Aliza Shvarts first came to widespread attention when her Untitled [Senior Thesis] (2008), consisting of a yearlong performance of self-induced miscarriages, was declared a “fiction” by Yale University and censored from public exhibition. That controversial work was on view for the first time in New York as part of her 2020 exhibition Purported at Art in General. It frames the areas of inquiry she has continued to explore: how the body means and matters and how the subject consents and dissents. In this in-depth conversation, Emily Apter and Aliza Shvarts discuss the exhibition and a wide range of topics relevant to contemporary feminist practice and thought: the genealogy of citation; the uses of theory; speech action; rape kits; nonconsensual collaboration; queer kinship; and memes.

“On Epigenesis” consists of a series of interrelated short articles examining the philosophical concept of epigenesis, with a particular focus on Catherine Malabou's development of it in contemporary thought. Alexander Miller introduces the topic of epigenesis and considers its significance as a new paradigm. He also presents the reader with an overview of Malabou's work on the topic: Drawing from recent advances in the life sciences as well as the Western philosophical tradition, he claims, Malabou has proposed “an epigenetic paradigm for rationality” for the 21st century. Catherine Malabou explains that when, in 2001, the scientific journal Nature published virtually the entire sequence of three billion bases that make up the human genome, people were surprised: Only five percent of the sequence turned out to actually be genes. Assembled in bunches and clusters, they are separated by vast expanses of so-called gene deserts made up of DNA characterized as “junk” or “repetitive,” which is to say, non-coding. The sequencing of the genome did not offer the revelations that people had expected, marking the end of the “everything is genetic” creed and announcing the rise of the “epigenetic paradigm.” The present article analyzes the implications of this new paradigm in biology, philosophy, and hermeneutics. Emily Apter situates Catherine Malabou's theory of epigenesis within a broader disciplinary context of Continental philosophy, the cognitive turn, and what a brain does or “is” as an object of aesthetic representation. Peter Szendy argues that even if they are not the central focus of her philosophical work, media and medial metaphors play a key role in Catherine Malabou's understanding of epigenetics. Indeed, her views on the epigenetic paradigm shift could lead to a rethinking of mediality. A medium, according to such an epigenetic approach, would be neither simply a storage space nor a carrier: It would be what happens along with the events (whether they involve works or data) that it hosts or transports. Emanuela Bianchi asks whether the epigenesis of “pure reason” can in any sense be “pure,” since epigenesis necessarily involves empirical processes. Foregrounding the topological involvement of the developing organism in its environment in both biological and psychoanalytic registers, she suggests a way forward can be found in thinking of the genesis of reason as both empirical and rational. Alexander R. Galloway traces an etymological path from “epigenetic” back to the Greek verb “gignomai,” meaning “to be born” or “to become.” But what is becoming? And why is becoming better than (mere) being? One answer is that becoming helps one to escape the confines of identity and rote determination. But what happens when the epigenetic paradigm becomes dominant, when contingency, evolution, and becoming prevail over essence, stasis, and determinism?

Memes are an increasingly omnipresent political technology in the age of Trump, weaponized by troll armies, while at the same time reviving oppositional genres of caricature and satire that are in turn conducive to new forms of political literacy. As a medium, the meme is a mechanism of transliteration, translating affects into icons that read out visually and orthographically, as alphabet, cipher, rebus, anagram, tag, GIF, secret message. In their antidepressant function, memes are salves for solitary souls. They are community-builders connecting solo agents to social networks and political causes. They engender an implicit trust among the users who co-produce and distribute them (modeling a sharing economy dubbed “platform cooperativism” by Trebor Scholz). And yet, because of their predication on impersonal intimacy, memes shift the ground of the political, from an ethics of direct responsibility to an ethics of limited liability and indirect consequence in moral action. This essay examines some key episodes in the political life of memes, examining works by Jenny Holzer, Mary Kelly, Lutz Bacher, Slavs and Tartars, Tony Cokes, and Silvia Kolbowski, as well as anonymous meme-makers.

Drawing on the work of Lawrence Abu Hamdan, a British-Lebanese artist and researcher currently based in Beirut, this essay examines the juridical and conceptual field of critical forensis which is situated at the juncture of security studies, art, and architecture. Abu Hamdan extends forensics to the area of “new audibilities,” with a focus on the politics of juridical hearing in situations of legal-identity profiling and voice authentication (the “shibboleth test”). Abu Hamdan's projects investigate how accent monitoring and audio surveillance, voice recognition, translation technologies, sovereign acts of listening, and court determinations of linguistic norms emerge as so many technical constraints on “freedom of speech,” itself a malleable term ascribed to discrepant claims and principles, yet taking on performative force in site-specific situations.

Recent philosophical tendencies of “Actor-Network Theory,” “Object-Oriented Ontology,” and “Speculative Realism” have profoundly challenged the centrality of subjectivity in the humanities, and many artists and curators, particularly in the UK, Germany, and the United States, appear deeply influenced by this shift from epistemology to ontology. October editors asked artists, historians, and philosophers invested in these projects—from Graham Harman and Alexander R. Galloway to Armen Avanessian and Patricia Falguières to Ed Atkins and Amie Siegel—to explore what the rewards and risks of assigning agency to objects may be, and how, or if, such new materialisms can be productive for making and thinking about art today.