IMPOSSIBILITY OF THAT

Abstract

Working with Jorge Luis Borges’s The Book of Imaginary Beings, this essay shows how creaturely beings, or transfigurations, dramatize the afterlife of racial slavery, coloniality, the (con)temporality of HIV/AIDS, and how their im/possibility disturbs and breaks with the “order of things.” While transitive and transversal in their potentiality for insurgency, Imaginary Beings and Fantastic Zoology also always carry a colonial logic, a conquest paradigm, while also un-resting (if not necessarily liberating) the enjoyment of, what Borges calls, “terrible grounds.” Taking up fantastical and imaginary figures, this essay aims to add to Borges’s compendium of beings; this is a tracing of fugitive forces, of pessimistic and potent provocations that break from “the Human,” “the Man,” and their enumerable agents – from the Fanonian invocation of the bestiary, to the +* value form and its racialized and erotico-, bio-, and necropolitical calculus of HIV/AIDS risk, the authors explore transfigurations at the edge of existence.

Keywords:

• transfiguration
• race
• colonialism
• necropolitics

disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.