Vol. 24.1 is a joint venture between two guest editors whose work had been running in parallel across the previous two years. Guest editor José-Antonio Orosco, acting under the auspices of the Anarres Project for Alternative Futures, organized two essays growing out of a 2022 symposium marking the fiftieth anniversary of Ursula K. Le Guin’s anti-war novella The Word for World is Forest. At the same time, Will Barnes — the guest editor of Vol. 23 — had continued gathering Butler scholarship beyond what fit in that issue, and two of those manuscripts carry over here.
Orosco’s foreword, “Reimagining Nonviolence, Oppression, and Gender Justice,” frames the work of both contributors through Le Guin’s own stated aim: not to prescribe utopia, but to “dislodge my mind, and so the reader’s mind, from the lazy, timorous habit of thinking that the way we live now is the only way people can live.” The two Le Guin essays take that charge seriously. Ben Nadler’s “‘The Root Is the Dream’: Dreaming, Storytelling, and Political Action in Two of Le Guin’s Vietnam War Era Novels” reads The Word for World is Forest alongside The Lathe of Heaven, finding in both a sustained meditation on “effective dreaming” — the way imagination and the unconscious can furnish visions of a more just world powerful enough to motivate action. Nadler links this to Robin D. G. Kelley’s concept of “freedom dreams” and to the historical Black freedom struggle and contemporary prison abolition movements, while also warning that the same imaginative power can fuel exclusionary utopian visions that erase other peoples and ways of life. Sheryl M. Medlicott’s “Use Your ‘Mother Tongue’ to Change the World: An Ecofeminist Reading of Le Guin’s The Word for World is Forest on the Occasion of Its 50th Anniversary” traces the ecofeminist undercurrent in the novella — the interlocking logics of misogyny, environmental destruction, and colonial violence against indigenous peoples — while also noting that Le Guin’s narrative remains structured around patriarchal themes: fixed gender dualisms and masculine saviors that she would spend later novels learning to unlearn. Medlicott invites readers to bring that same self-critical posture to their own scholarly and activist work.
The two Butler articles complete the arc that Vol. 23 opened. Danny Marrero’s “Safeguarding Bodies That Matter: Inequal Grievability and Sexual Terror in Butler’s Analysis of Feminicidio” examines Butler’s deployment of the Spanish-language term feminicidio — chosen over “femicide” or “femicidio” to capture the way lethal violence against women and trans women in Latin America is not merely a crime but a condition enabled and sustained by social structures and legal impunity. Marrero situates Butler’s use of the term within the broader history of feminist scholarship on this phenomenon and argues that the concept, properly augmented, becomes an indispensable tool for philosophers of nonviolence as it sharpens both our analysis of the violence women face and our moral vocabulary of grievability for lives lost to institutionalized patriarchy. Justin Pearce’s “Divine Violence vs. Nonviolence: On Judith Butler’s Reading of Walter Benjamin” takes up the perennial question of whether any form of active resistance against oppressive institutions can avoid replicating the violence it contests. Butler turns to Walter Benjamin’s concept of “divine violence” as a form of action that escapes the moral traps of armed struggle, but Pearce argues that Butler misreads Benjamin as more purely nonviolent than Benjamin’s own text supports. Benjamin’s deeper aim, Pearce contends, is to transcend the violence/nonviolence binary altogether — and since many historically “nonviolent” movements have involved property destruction and armed preparation for self-defense, seeking purity of means may itself be a distortion. Pearce invites readers toward Étienne Balibar’s concept of “anti-violence”: neither abstraction from violence (nonviolence) nor its inversion (counter-violence), but an internal response to and displacement of it.
Moses’s editorial introduction closes the frame by noting what Le Guin and Butler share: both call us to attend to dreaming. Le Guin warns that our habits of dreaming reveal monstrous powers; Butler returns to Freud to diagnose how unconscious structures of self can manifest as collective murder. Together, the issue positions The Acorn as a site of what Moses calls a “dreamers’ resistance to fascism” — a philosophical practice that reaches not just for critique but for the imaginative resources required to build the house we want our children to live in.
The Acorn Journal 