2026-2027 Sarah Lewis-Cappellari's seminar: Strange Affinities: Difference Without Separability

The seminar from Confluence to Confluence

Seminar participants second year: Giuliana Beya Dridi, Anahi Saravia Herrera, Richard Liu, Dariya Trubina

Seminar participants first year: 

Strange Affinities: Difference Without Separability

INTRODUCTION:

What if we rehearsed, after Denise Ferreira da Silva, an “end to this world as we know it” as a way of unsettling what makes us matter differently, holds us to time, and keeps us apart, so as to come together as we have, entangled, always already been?

This proposition arrives amid a political climate saturated with end-of-days rhetoric, a convergence of forces sharing no common doctrine and answering to no common leadership, yet increasingly aligned around the same apocalyptic logic and the same seats of power, among them Christian nationalists who read civilizational collapse as prophecy fulfilled, ethnonationalists crying for security through expansion at the cost of another people's annihilation, and tech oligarchs treating planetary catastrophe as a business case for leaving the earth behind, for AGI or the singularity, for Mars. What seems to hold this convergence together is not agreement but a shared outlook, namely that the end is coming and the task is to be counted among those who survive it, prepared, provisioned, elsewhere, rather than among those left to face it. Confronting a politics organized around who gets to survive requires coalition, urgently and at scale. But coalition needs some ground beneath the numbers and the will, some claim about why existence is bound together at all, about what and who belongs, following Helen Fein's formulation, within the universe of moral obligation. That ground is usually named relation.

Has relation, though, ever been a settled premise? Black studies has staged sharply divergent debates, from Édouard Glissant's insistence that relation, opaque and irreducible, is the very ground on which difference can be thought together, to Frank B. Wilderson III's account of an antagonism so foundational that relation was never suspended for Blackness so much as structurally unavailable to it from the start. Between these poles, other traditions, Bernice Johnson Reagon's account of coalition as dangerous, uncomfortable work undertaken without the comfort of relation's promise of belonging, suggest the question may not be resolvable. If coalition cannot assume relation, the difficulty may be not only strategic but foundational: on what grounds, then? Building a coalition against an annihilating convergence of power without asking what grounds that coalition risks leaving the deeper structure of sorting intact, since who survives and who does not is less an invention of this convergence than an inheritance of colonial regimes of value, of who and what was and is owed repair, and who and what was and is left to bear the cost. The question, then, may not only be how to come together, but what ground would let coming together mean, be, do something radically different than a seemingly kinder sorting of who and what matters. 

Cultural institutions offer one place to watch this contest over relation play out in practice. Facing demands for restitution, for accountability, for a reckoning with regimes of violence and complicity, Western institutions have, for decades now, answered in the idiom of relation: the encounter elevated to artwork, participation, dialogue, and care named as curatorial values, Glissant's poetics of relation invoked and, in the invoking, stripped of the opacity that gives it force, as if relation itself were the ethical good. Yet ethics-as-relation often operates less as encounter than as institutional management, a vocabulary through which demands are absorbed without conceding the hierarchies they challenge. Consider restitution: the debate narrows to whether the object goes back, the return is staged as a ceremony of friendship, a promise of dialogue, while the apparatus, its conventions, its procedures, its authorities, stays in place, the caption that fixes an object's meaning, the chronological hang that assigns it a stage in a single history, the vitrine that holds it bounded and apart. What returns, then, is rarely a challenge to how the object is held but the same conditions of appreciation and preservation, installed anew by those it is granted to, restitution's success measured by how faithfully the receiving institution reproduces the same caption, the same hang, the same vitrine. Venice's 61st Biennale staged the same absorption at the level of governance. When its jury declared it would not consider for its prizes countries whose leaders stand charged before the ICC with crimes against humanity, the institution did not argue with the criterion; it did not have to. Under ministerial pressure the jurors resigned, and rather than reconstitute the position from which such an ethical call could be applied, the Biennale abolished the position itself, replacing the juried Golden Lion with “Visitors' Lions” decided by ticket-holders, in the name of “inclusion and equal treatment among all participants.” Inclusion without responsibility, relation without ethics; the participatory idiom absorbs the demand and preserves the apparatus.

The convergence that opened this abstract has reached cultural institutions too, gathering toward a further right: not to care at all. The pattern is not universal, but it is visible above all in the United States, where institutions dependent on federal funding have turned the same fluency they once brought to “care” toward its dismantling, closing diversity offices, relitigating restitution, reasserting “excellence” and “merit” as though these were unmarked rather than the residue of who and what has historically been permitted to accrue value, to be counted as worth safeguarding and remembering. A parallel debate has surfaced in art criticism, which welcomes a return to “art for art's sake” as relief from the demand that art perform politics. But that relief presupposes separability too, staging the aesthetic as autonomous, as though it could be detached from the social, political, and historical matrix that produces and reads it. Difference has been essential to the Western construction of the human as a category from its founding, a sorting of who counts as fully human and who stands as the limit against which that humanity constitutes itself, what Sylvia Wynter names the overrepresentation of a single genre of the human as the human as such. A liberal ethics that presupposes separability in the same way the human was first sorted into a hierarchy and partitioning of mattering cannot repair what it remains structurally built to (re)produce. Care and its refusal are not opposites, then, but two performances of one grammar, which is why the backlash does not undo ethics as relation so much as expose the logics of separability the two shared all along.

