This book on Relationality addresses our growing "crisis of connection" by foregrounding the multi-faceted ways in which we are interconnected with each other and the world in which we live.
When Niobe Way and her collaborators first proclaimed such a "crisis" in their 2018 book The Crisis of Connection: Roots, Consequences, and Solutions, they could not have foreseen the extremes of isolation and disconnection that Covid-19 would unleash just a couple of years later. Importantly, what such experiences of impaired and compromised relationality impress upon us—now more powerfully than ever—is just how fundamentally we are intertwined with each other and the world we inhabit. The ten scholarly chapters assembled here, combined with ten specially commissioned poems, emphasise the significance of these relational entanglements. They draw on a range of thinkers (with Emmanuel Levinas playing a particularly prominent role) to bring relationality into conversation with an array of contemporary paradigms and areas of political concern: the Anthropocene, post-humanism, neoliberalism, disability studies, and postcolonialism (to name but a few). Tracing the various challenges and opportunities associated with our relational existence, they collectively consider the role relationality plays, or might play, in our increasingly less-than-relational lives.
The chapters and poems in this book were originally published as a special issue of Angelaki.
Foreword: Relationality
Simone Drichel
Introduction: "The Most Perfectly Autonomous Man": Relational Subjectivity and the Crisis of Connection
Simone Drichel
How to Read a Photograph (poetry)
Lynley Edmeades
1. Relationality and the Photographic Image: Of Sovereignty, Singularity, or Loneliness?
Rosalyn Diprose
How to Become Unhinged (poetry)
Lynley Edmeades
2. The Relationality of Disappearance
Neil Vallelly
A Treatise on the Ethical Dimensions of Acknowledging the Repellant Notions of Selfhood (poetry)
Lynley Edmeades
3. Reading the Dead with W.G. Sebald: Relational Challenges to Neoliberalism
Josephine Carter
Humanisme de l’Autre (poetry)
Lynley Edmeades
4. All our Relations: Levinas, the Posthuman, and the More-than-Human
Matthew Calarco
Can I Still Say I? (poetry)
Lynley Edmeades
5. The Other Does Not Respond: Levinas’s Answer to Blanchot
Robert Bernasconi
The Asymmetry of Embedded Needs (poetry)
Lynley Edmeades
6. Between an Ethic of Care and an Ethic of Autonomy: Negotiating Relational Autonomy, Disability, and Dependency
Laura Davy
In Which Everything is Made Up of Relationality (poetry)
Lynley Edmeades
7. Transmission, Relationality, Ethnography, Stephen Frosh & Ruth Sheldon
In Joining (Words) (poetry)
Lynley Edmeades
8. Settler-Colonialism’s "Miscarriage": Thinking the Failure of Relationality through Irigaray’s "Interval"
Joanne Faulkner
Because We (poetry)
Lynley Edmeades
9. Sites of Relation and "Tout-Monde": Reflections on Glissant’s Late Work
John E. Drabinski
Grounding for It (poetry)
Lynley Edmeades
10. A Cut in Relationality: Art at the End of the World
Claire Colebrook
Biography
Simone Drichel teaches in the Department of English & Linguistics at the University of Otago, Dunedin, New Zealand. A cross-disciplinary researcher, her current work traverses the fields of continental philosophy and relational psychoanalysis to address the widespread erosion of ethical responsiveness in the contemporary global political situation.
