Haraway writes about “response-ability.” I read her as writing the word that way to highlight how the knowledge that we produce can make us better able to appreciate the way that we are always already bound up in the dynamics we seek to understand. We cannot get outside them, we cannot have innocent and objective relationships to them and we cannot be absolved of our complicity. For me, this is a difficult and necessary mantra as a white scholar studying race. I am and always will be conducting research in the context of systemic, historically rooted and materially consequential white supremacy.

Based on a decade of research in the UK, US and Singapore, the book examines the transnational relations through which theatre emerges, ‘tracking’ both practitioners and creative process in their physical and imaginative border crossings to explore how meanings and identities are constructed, negotiated, and reconfigured across different spaces of production, performance and reception.

The focus of the relatively short interview below is to introduce the controversial turn in Ferraris' work to what he dubs a “new realism,” which finds him a kindred spirit to the speculative realists (Iain Hamilton Grant and Graham Harman have written forwards to the two English translations of his works this past year), as well as Markus Gabriel, whose realist theory of fields of sense has already made a mark in Germany, Italy, and elsewhere (though Ferraris’s turn to realism predated these movements).

Arnold Farr speaks to Margath Walker about his research on German idealism, Marxism, critical theory, philosophy of race, postmodernism, psychoanalysis, and liberation philosophy.

With the inevitable differences between authors’ readings of psychoanalytic texts, the book does not detract from the importance of its larger project to demonstrate the “breadth, depth and vitality” of psychoanalytic geographies. Nor does it shy away from controversial issues, or try to suggest coherent meta-theories for apprehending the world.