Second Reflection, Second Innocence: Linguistic-affect and Anti-debt Prefigurement in Corina Kennedy’s Tender for All (Essay)

The new Afterimage double issue features an essay I wrote about Corina Kennedy's "Tender for All," an exhibit which appeared at PC4 gallery in Yonkers in the fall of 2016. The following is from the essay:

As Thomas Gokey remarks in conversation with [Chris] Kraus in the pamphlet Lost Properties, “Debt is such an immaterial thing, but I feel it in my body. I feel the stress of it, I feel the weight of it.” By laboriously scoring the language of debt—both in its Canadian and United States contexts, and in English and French, and English and Spanish respectively—Kennedy registers debt as an immaterial force weighing upon our consciences, organizing the subject through ressentiment—Frederick Nietzsche’s term for ways of remembering that prevent action, creativity, and conatus. Related to this effort is a sustained attempt to capture debt’s mood or tone. Encountering the language of debt writ large, albeit in hushed shouts, Kennedy reestablishes a distance necessary for experiencing certain uses of language as endemic to our emergence as subjects within the debt economy[.]