Editorial
Krisis 42 (1): 1-2.
Licence
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons
Attribution 4.0 License International License (CC
BY 4.0). © 2022 The author(s).
1
Editorial
This issue includes the rst instalment of a two-part Care Dossier central to Krisis
publications this year. The contributions to the Dossier testify to the various forms
that “care” can take. It was our aim to take seriously Joan Tronto’s (1993) exhortation
that we need to extend care beyond the narrow dyad of interpersonal relationships of
dependency. Many of the contributions to this issue engage with the extensive body
of literature that has emerged from lived experiences of political and social struggles,
primarily from feminists (of colour), which put friendship, love, and coalition-building
centre stage. Others extend the concept of care beyond human beings, to include
non-human entities, as well as our built environment and processes caused by extractive
capitalism. Such an approach allows recasting practices of providing and withholding
care as material, economic, and political and thus to highlight its intertwining with
structural conditions of racism, neo-colonialism, patriarchy, and their particular neo-
liberal inections. While “Care” is central to the articles collected in the Dossier, it also
reverberates within the other contributions to this issue.
Rhiannon Lindgren’s article “The Limits of Mutual Aid and the Promise of
Liberation within Radical Politics of Care” explores the political ambivalences of
mutual aid in times of COVID-19 through an in-depth historical comparison of the
Black Panther Party with the Wages for Housework campaign. The question of if and
how care provides a site of resistance is further examined by Ludovica d’Alessandro
in “Careful Cracks: Resistant Practices of Care and Aect-Ability”, which articulates
a Deleuzian notion of vulnerability that underscores the importance of concrete and
diverse bodies. In “Aective Architecture: Encountering Care in Built Environments”
Linda Kopitz shows how the deployment of care in contemporary architectural design
is entangled with neoliberalism, while also pointing to the political potential of built
environments and their imaginary innovation. The themes of the articles that explicitly
deal with issues of care resonate with the two articles that are adjacent to direct discus-
sions about care. In her article “Verloren normaliteit? Van het verlangen naar autoriteit
naar een Beauvoiraanse ethiek der dubbelzinnigheid, Maren Wehrle interrogates the
desire for authority by developing Simone de Beauvoir’s notion of ambiguity into a
novel account of normalcy. Finally, Matthias Pauwels’ article “Staging Uncivility, Or,
The Performative Politics of Radical Decolonial Iconoclasm” engages with the Black
Lives Matter movement in Belgium and, more broadly, the performativity of protests
that take aim at colonial monuments.
This issue also includes two interviews. In her conversation with Tivadar
Vervoort and Liesbeth Schoonheim, Estelle Ferrarese elaborates on her recent work
on care, vulnerability, and the importance of a social-constructivist, as opposed to an
ontological, approach to these concepts. Bram Wiggers interviews Jason Read on tran-
sindividuality and the promises of cross-reading Marx and Spinoza. The importance
that Krisis pays to the diversity of genres of social critique is also evinced in the publi-
cation of “Critical Naturalism: A Manifesto. The authors, Federica Gregoratto, Heikki
Ikäheimo, Emmanuel Renault, Arvi Särkelä and Italo Testa, see this programmatic text
both as a critical intervention in Critical Theory and as an open invitation to further
2
think collectively. It is in this vein that Krisis explicitly welcomes contributions engag-
ing with the manifesto.
This issue ends with ve book review essays. Patricia de Vries situates Emma
Dowling’s The Care Crisis: What Caused It and How Can We End It? (2021) in femi-
nist-Marxist debates; and Sue Shon reects on Mihaela Mihai’s Political Memory and the
Aesthetics of Care (2022) and the promises that “mnemonic care” holds for providing
new narratives whjich question ocial, memorialized histories. Tim Christiaens reviews
Adam Kotsko’s Agamben’s Philosophical Trajectory (2020), warning us against a teleological
reading of the oeuvre of the theorist of biopolitics. Mark Neocleous’ publication on The
Politics of Immunity: Security and the Policing of Bodies, which maps the cross-disciplinary
productivity of the concept of immunity, is critically discussed by Paul Gorby. The book
review section concludes with an essay by Maarten van Tunen that engages with Jason
Stanley’s How Propaganda Works (2015) and How Fascism Works (2018).
Finally, the concept of “care” serves as a reminder of the - often invisible – labour
that goes into the making a journal such as Krisis, and our dependency as editors on
reviewers, authors, and other contributors. This reliance raises important issues regard-
ing the structural conditions of neoliberal academia which are not unique to Krisis. It
is also, however, a source of intellectual pleasure; and in the spirit of open access Krisis
will start releasing a podcast series this Fall that aims to convey this pleasure beyond the
connes of the written word.