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The Derivative is a bi-annual online publication launched in October 2020, in the midst of unprecedented political, social, economic, and environmental collapse in Lebanon. It is an attempt at building collective vocabularies, registers, and practices able to account for and run against the systemic onslaught we are faced with.

The Derivative is a student of the uprising of Oct 17, 2019; it is first and foremost a rhizomatic object around which to mobilize a diversity of praxes. Experimenting with collective editorial models, each issue is above all an excuse to think and make together and a way to expand and strengthen networks of friends and allies through divergent modes of address, thought, and action.

Every issue of The Derivative starts with three guest editors, each assigned a theme in the form of a three-letter root word (جذر) in Arabic. Each editor then collaborates with five contributors to help unfold the various facets of each theme, as well as an artist contribution responding to each text.

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Hypochondriacal with the World*

Ill (noun): Old Nors illr “Lost in the mists of time”.   Sick (adjective): “Ill, diseased; troubled, deeply affected”. “Tired or weary, disgusted from satiety”; “Mentally twisted”; seocmod “infirm of mind”. What of suffering (noun)? One time during a pandemic, I felt ill. Really ill for months. They tell me I’m always sick. They tell me […]

Crowds and Experts: An Interview with Omer Shah

In the following interview, Omer Shah, a PhD candidate in Anthropology, at Columbia University, expounds on the ethnographic work he carried out in Saudi Arabia, in and around the holy city of Mecca, between October 2017 and August 2019. By attending to historical and contemporary formations of the crowd, expertise, knowledge production, and the kingdom’s […]

A Loud Voice Never Dies: Songs Across Time and Place

“هاي السنة سنة، مو مثل كل سنة”عزيز علي — “Hay el sana sana, mu mithil kul sana”— Aziz Ali This year is a year, unlike every year. These words could have referred to the bizarre year that 2020 has been, but they were written over sixty years ago. Iraqi singer and “monologuist” Aziz Ali recorded […]

Restraint: Between Fire and the Labyrinth: Jason Mohaghegh

[JASON MOHAGHEGH is Associate Professor of Comparative Literature and Philosophy at Babson College. His work explores rising poetic, philosophical, and artistic movements across both East and West, with particular focus on concepts of chaos, illusion, violence, disappearance, delirium, silence, madness, apocalypse, night, and futurity. He has published nine books to date–including The Chaotic Imagination (Palgrave, […]

“Bodies Are Always Transmitting”: An Interview with Radio Earth Hold

Kareem Estefan in conversation with Rachel Dedman, Arjuna Neuman, and Lorde Se-lys. The broadcast opens with a command from an unknown source, addressed to a confined listener: Lie very still. It is the summer of 2020 and I am this confined listener, absorbed by my headphones, seated at my desk, in the same position I […]