How to take up the question of living and dying, and what it means to survive, to live on, after the countless disasters of modernity? In reading Blanchot’s fiction, Derrida unfolds sur-vivre as an infinite verb: living on. Where “on” (sur-) marks not the beyond but rather the indefinite duration of “after” prior to any end, such that life is always already posthumous in the persistence and withdrawal of its ongoingness, harboring at the outset the excess of over-life. A movement and sense of infinitude Derrida had begun to examine in terms of “life-death” or without the hyphen, and would later reiterate under the sign of survivance. What lives on remains, akin to spectrality, in the aftermath of the ever growing disaster where life—hierarchically ordered and divided by sovereign power—is rendered disposable in advance and thereby put under the threat of unlimited destruction.

How might we think of survival without any narratological sense of fulfillment, tied to meaning making, growth, or accomplishment—let alone redemption? What experiences and practices of struggle can be invented or retrieved anew? Might it be according to a displacement of the temporal structure of belatedness or Nachträglichkeit, or as the reverberating blows and rhythms of the après-coup, whose breaks can syncopate an oft-kilter beat that swings out of time? And as the counter-currents or undertows that mobilize subversive forces of uprising, answering the demand to “go on” even when, as Beckett says, “no how on.” 

“Living on, after all” is an intervention, suspension, departure, and the insistence of refusal and resistance. How to think on, and after, biopolitical, necropolitical, decolonial, queer, and eco-critiques: of the survival of Black life, disposed to premature death, “in the wake” (Sharpe), insurgent social life “in the break” (Moten), and the "autopoetic turn" (Wynter); of reproductive futurity and the “no future” thesis; or in terms of existence and extinction as abiding in the tangential (Heine) or the separated (Neyrat) and therefore after entanglement (Giraud)? And how would these approaches converge with or diverge from claims to indigenous survivance (Vizenor)? Or help us reconsider the writing of the disaster between literature or art and politics, ranging from the camps of the Second World War to the gulags and carceral systems—to the age of decolonization and the Nakba up to the present of racial capitalism, including as the afterward of revolutions and abolitions? 

We want to examine modes of perseverance at odds with neoliberal codes of flexible subjectivity, grinding, and creativity; the ethics and politics of resilience; or the hope of progress underlying social movements and late fascist tendencies of the far-right. We invite proposals across disciplines on the literature, philosophy, aesthetics, and theory of the time and space of the after, emphasizing arts of living on, among the dying, always unfinished, and in the aftermath of the disaster.