Denise Ferreira da Silva names this grammar as modern thought's three ontological pillars: determinacy, sequentiality, and separability. Together they constitute the analytics of raciality, the difference-making apparatus through which difference is made to appear as a fixed and knowable nature, as a stage in a single unfolding timeline, as the irreducible separation of bounded beings. This partitioning of the world does not present itself as a construction; it presents itself as the way things are. The pillars persist not because they are claims within modern thought but because they are its conditions; one does not defend them, one thinks and lives with and through them, the aesthetic among the registers in which they are made to feel given rather than made. It is against this grammar that Ferreira da Silva turns to quantum physics, not for proof that the partitioning is construction but for what she calls “poetical descriptors,” borrowing from its strangest findings, e.g., particles that stay connected across any distance, never fully distinct to begin with, to imagine existence outside what separability's toolkit produces. Taking Ferreira da Silva's “difference without separability” as its central analytic, the seminar asks what becomes possible when difference is understood not as a relation between separate, already determined parts but as entanglement. Entanglement, so named, is not offered as relation's replacement, a fresh vocabulary standing ready for the same institutional absorption; the seminar treats it as a question to be tested, session by session, against its own capacity to be domesticated in exactly the way relation has been.

Rather than treating cultural texts and artworks as discrete objects or intellectual traditions as bounded fields, the seminar develops a method of reading across: an attunement to entanglement that brings texts and artworks into encounter and tension without presupposing separability. The method takes its name from Grace Kyungwon Hong and Roderick Ferguson's “strange affinities,” comparative work grounded not in shared identity but in unexpected kinship across difference. Read through Ferreira da Silva, these affinities are uncovered within a condition that precedes them, and participants will trace correspondences that emerge not through consensus, resemblance, or (un)bridgeable alterity, but through a common engagement with the limits of modern onto-epistemology. At this limit, strange affinities becomes a way of tending to the call this abstract opened with, an “end to this world as we know it” answered not by sorting, not by evacuation, not by exit, but by the toppling of long-trusted ontological claims. What if unsettling that difference-making apparatus, even provisionally, even in a seminar room, can make room for a different imaginary to stir, felt out in the doing; life rehearsed toward, not away from...

Four sessions carry the seminar's arc, each named for the pillar it sets out to unsettle. The first, Rethinking Aesthetics, presents a method: Wynter's deciphering practice read alongside da Silva's “On Difference without Separability,” where determinacy, sequentiality, and separability are first named, and first put in question. The three that follow take up each pillar in turn, asking what matter can do once determinacy is no longer assumed, what histories and futures open once sequentiality is no longer assumed, and what coalition might become once its ground is affinity rather than relation granted from above. Throughout, the method remains constant: to read for friction rather than synthesis, and to ask what correspondences surface once relation is thought without presupposing separability.

Readings/Works cited:

Amílcar Cabral, "National Liberation and Culture," Eduardo Mondlane Memorial Lecture, Syracuse University, February 20, 1970.

Amiri Baraka, "Rhythm Travel" (1995), republished by BAK (basis voor actuele kunst), https://www.bakonline.org/prospections/rhythm-travel/, by permission of Akashic Books.

Antonia Majaca, "What Did the Golden Lion Die Of? On Judgment and Disavowal at the Venice Biennale," e-flux Notes, 2026.

BAK (basis voor actuele kunst), "Together in Time," https://bakonline.org/en/research+publications/prospections/together+in+time/.

Bernice Johnson Reagon, "Coalition Politics: Turning the Century," in Home Girls: A Black Feminist Anthology, ed. Barbara Smith (New York: Kitchen Table: Women of Color Press, 1983).

Carolyn Lazard, Long Take (2022).

Cherríe Moraga, The Hungry Woman: A Mexican Medea (2001), selections.

The Combahee River Collective, "The Combahee River Collective Statement" (1977).

Denise Ferreira da Silva, "On Difference without Separability," in Incerteza Viva: 32nd Bienal de São Paulo, exh. cat., ed. Jochen Volz and Júlia Rebouças (São Paulo: Fundação Bienal de São Paulo, 2016), 57–65.

Denise Ferreira da Silva, "Toward a Black Feminist Poethics: The Quest(ion) of Blackness Toward the End of the World," The Black Scholar 44, no. 2 (2014): 81–97.

