In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Editors' IntroductionAlan D. Schrift andShannon SullivanThe articles in this special issue of the Journal of Speculative Philosophy were selected from revised versions of papers that were originally presented at the sixtieth annual meeting of the Society for Phenomenology and Existential Philosophy (SPEP) at Texas A&M University in College Station, Texas October 13–15, 2022.Michael Hardt of Duke University and Patricia Pisters of the University of Amsterdam gave the (...) SPEP 2022 Plenary Addresses, and we are grateful to be able to include their plenary papers in this special issue. Hardt's paper, "The Politics of Articulation and Strategic Multiplicities," treated SPEP members to an early peek at his newest book, The Subversive 70s (Oxford University Press, 2023). In this work, Hardt digs into the powerful resources for social movements that activists and theorists from the 1970s developed. As he argues, in many ways those activists and thinkers were ahead of their times—and also ahead of ours—in understanding how to analyze interwoven multiplicities of power and how to articulate and organize liberation struggles based on those multiplicities. Hardt brilliantly demonstrates how analyzing the progressive and revolutionary social [End Page 237] movements of the '70s can help us not only understand the roots of contemporary social and political struggles but also reclaim critical resources for those struggles.Patricia Pisters's paper, "Thinking with Fire: Elemental Philosophy and Media Technology," draws upon Gaston Bachelard's "fire complexes" to address a variety of pyrotechnical images appearing in contemporary cinema. Noting that elemental philosophy is on the rise in media studies and elsewhere, not least because of current environmental crises, fire is particularly engaging for its metaphorical, "matterphorical," and technological associations. While acknowledging fire as a material medium—cooking, heating, burning, etc.—Pisters's primary focus in her paper is on fire as an immaterial medium, and it is here that she turns to Bachelard's constellation of fire complexes—the Empedocles, Prometheus, and Novalis Complexes—to which she adds her own fourth complex, the Sita Complex. With these complexes, she provides readings of four cinematic productions that elucidate the annihilating, transgressive, sexual, and purifying qualities of fire, and she suggests that these entangled fire complexes present different kinds of combustive knowledge in which the element of fire manifests itself as material phenomenon of nature, the engine for modern life, and immaterial affective reverie of destruction, transgression, and sexuality.The other articles in this special issue have been organized according to five broad groupings. The first grouping, "On Latin American Philosophy," brings together three papers that engage Latin American philosophy, particularly as found in Mexican, Columbian, and Venezuelan history and political movements. In "Radicalizing Localization: Notes on Santiago Castro-Gómez's Genealogies of Coloniality," Julian Rios Acuña argues that Columbian philosopher Santiago Castro-Gómez develops a radical method of localization. This method allows Castro-Gómez to transform Foucauldian genealogy into genealogies of coloniality that grapple with the complexities of extreme violence produced by colonialism. In "Stefan Gandler's Renewal of Critical Theory from Latin America," Jake M. Bartholomew argues for a version of Critical Theory that is not bound by Europe but also remains true to its first-generation Marxist roots. Relocating to Mexico and advocating for Mexican philosophers, German-born philosopher Stefan Gandler shows how Latin American philosophy can enrich Critical Theory, providing more than can the second and third generations of Critical Theory because of its ability to analyze capitalism from outside the economic perspectives of the Global North. In "Two Versions of the Mestizo [End Page 238] Model: Toward a Theory of Anti-Blackness in Latin American Thought," Miguel Gualdron Ramirez criticizes the anti-Blackness that he sees at the heart of mestizo models of latinidad, or lo latinoamericano. Focusing on the concepts of liberation offered by Venezuelan theorist and politician Simón Bolívar and Mexican philosopher José de Vasconcelos, Ramirez reveals the exclusion and erasure of Black bodies, lives, and histories that ground their versions of Latinx identity and Latin American history. Together these three articles showcase how Latin American philosophy can enrich and expand the scope of Continental philosophy.The second grouping, "Liberatory Limits and Misalignments," features three articles... (shrink)