A discussion of Sylvia Wynter's essay "Toward the Sociogenic Principle" and Aníbal Quijano's "Coloniality of Power" essay, with particular attention to how each diagnoses the pathologies of the colonial relation, the world is buoys, and the kinds of racial and national identities it produces. How can we think outside the coloniality of power? How can the social be constructed otherwise, such that it produces liberated forms of subjectivity, knowledge, and being?

A conversation about Édouard Glissant's work on creolization, with particular emphasis on how that conceptualization of relation emphasizes both the right to opacity and the necessity of cultural contact. What happens to concepts, to art, to expressive life when it is put in contact with differences? How do vulnerable communities and traditions protect themselves in moments of asymmetrical contact? And so what are the ethics of these kinds of encounter?

A discussion of Paul Celan's essay "The Meridian," along with companion pieces of Emmanuel Levinas. Claude Lanzmann, and Jacques Derrida, with particular focus on the poetic word's capacity to bring the deconstructive, dismantling, and interruptive function of absence in reckoning with traumatic experience. How does such a word reflect an ethics of speaking about catastrophe?