics by attending to its violence-engendering micropolitics in addition to the macrolevels of the permacrisis times it is said to be operating in. The burgeoning environmental crisis that is currently unfolding against the backdrop of these permacrisis times furthermore indicates that such a mapping exercise must consider both the micro- and macropolitical nuances of how zoē/bios classifications and resultant gaps between non/human actors are created and sustained. Finding such a nuanced eco-focused framework in Deleuzoguattarian philosophy (see Deleuze [1969]1990; Deleuze and Guattari [1980]2005; Guattari [1989]2000 and [1992]2002), as well as contemporary critical new materialist thought (see Cooper 2008; Braidotti 2013; Haraway 2016; and Yusoff 2018), we first examine these permacrisis times before presenting a critical cartography (Braidotti [1994]2011; Deleuze and Guattari [1980]2005) of the contours of mimetic resentment's violent micro- and macropolitical somatechnics, to then explore several eco-focused Deleuzoguattarian and critical new materialist pathways that could lead us out of the spiralling vortex of violence that characterises this time of planetary trouble.

This essay consists of a set of digital (post-)pandemic email correspondence held between a political sociologist and an interdisciplinary philosopher working at western European universities while the COVID-19 pandemic rapidly unfolded itself. Starting from an unsettling point in time in 2021, during which vaccination strategies and numerous eugenic pandemic containment measures were being discussed, the authors touch upon issues as diverse as the importance of embodied feminist theorising in pandemic crisis times; neoliberal extractive capitalism’s influence on society, pandemic (mis)management, and higher education; the problematic (post-)pandemic business-as-usual-narrative; grief, mourning, and trauma; the power of anger and protesting; and the forced return to normal(cy). These conversations are held together by an irruptions-based methodology based on Deleuze and Guattari (2000). This methodology tries to make sense of the (post-)pandemic as a disruptive event while forming the backdrop for conversational and critical theoretical snippets, self-designed memes, and critical race, queer, disability, and feminist theoretical perspectives that all conceptualise (post-)pandemic somatechnics as a ‘form of ethico-political critical practice’ (Sullivan and Murray 2011: vii).

ABSTRACT Currently the subject of polarising debates and political instrumentalisation, identity politics - together with how it is entangled with identity as a lived but also theorisable experience consisting of discursive, material, and affective dimensions - is rightfully regarded as a complex phenomenon. This chapter unpacks some of this complexity by mapping out the matters - and matterings of - identity (politics) by means of a critical cartographical methodology of Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari and Rosi Braidotti. After sketching out several critical materialist philosophical conceptualisations of identity (politics), such as those rooted in feminist standpoint theory, situated knowledges, intersectional activism and scholarship, queer theory, and queer of colour critique, a critical new materialist framework that continues along these matter(ings)-emphasising lines is presented. This critical new materialist framework, or put differently, an interferential, conceptualises identity as an always-shifting myriad of the discursive-material-affective. This interference-based framework not only allows for a more conceptually clear and multifocal theorisation of all things identity, consequently highlighting a coalitional identities-based politics but it also demonstrates that contemporary critical new materialist thought builds on preceding feminist materialist paradigms.

For feminists, working in/with the ‘posts’ is, always has been, and must be, a collective and collaborative endeavour. Increasingly, post-inquiry involves taking seriously multiplicities of humans, nonhumans, more-than-and-other-than-humans, multispecies and natureculture entities, including viral, microbial, elemental and atmospheric relationalities. The individual papers in this Special Issue, this editorial, and the Special Issue as a whole attest to this imperative pull to the collective-collaborative in seeking to explore the entangled relations of/between feminisms and the ‘posts’. As a collaborative-collective multiplicity, the Special Issue interrogates what these entangled relations offer for reconfiguring gender and education research, theory, pedagogic practice, activism and praxis.

