This chapter considers a way of imagining ecology without nature by thinking about how humans see only a certain bandwidth of light. X-rays, also known as gamma rays, are perhaps the ultimate example of invisible light. X-rays confuse the commonsense difference between light and matter, since they can directly wound and destroy life, even as they illuminate it, brighter than bright. X-rays give the lie to the artificial division between perceiving and causing that has plagued philosophy and ideology since at (...) least the Kantian turn. In an age of ecological awareness, the idea that the perceptual dimension is a neutral field is ended, partly by lethal entities that make up that very dimension itself. The time of nuclear materials and global warming is a time of lethal illumination. (shrink)

This chapter touches upon the damaging impact of neoliberal reason on institutions of higher education, and my efforts as a teacher to help turn things around by re-vitalizing the classroom. After a critique of current neoliberal ‘borderline times’, the chapter takes the reader on a journey of diffractive re-imaginings in which I share some of my experiences of co-learning with undergraduates in an American feminist-philosophical classroom. My central argument is that the neoliberalism-induced crisis in education can be affirmatively counteracted through (...) experimentations with various posthuman and new materialist theories, and the Harawayan-Baradian methodology of diffraction in particular. Furthermore, informed by the impression that theory and pedagogical praxis go hand in hand in many contemporary feminist new materialisms, I zoom in on daily acts of resistance against the neoliberal corporatization of the American university, acts that actualized themselves as feminist new materialist pedagogies. Three examples of diffractive pedagogical strategies are then discussed in detail. (shrink)