Publication Announcement by Simone Drichel (New Zealand)

Drichel, Simone, ed. (2019). Relationality (special issue). Angelaki: Journal of the Theoretical Humanities, 24(3).

A collection of essays on the theme of Relationality by international scholars from across the humanities and social sciences is here assembled. The ten articles in this special issue, combined with ten commissioned poems, trace the various challenges and opportunities associated with our fundamentally relational existence. They bring relationality into conversation with an array of contemporary paradigms and areas of political concern – the Anthropocene, posthumanism, neoliberalism, disability studies, and postcolonialism, to name but a few – and draw on a range of thinkers, most prominently Emmanuel Levinas, to consider the role that relationality plays, or might play, in our increasingly less-than-relational lives.

https://www.tandfonline.com/toc/cang20/24/3?nav=tocList

Drichel, Simone. (2019). Foreword: Relationality. Angelakii, 24(3):1–2.

Our inherent interconnectedness notwithstanding, relationality remains an elusive quality in a culture that valorizes cultural ideals of independence, autonomy and freedom. In this open-access foreword to a special issue on Relationality, the editor suggests that such cultural ideals plunge us into a “crisis of connection” with disastrous consequences both for our own well-being and survival and for the well-being and survival of innumerable others “to whose ethical demands we close our hearts and minds, eyes and ears, and whom we thereby refuse an ethical response.” Drichel proposes that an awareness of this growing crisis offers us a significant opportunity to reconsider the kinds of cultural ideals we strive for.

https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/0969725X.2019.1620445

Drichel, Simone. (2019). Editorial introduction: ‘the most perfectly autonomous man’: Relational subjectivity and the crisis of connection. Angelaki, 24(3):3–18.

In their recently published book The Crisis of Connection (2018), editors Niobe Way et al. make a claim for “the need for a paradigm shift” which recognizes that “humans are inherently responsive and relational beings” and “not simply the rugged, aggressive, and competitive individuals that we are often made out to be.” This editorial introduction argues that this paradigm shift has been under way for many decades, but that what continues to stymie our inherent relationality, and plunges us into the “crisis of connection” that Way et al. rightly identify, is our ongoing attachment to a damaging cultural ideal of autonomous subjectivity. This crisis might serve as a powerful reminder of the primacy of relationality: In its absence, we become lonely, depressed, and ethically immune to the suffering of others, if not outrightly violent. We are thus confronted with an inverted – and far less glorious – version of the old cultural ideal of autonomous individuality, and therefore challenged to consider the impact this crisis is having on our lives.

https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/0969725X.2019.1620446

Simone Drichel, Ph.D.
English & Linguistics
University of Otago
PO Box 56, Dunedin 9054
New Zealand
Email Simone Drichel