Errant Journal, Issue 6

About Errant Journal:

Errant Journal is a cultural/political publication loosely inspired by Édouard Glissant´s notion of the Poetics of Relation in which he opposes ideas of centers, linearity, roots and dichotomy. Errant, meaning both ‘deviating from an accepted norm’ and ‘wandering’, represents a way of breaking free from the idea of identity based on origin and the possibility to possess a totality of knowledge. It is never the goal to know everything, to see and understand something in its entirety. Instead, a person who is ‘errant’ rejects the universal and challenges the idea that the world is transparent and explainable. 

By being a ´journal´ we mimic the academic standard, while our content aims to stretch the limits of how knowledge is ‘officially’ and ‘correctly’ produced. Different Englishes, academic and embodied knowledge, intuition and the poetic all find their place on our pages. Although our background is in art, we do not see art as a special or separate category of human knowledge and production but rather as one of many options to consider our worlds. Our journal therefore plays on the phonetic of an errant journey: a kind of wandering that is neither aimless nor directed at a clear goal or on a well defined path.

In this issue:

Debt

Errant Journal No. 6 takes up the topic of debt in order to challenge the idea that it is something rational, natural or inevitable. The contributions in the issue address the ways in which debt and its language hold power over us and organize obedience; from its role in geopolitics to its associations with shame and guilt through moral and religious connotations. Together they reveal how the personal is always connected to the structural. Crucially, the issue also features contributions that address ways of thinking about debt outside Western/neoliberal hegemony and introduce instances of resistance to the violence and inequality inherent to debt. We’ve made additional space in this issue to address the intensified struggle for Palestinian liberation and its relations to debt/guilt and finance.