By bringing feminist science studies scholar Donna J. Haraway’s A manifesto for cyborgs (1985) and Situated knowledges (1988) in line with contemporary critical new materialist thought (see Colman & Van der Tuin, 2024; Dolphijn & Van der Tuin, 2012; Geerts, 2022), this critical pedagogical and philosophical think piece tackles the problematic of Anthropocenic disruptions of the planetary biosphere for critical pedagogies and higher education (also see Carstens, 2016). It additionally encourages its readers to think through their own pedagogical conceptions and praxes by means of irruptive (Geerts & Carstens, 2024; Koro-Ljungberg, 2015) selfreflection- stimulating questions. Our situated – and thus limited and open-ended – response to this all-encompassing Anthropocenic crisis is rooted in a rethinking of Harawayan cyborgian and situated knowledges and the critical pedagogical lessons drawn from the latter. Rereading Haraway’s work through contemporary critical new materialist and related scholarship reveals that it already contained an ecofeminist onto-epistemological shift toward more-than-human agency and relationality. This shift has major consequences for all things critical pedagogical and educational, as our pedagogical thinking-doings are deeply embedded in today’s crisis-ridden lifeworld. This rereading exercise furthermore underlines the necessity of an updated critical new materialist pedagogical praxis for learning and teaching, inspired by Harawayan ecofeminism, that takes the entanglements between human, dehumanised, and more-than-human actors seriously.

This dissertation, located at the crossroads of Continental political philosophy, feminist theory, critical theory, intellectual history, and cultural studies, provides a critical cartography of contemporary new materialist thought in its various constellations and assemblages, while using diffractive theorizing to examine two Continental terror(ist) events. It is argued that such a critical cartography is not only a novel but also much needed undertaking, as we, more than almost two decades after the Habermas-Derrida dialogues on terror(ism), are in need of a Zeitgeist-adjusted conceptual framework, and, thus, a revitalization of philosophizing as such, that could lead to an analysis of the complex ontological, epistemological, and eco-ethico-political entangled aspects of global crises, and, specifically, terrorist events, the actual terror they produce, and the bio-/necropolitical repercussions they often engender. Using the new materialist methodologies of critical cartography and diffraction, this project’s first part explores what it means to “theorize from the ground up” in a feminist manner, while furthermore offering a situated critical cartography of new materialist thought. Within the contours of this Deleuzoguattarian mapping exercise, new materialist thought is shown to be grounded in foregoing materialist philosophies, transversal and trans(/)disciplinary, and, moreover, a revitalizing ever-evolving philosophical strand of thought with crisscrossing, transcontinental roots and a strong foundation in (post-)Foucauldian poststructuralist thought. Particular attention is paid to what in this project are called “critical” new materialisms, or those new materialist philosophies that take the necessity of critical power analyses seriously, and could be said to be “eco-ethico-political” in nature. This cartography is furthermore accompanied by a digital critical cartography that can be utilized for pedagogical means. The second and final part of this dissertation, preceded by an excursus that accentuates the importance of Harawayan ecophilosophical thought for critical new materialist philosophies, consists of one chapter that puts the idea of diffractive theorizing into practice; subsequently exploring theorizing on terror(ism), the Habermas-Derrida dialogues with regard to 9/11, and the Paris 2015 and Brussels 2016 attacks as affect-inducing events of “feeling-thinking-through.” This chapter ends with a diffractive rereading of Habermas, Derrida, Benjamin, and also partially Levinas, on the subject of the contemporary democratic state, terrorism, and the legitimacy of lockdowns and emergency state declarations. By doing so, this final chapter anticipates on this dissertation’s epilogue, in which the need for an up-to-date critical new materialist eco-ethico-political model of justice and responsiveness-as-response-ability, is highlighted.

This particular roundtable falls at the end of a four-year networking project (COST Action IS1307 New Materialism: Networking European Scholarship on ‘How Matter Comes to Matter’) and reflects upon the genealogies of new materialism and how these flow into the individual working practices of participants. The texts below were contributed remotely via email by members of the group, following face-to-face meetings in Barcelona, Maribor, Warsaw, Liverpool, Paris and Utrecht. Authors were unaware of each other’s responses and in this way the dialogue has unfolded a little like a game of Exquisite Corpse or Consequences, with questions acting like a trail of breadcrumbs to follow. Accordingly, the text is the product of a partially bounded experimental system ‘designed to give unknown answers to questions that the experimenters themselves are not yet able to clearly ask’ (Rheinberger 1997: 28). Thus, it both ruminates upon work to date and is intended to generate novel responses from authors and readers alike.

