Austin Lillywhite

This special issue on queer environs examines the spatial infrastructures behind environments and queer genders/sexualities. The current deterioration of environments around the globe prompts us to raise anew the question of how environments impact gender and sex, and vice versa. Queer Environs directs our attention not only to the spatial infrastructures producing both environments and sex-gender, but also the defamiliarization of those spatial roots as a result of the “global weirding” of climate change. The essays in this special issue explore the meanings of our globally queer(ed) environs for both queer studies and the environmental humanities, asking questions such as: How are queer and trans people especially vulnerable to infrastructural damages brought on by extreme weather? How do terms like “queer ecologies” and “queer environs” fail to attend to geopolitical differences, shaped by colonial power? And how useful are comparisons, both allegorical and biological, between human and nonhuman queernesses?

Deconstruction and duration are arguably the two most important theories of time to emerge from French philosophy in the twentieth century. Yet, despite the resurgence of interest in Bergson, scholars have ignored Derrida’s own discussions of Bergson, both positive and negative, throughout his career. This lack of attention obscures an important influence on Derrida’s early thought, and hampers our ability to understand the nature of Derrida’s relationship to fields such as new materialism, posthumanism, and affect studies, that frequently turn to Bergson for inspiration. This paper addresses this gap by tracking Derrida’s readings of Bergson and comparing two related pairs of their concepts: duration and différance, and intuition and spacing. The paper concludes by arguing that Derrida’s critical engagement with Bergson leads to an anti-presentist model of life, which gains new relevance in the Anthropocene.

This essay critiques the return to objects posited by certain new materialisms, most specifically the speculative realism of Harman, Meillassoux and Brassier. It argues that their “non-relational” and “autonomous” ontology represents a neo-positivist conception of reality. In place of such an atomistic ontology, I will suggest that the new materialisms develop a more productive, “non-reductive materialism”—a term drawn from analytic philosophy of mind. I will interpret Merleau-Ponty and Jean-Luc Nancy as crucial examples of such a materialism on the continental side. Rather than being based on the non-relational innerness of an object, this position instead takes into account matter’s fundamentally extended nature. Confirmed by examples such as the growing evidence for neuroplasticity, the externalist, non-reductive view advances the new materialist argument that matter is “agentive” and “active” rather than “mechanic” and “passive,” without slipping into an anti-social-constructionist biologism or behaviorism.

This essay considers the possibility that prominent theories of the posthuman may draw problematic forms of inspiration from ideas about the "primitive" human. This would complicate how the post in posthuman is defined by current scholarship. It would also suggest that there are potentially concerning racial politics, hitherto unnoticed, embedded within certain modes of posthuman theorizing. In assessing these concerns, the essay develops an analysis of the unexpected racializing and fetishistic dimensions commonly at work in the idea of networks, and looks at the ways networks and new animistic ontologies may in certain ways perpetuate the same Eurocentric humanist biases that they aim to critique.