Life is nothing given, but what is negotiated in every text and every confrontation or conspiracy among those we call living. The scientific disciplines alleged to have mastered the secrets of life and the ability to produce or create it at will—synthetic biology,  artificial intelligence, etc.—are nevertheless stymied by this inevitability. The creation of life, biotechnical artifice, is predicated on a prior act of creation, the construction of a model. Such models necessarily remain contestable; artifactual; historically, culturally, linguistically, and psychosexually overdetermined; and captured in circuits of capital.

The necessity of creating a model of creation prior to the creation itself renders every invention an imitation. This negotiation of borders, in which life-or-death decisions are made without knowing what life has been or can be, unites the most humble and overconfident life scientists with their objects of study, those beings we call living, and the parasites, viruses, symbionts, consortia, tools or techno-cultural supplements with which they reach temporary accords.

We invite papers from anyone working directly with texts from the sciences and their social, political, economic, sexual, and racial contexts, or with similar themes in literature, philosophy, and theory. We are most interested in those approaches that question the dogmatic stance typical of new materialism and the material turn, which attributes agency and invention directly to matter or life, and imagines an unmediated relationship with these entities, without the intervention of invention. We are especially interested in approaches drawing on deconstruction, French theory, critical theory, science and technology studies, the history and philosophy of biology, and other domains that the material turn has neglected or pretended to surpass—always by inventing a caricature of the past.

Proposals can address, but are not limited to, the role of mimesis and narrative construction in scientific modelling; evolutionary theory in relation to nature and culture; eugenics and the far right; racial difference, sexual difference, and class difference in scientific practice and writing; virology, epidemiology, and the co-constitution of organisms by their infections; notions of health and pathology; intellectual property and the legal and economic frameworks of science; Marxist science and critiques of neoliberalism.