Denise Ferreira da Silva, "Unpayable Debt: Reading Scenes of Value against the Arrow of Time," in Unpayable Debt (Berlin: Sternberg Press, 2022).

Dilar Dirik, The Kurdish Women's Movement: History, Theory, Practice (London: Pluto Press, 2022), selections.

Édouard Glissant and Manthia Diawara, "One World in Relation: Édouard Glissant in Conversation with Manthia Diawara," trans. Christopher Winks, Nka: Journal of Contemporary African Art, no. 28 (2011): 4–19.

Elizabeth Freeman, Time Binds: Queer Temporalities, Queer Histories (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2010).

Ellen Samuels and Elizabeth Freeman, "Introduction: Crip Temporalities," South Atlantic Quarterly 120, no. 2 (2021): 245–254.

Ezrom Legae, Chicken Series, 1979, graphite and pastel on paper, Skinner Collection, Johannesburg, exhibited in Ezrom Legae: Beasts, High Museum of Art, Atlanta, 2025.

Frank B. Wilderson III, "Blacks and the Master/Slave Relation," interview by C. S. Soong, in Afro-Pessimism: An Introduction (Minneapolis: Racked & Dispatched, 2017), 15–30.

Frantz Fanon, "Algeria Unveiled," in A Dying Colonialism (1959).

Frédéric Neyrat, "Walter Benjamin's Cosmos: Correspondence, Aura, and the Cosmo-Geological Subject," Mosaic: An Interdisciplinary Critical Journal 54, no. 3 (2021): 59–84.

Grace Kyungwon Hong and Roderick A. Ferguson, "Introduction," in Strange Affinities: The Gender and Sexual Politics of Comparative Racialization (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2011).

Huey Copeland, "Tending-toward-Blackness," October 156 (2016): 141–144.

Ines Doujak, Ghost Population(s), 2016–ongoing, collage series made from historical botanical and medical illustration prints.

Jasbir Puar, "I Would Rather Be a Cyborg Than a Goddess: Intersectionality, Assemblage, and Affective Politics," philoSOPHIA 2, no. 1 (2012): 49–66.

Joan Kee, "Afro-Asia and the Ethics of Friendship," e-flux, no. 140 (November 2023).

Kandice Chuh, "It's Not About Anything," Social Text 32, no. 4 (2014): 125–134.

Karen Barad, "Posthumanist Performativity: Toward an Understanding of How Matter Comes to Matter," Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society 28, no. 3 (2003): 801–831.

Lizzie Borden, dir., Born in Flames (1983).

Mel Y. Chen, "Introduction: Intoxications, Intimacies, and Interformations," in Intoxicated: Race, Disability, and Chemical Intimacy across Empire (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2023), 1–17.

Michel-Rolph Trouillot, "An Unthinkable History: The Haitian Revolution as a Non-Event," in Silencing the Past (Boston: Beacon Press, 1995), 70–107.

Michelle Wright, Physics of Blackness: Beyond the Middle Passage Epistemology (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2015).

Pauline Boudry and Renate Lorenz, (No) Time (2020).

Perry Henzell, dir., The Harder They Come (1972).

Riar Rizaldi, Mirage, ongoing project (2023–); key works include Mirage – Metanoia (Prelude) (2023) and Mirage – Eigenstate (2024), single-channel video, Gasworks, London.

Sylvia Wynter, "Rethinking 'Aesthetics': Notes Towards a Deciphering Practice," in Ex-iles: Essays on Caribbean Cinema, ed. Mbye B. Cham (Trenton, NJ: Africa World Press, 1992), 237–279.

Valentina Desideri and Stefano Harney, "Fate Work: A Conversation," Ephemera: Theory & Politics in Organization 13, no. 1 (2013): 159–176.

Wangechi Mutu, Histology of the Different Classes of Uterine Tumors, 2004–05, twelve mixed-media collages.

Wangechi Mutu, Try Dismantling the Little Empire Inside You, 2007, ink, Mylar, pigment, and photocollage with mixed media on Mylar and wall, 95 1/2 x 104 in.

Walter Benjamin, selections on correspondence and the dialectical image, from Illuminations, trans. Harry Zohn, ed. Hannah Arendt (New York: Schocken Books, 1968), and The Arcades Project, trans. Howard Eiland and Kevin McLaughlin (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1999).

"Venice Biennale Artworks," The New York Times, May 14, 2026.

Zakiyyah Iman Jackson, Becoming Human: Matter and Meaning in an Antiblack World (New York: NYU Press, 2020), introduction.

Zakiyyah Iman Jackson, "Outer Worlds: The Persistence of Race in Movement 'Beyond the Human,'" GLQ: A Journal of Lesbian and Gay Studies 21, nos. 2–3 (2015): 215–218.