Author: Johanna Ekenhorst

Announcement: Special Issue “Im/Possibility”

By Florian CordEditorial

In early 2020, Coils of the Serpent will publish a special issue entitled “Im/Possibility: On the Production, Distribution, and Articulation of the Possible and the Impossible,” which will be guest-edited by Dennis Büscher-Ulbrich, Cord-Christian Casper, Emmanuel Tristan Kugland, and Marlon Lieber.

The issue intents to examine various facets, modes, and agents of the material and symbolic production, distribution, and articulation of im/possibility across various media. It seeks to analyze and critique the dominant forms of im/possibility from the perspectives of critical theory, psychoanalysis, philosophy, history, sociology, political science, literature, and cultural studies, and to debate the pressing questions of what material, discursive, psychosocial and affective constraints on subjectivity and agency exist today that help reproduce or contest a neoliberal and increasingly authoritarian “consensus,” or what Jacques Rancière has aptly called “the police distribution of the sensible.” We hope to bring together authors who draw on (post-)Marxist critical theory and/or the tradition of Birmingham Cultural Studies to analyze and critique the historical formation, material conditions, cultural representation, and political distribution or articulation of the im/possibility of radical social transformation, new forms of social struggle and solidarity, automation and digitalization, green capitalism, neoliberalism, economic nationalism, fascism, gender abolition, black liberation, communism, and all forms of emancipatory practice.

Read the full announcement!

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Announcement: Special Issue “Societies of Control”

By Editorial

In late 2019/early 2020, Coils of the Serpent will publish a special issue dedicated to Gilles Deleuze’s “Postscript on the Societies of Control” (which the journal references in its title).

Read today, the Postscript seems to anticipate many of the mechanisms and forms of power characteristic of the present age. It is therefore not surprising that many diagnosticians of contemporary culture and society – and, in particular, analysts of late capitalism, neoliberalism, and the digital era – continue to refer to the text and use it as a source of inspiration. In 2020, it will be thirty years since the initial publication of the essay. To mark this occasion, we invite experts in Deleuze studies as well as in the theory and analysis of contemporary power dynamics to respond to the question: what relevance does the Postscript (still) have for thinking power and resistance in the 21st century?

The issue, edited by Florian Cord and Simon Schleusener, will bring together, and bring into dialogue with each other, a number of renowned experts as well as some younger scholars to engage in a debate not only about Deleuze’s “Postscript on the Societies of Control,” but on contemporary power in general.

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