ABSTRACT. This article is a collaborative writing experiment emerging from an ongoing reading group focused on more-than-human and decolonial philosophies of creativity. It takes up the concept of the ‘impersonal’ as a call to explore the affective dynamics of group subjectivity through practices of reading collectively. Over three years, the group has moved through, with and across a range of texts that intersect with studies in process philosophy, Indigenous studies, affect theory, critical posthumanism and the radical Black tradition. The conceptual figure of the impersonal haunts our readings across these diverse bodies of work. Even for just a few hours each fortnight, the reading group contours a time where the impersonal ruptures the demand to be and belong as individualised subjects. Our collaborative writing jumps and stutters across this chromatic time-scape, sifting through an impersonal memory of events and their reverberating tonalities and inflections in the passing present.
Keywords: reading groups; group subjectivity; decolonial philosophy; process philosophy; affect studies; critical posthumanism
How to cite: Rousell, D., Harrison, A., Ryan, E., Chapple, V., Beale, R., Zhang, F. B., Tytler, C., & Aleksić, J. (2024). Impersonal forms of togetherness: Finding ways to (not) belong through reading groups. Knowledge Cultures, 12(2), 112-129. https://doi.org/10.22381/kc12220247.
Received September 29, 2023 • Received in revised form February 23, 2024
Accepted March 25, 2024 • Available online September 1, 2024