Bibliographic record
Abstract
“Unthinkable Subjects: Postmortem Poetics in Modernity” investigates the status of the dead in theory and the avant-garde at the limits of race and sex. Bringing together queer theory, critical race studies, psychoanalysis, and contemporary experimental writing, this thesis suggests that the dead animate these fields as a site for ethical and political inquiry. If oppressive rhetoric murders by castigating nonnormative others beyond the sphere of the common—as sick, infected, contagion, dying, or already dead—this thesis examines the risks of reclaiming such murdered and murderous bodies. Since fatality invigorates queer theory and critical race studies, the first part of the thesis considers the murderous subjectivities that compose these fields. In this section, the thesis critiques the “murderous jouissance” of the antisocial thesis in queer theory, which offers the most extreme version of self-annihilating fantasy as an ethos of being in the world. Given that the antisocial thesis is most often articulated through psychoanalysis, the thesis goes on to historicize questions of psychoanalysis and race in Frantz Fanon, arguing that for racialized subjects a condition of murderousness registers the violent logic of racism as a psychotic aberration. The rest of the thesis offers readings of contemporary experimental texts working along axes of race and sex, troubling both queer theory’s self-assured fantasy and the apparent inescapability of racialization as a psychically damaging prison. The writers in this study—Wilson Harris, Gail Scott, and Renee Gladman—paradoxically respond to the murderous language of oppressive rhetoric with texts that demonstrate how language not only murders but is itself murdered. Murdered language is registered by the experimental poetics that claim unbecoming, decay, attrition, severance, and violence as their form, resulting in narratives of “in-existence”—texts that formally dwell in and meditate on ambivalence, refuse narrative wholeness, solicit poetic enigma, and traverse the antagonisms of language. Each author’s investment in murder, self-murder, self-annihilation, or self-removal paradoxically offers nonaggressive forms of undoing, ravishment, and coming undone as that which occasions novel ways to claim ontological murder at the scintillating and ecstatic limit of fatal language.
Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.
How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.004 | 0.007 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.007 | 0.044 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.005 | 0.008 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.004 |
| Research integrity | 0.002 | 0.004 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.004 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".