The middling as domain of fugitivity and possibility

Abstract

The commentaries on my recent article Ant logic and the necrolocutor revealed the extent to which the exceedingly slippery figuration of the necrolocutor – represented as marginal abstraction, colonial subject, exploited labourer, refusal personified, dialogic liberator, prisoner confined by impossibility – has evaded us all as it flickers in and out of view across our combined readings and writings. This response begins by grappling with suggestions of acting and learning from the belows and bottoms of this world and the next. Extending the critiques of these vertical imaginings of power, the response asks what of the unacknowledged middle. The response reflects on the middle as actual, logistical, material possibility space that the top and the bottom, if taken as they are articulated, cannot provide – a flickering domain of fugitivity and possibility.