In ‘Situated Knowledges’, feminist science studies scholar – and, as will be argued in this chapter, critical new materialisms scene-setter – Donna Haraway (1988) reveals her own politicised ‘electroshock’ (578) therapeutic take on epistemology and what it means to create knowledge from the ground up. She builds her argument upon Marxist, historical and feminist materialisms, the rich tradition of feminist epistemology and, above all, Sandra Harding’s (1986, 1987, 1991) standpoint theory. Connecting the foregoing philosophies to the Foucauldian idea of power/knowledge (Foucault 1990 [1976], 1995 [1975]) and a critique of disembodied, objectifying vision, Haraway conceptualises her materialist project along four criss-crossing axes, namely: ontology (theorising what the world is); epistemology (theorising about how to see the world as it is); ethics (theorising why the world is as it is and how it ought to be); and politics (theorising how to effectively change the world). It is in the thought-provoking assemblage of these four philosophical domains that Haraway’s eco-philosophy sets the framework for what this chapter describes as critical new materialist philosophies.

Infusing contemporary critical terrorism studies (CTS) with concepts and methodologies from philosophy and critical theory via a Baradian posthumanist agential realist perspective and (counter)terrorist cases and vignettes, this chapter argues for a retheorisation of (counter)terrorism. It does so, firstly, by reconceptualising terrorism and counterterrorism as complex assemblages consisting not only of discursive-material components – an entanglement now largely accepted within CTS and critical security studies (CSS) – but also of affective layers and more-than-human phenomena. Secondly, by analysing European urban (counter)terrorist cases from the UK, Germany, France, and Spain, together with these cases’ surprising spacetime-jumping interlinkages underwriting what we here conceptualise as queer(ing) spacetimematterings, this chapter zooms in on the intra-actions taking place between human and more-than-human agential phenomena and their risk-managed urban environments. Lastly, extra analytical attention is paid to how, in this neoliberal day and age – here rephrased as control society-driven ‘situationscaping times’ – very specific macro- and micropolitical violence-preventing measures and efforts are employed in the fight against various manifestations of urban terror and terrorism.

Geheel in lijn met de rest van Europa-denk bijvoorbeeld aan de toegenomen populariteit van de radicaal-rechtse Zweden-Democraten (Sverigedemokraterna) en de verkiezing van de eerste naoorlogse radicaal-rechtse premier van Italië, Giorgia Meloni-maakt postpandemisch België een politieke draai naar (radicaal) rechts. Deze wending is vooral merkbaar in Vlaanderen: Uit een krantenpeiling van december 2022 blijkt dat 25,5 procent van de Vlamingen bij de volgende verkiezingen van plan is om op het Vlaams Belang te stemmen, die op de voet gevolgd worden door de N-VA met zo'n 22 procent van de stemmen. Bijna de helft van de Vlaamse kiezers heeft dus een voorkeur voor een Vlaams-nationalistische regering, wat de federale coalitiebesprekingen en de politieke toekomst van België in 2024 wel eens negatief zou kunnen beïnvloeden. N-VA-voorzitter Bart De Wever verklaarde onlangs bovendien te willen samenwerken met het Vlaams Belang, op voorwaarde dat de partij zich zou ontdoen van haar meest radicale vertegenwoordigers. Dit alles betekent dat het zogenoemde cordon sanitaire-akkoord uit 1989-bedoeld om antidemocratische partijen uit politieke coalitiebesprekingen te weren-binnenkort wel eens zou kunnen sneuvelen.

Departing from the (post-)Anthropocenic crisis state of today’s world, fuelled by the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic, various post-truth populist follies, and an apocalyptic WW3-scenario that has been hanging in the air since the 2022 invasion of Ukraine, this article argues for the possibility – and necessity – of an affirmative posthumanist-materialist mapping of hope. Embedded in the Deleuzoguattarian-Braidottian (see Deleuze and Guattari 2005 [1980]; Braidotti 2011 [1994]) methodology of critical cartography, and infused with critical posthumanist, new materialist, and queer theoretical perspectives, this cartography of hope is sketched out against two permacrisis-infused positionalities: nostalgic humanism and tragic (post-)humanism. Forced to navigate between these two extremes, the critical cartography of hope presented here explores hope in numerous historico-philosophical (re-)configurations: from the premodern ‘hope-as-all-too-human’, to a more politicised early modern ‘hope-as-(politically-)human’ – representing hope’s first paradigm shift (politicisation), and from a four decades-long neoliberal redrawing of hope as ‘no-more-hope’ – hope’s second shift (depoliticisation) – to a critical (new) materialist plea to de-anthropocentrise and re-politicise hope – hope’s third and final post-Anthropocenic shift (re-politicisation). By mapping these (re-)configurations of hope, a philosophical plea is made for hope as a material(ist) praxis that can help us better understand – and counter – these extractive late capitalist, neoliberal more-than-human crisis times.

