Sam Dolbear

The chiromancer appears in "Fate and Character" as she might have figured at the time of its writing: fleetingly, whether in popular and academic periodicals or in a booth at the fair. This essay seeks to reconstruct her cursory role in relation to Benjamin's wider philosophy of history, where the hand becomes a site for condensed temporalities, a ledger of past action and future possibilities. We argue for the replacement of the notion of chiromancy as it is entrapped within bourgeois notions of character and fate, tied to work and profession, with a more critical, historical-materialist reading, that links moments of crisis and struggle across time and points to an elsewhere: a time of redemption, music, and truth.

As editors, we decided to not fight the obscurity of "Fate and Character" but work with it, in its spirit. Thus, rather than solicit standard research essays, we invited a wide range of scholars from across the humanities to write short, essayistic pieces. The goal was to produce theory in a different register—free-wheeling, consciously essayistic, eagerly associative, and, yes, "digressive"—in which a cast of concepts and characters serves to guide the issue's organization, in the hope to deliver a set of readings that are at once legible, digestible, and surprising in their different styles and approaches.