Editor's Introduction: (un)precedented

There is no shortage of references of late to unprecedented events, whether in terms of political crises or climate disasters.Yet equally forceful is the way that such alarms are couched as iterations of precedents, more immediately with the resurgence of global fascisms, and more distantly with debates over what to call the current geological epoch.What is at the root of this temporality that seems to be at once a return of the familiar and yet strangely uncanny, and what does its proliferation sublimate in terms of possibilities for critique and resistance?Titled "(un)precedented" to indicate the unsettling parallax, this special issue of positions approaches the problem as Walter Benjamin had suggested at an earlier inflection point in his "Theses on the Philosophy of History."Although his ninth thesis, referencing Klee's 1920 painting as the "angel