Fascism, according to the Deleuzo-Guattarian perspective and new materialist viewpoints, can be conceived of in terms of desire. In mediating desire’s pure flows, the schizoanalytical programme attempts to bypass what Deleuze calls ‘the strange detour of the other’ (B, 356). In this respect, concepts developed in Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari’s Capitalism and Schizophrenia cycle are critical to the project of the problematic of desire, the other and (neo-)fascism. In this chapter, we explore how Deleuzo-Guattarian anti-fascist concepts, such as the Body without Organs (BwO), together with new materialist approaches towards vital materialism, may help us to ‘keep an eye on all that is fascist, even [the fascist] inside us’ (TP, 165). Such a critical-creative analysis, we argue, is needed to distinguish contemporary vitalist new materialisms from so-called Lebensphilosophien (philosophies of life) and frame the rise of neoliberal capitalism-supported regimes of neo-fascism.

Ongeveer vijf weken na de start van de jacht op Jürgen Conings, de Belgische beroepsmilitair gezocht omwille van het bedreigen van viroloog Marc Van Ranst en andere prominente doelwitten, vond men zijn stoffelijk overschot terug in het Dilserbos, Dilsen-Stokkem. Ook na zijn dood – Conings overleed hoogstwaarschijnlijk door zelfmoord – blijft de zaak Conings het Belgische sociaal-politieke landschap beroeren en de publieke opinie verdelen: de mate van steun die Conings de afgelopen weken kreeg, toont nog maar eens aan dat extreemrechts een serieus maatschappelijk probleem is in België, waarvan de reikwijdte bovendien maar al te vaak miskend wordt.

Emancipatie en integratie, nationalisme, machtsonderdrukking en privileges, (super)diversiteit en erkenning. Het zijn slechts een paar van de beladen termen waar we tegenwoordig veel mee geconfronteerd worden, en dat in de context van persoonlijke identiteitsvorming als in debatten omtrent groepsidentiteit, de vraag naar minderheidsrechten en de gepercipieerde conflicten met de zogenaamde democratische Westerse Verlichtingsidealen die daar vervolgens uit voortkomen. Heel veel van deze politieke discussies die momenteel gevoerd worden binnen de politiek en de media draaien om ‘identiteit’, waardoor dit concept helaas tot een gepolitiseerd en polariserend begrip verworden is.

Though the concepts of diversity and inclusion are still widely used in the contexts of management, policy-making, and academic research, the notion of superdiversity is becoming increasingly popular. First articulated by social anthropologist Steven Vertovec (see Vertovec, 2006; 2007; 2012), superdiversity has been described as a concept and theoretical tool that enables us to study our ever-evolving, globalising social reality in great detail by taking the enormous amount of diversity that exists within different groups in societies around the world into account as well, in addition to differences between different groups. Superdiversity is mainly linked to the growing ethnic and cultural complexity of Western European societies, and is therefore often associated with the rise of so-called majority-minority- cities, such as Amsterdam, Brussels, and London, to name a few – all cities in which ethnic minority groups are about to replace (or have already replaced) the ethnic majority group (see, e.g., Crul, Schneider, & Lelie, 2013; Crul, 2016; Geldof, 2015).

