Late capitalism has told us that the era of sacrifice has ended—at least for the capitalist. That subject believes in giving up nothing, as overlapping crises of overproduction have been resignified as “abundance”: an abundance of commodities, securities, identities, and pleasures; of creativity, credit, energy, and information; and never-ending access, growth, and land. In the midst of this era of accumulation, we have seen the evisceration of even the slightest suggestion of political, economic, and civil rights, and the violent circumscription of possibility, opportunity, and freedom. The underside of late capitalist abundance has taken shape as endless spaces of confinement, hyper-exploitation, and extermination—the prison, the ghetto, the free trade zone, the debt trap, the strip mine, the camp—ever-expanding sacrifice zones with ever-more tenuous borders. At the present nexus of international fascism, ecological catastrophe, and racial capitalism—in a moment where capitalists would rather destroy everything than share anything—this seminar is concerned with identifying and moving past a particular impasse in contemporary life: the idea that political change can be exacted without sacrifice, without loss, without sharing, without anyone giving anything up. To that end, we are interested in critical genealogies of anarchism, Black radicalism, decoloniality, and deconstruction, traditions wherein the figure of the revolutionary is one who gives themself away.  

How might we reimagine, for our present, sacrifice as the space between loss and sharing? In his “Theses on the Philosophy of History,” Walter Benjamin called the “spirit of sacrifice” the greatest strength of a revolutionary working class. Returning to that spirit, what forms of sharing might fight back against fascism? Who or what are we when we are shared with the living and the dead? What forms of risk become possible when we give ourselves away, or when we (collectively) give up on the possibilities offered by the possessive, the first-person, and the singular-I? Or when we take risks that damage our careers on behalf of the dead in Palestine, for example, or when we cut out, with a vengeance, the parts of ourselves hewn to the promises of liberal humanism? How might deconstruction, decoloniality, and Black studies help us in this task? Do we need a new poetics of violence?

We are interested in papers that engage with these traditions in relation to a range of objects, from literary art to visual art and cinema, to contemporary and historical social movements and activist formations, and to critical and theoretical interventions.