The ongoing COVID-19 pandemic has made explicit what many of us already knew and some of us are constantly made to feel: good health and the abilities of our bodies & minds1 are fluid and uncertain. We can only ever hold them precariously (Butler, 2004; Scully, 2014). In the end, we are all vulnerable beings. And, yet, vulnerability, perhaps especially in times of crisis, can never be fully universalised, nor is it distributed equally: the value and definition of what our bodies & minds can do, what they mean, and how they are expected – and often pushed – to function, are intrinsically unstable, as they depend on the socio-cultural, political, and economic context. This is perfectly echoed by the title Rosi Braidotti (2020) gave to one of her recent articles on the ongoing COVID-19 crisis and the current posthuman predicament: ‘“We” Are in This Together, But We Are Not One and the Same’.

During the past two decades or so, the emergence and ever-accelerating development of digital media have sparked scholarly interest, debates, and complex challenges across many disciplines in the social sciences and the humanities. Within this diverse scholarship, the research on digitality, gender, sexuality, and embodiment has contributed substantially to many academic fields, such as media studies, sociology, religion, philosophy, and education studies. As a part of the special issue “Gender, Sexuality, and Embodiment in Digital Spheres: Connecting Intersectionality and Digitality,” this roundtable consists of a conversation between five researchers from different (inter)disciplinary locations, all addressing matters of methodology, intersectionality, positionality, and theory in relation to the topics of gender, sexuality, and embodiment in digital spheres. Said roundtable begins with a critical self-positioning of the participants’ (inter)disciplinary and embodied locations using examples from their own research. The conversation then progresses to how these researchers have employed contemporary theories, conceptual vocabularies, methods, and analyses of gender, sexuality, and embodiment in digital spheres to then conclude with some ethico-political notes about collaborations between scholars and (digital) activists.

Gender, sexuality and embodiment in digital spheres have been increasingly studied from various critical perspectives: From research highlighting the articulation of intimacies, desires, and sexualities in and through digital spaces to theoretical explorations of materiality in the digital realm. With such a high level of (inter)disciplinarity, theories, methods, and analyses of gender, sexuality, and embodiment in relation to digital spheres have become highly diversified. Aiming to reflect this diversity, this special issue brings together innovative and newly developed theoretical, empirical, analytical, and critical approaches in the study of gender, sexuality, and embodiment in digital spheres. By connecting intersectionality and digitality to one another, it adopts an integrated approach that reflects the intricacy and interconnectedness of social categories and markers of difference, privilege, performance, and discrimination. The contributions explore a range of differently situated digital cultural practices, including intimate and sexual experiences with(in) digital media, online self-presentation, expressions of digital resistance, and forms of backlash and online attacks. What connects all these articles, is their critical approach to intersectional inequalities and privileges in relation to digitality, plus their nuanced perspective on gender, sexuality, and embodiment interferentially. The final article is based on a roundtable discussion and aims to encourage interdisciplinary connections and suggests ways of doing research that builds bridges between academia and activism

Whether we are said to be living in the Anthropocene, the Capitalocene, or are witnessing the start of the Chthulucene, as feminist science studies scholar Donna J. Haraway (2016) would describe the current post-anthropocentric era, there is a demonstratable need for affective, entangled, transversal forms of thinking-doing today. Writing this editorial almost a year after the COVID-19 pandemic erupted, and that as inhabitants of Belgium and South Africa—countries with complex ongoing capitalist-colonial legacies, socio-political presents, and heavily but also differently hit by said pandemic—we more than ever feel that these are times of entwined crisis, chaos, and hardship, overflowing with cravings for pedagogical-philosophical responses that are affirmative, productive, and future-oriented. Reactions that are moreover part theory, part praxis, counter the nihilistic, and are future-focused while still grounded in the present, as to not defer responsibilities to future times (see Geerts & Carstens, 2019).

This article reviews the debate on ‘intersectionality’ as the dominant approach in gender studies, with an emphasis on the politics of representation. The debate on intersectionality officially began in the late 1980s, though the approach can be traced back to the institutionalization of women's studies in the 1970s and the feminist movement of the 1960s. Black and lesbian feminists have long advocated hyphenated identities to be the backbone of feminist thought. But in recent years, intersectionality has sustained criticism from numerous angles within gender studies, ranging from feminist philosophy to applied political research. This article will use the theorization of ‘interference’ as a searchlight to produce an overview of this interdisciplinary debate, culminating in our affirmative answer to the question: should we move from intersectionality to interference? Our answer is based on onto-epistemological reflections, i.e., reflections in which being and knowing are always already entangled.