Dialogue sans reconciliation: Intersectionality and contradiction

‘Intersectionality in interregnum’ proposed conjunctural keyword analysis (CKA) as an open-ended, collaborative experiment for assessing what a radical political keyword can and cannot do under historically specific configurations of power. It began to bring Williams's historical semantics of keywords into conversation with Hall's conjunctural analysis, approaching intersectionality's semantic volatility, theoretical indeterminacy, political malleability, and hegemonic rearticulations not simply as evidence of failure or co-optation, but as symptoms of – and diagnostic openings onto – a wider organic crisis. The article therefore neither sought to restore an authentic intersectionality nor to abandon it: it asked what its accumulated histories make available in the present, what its explanatory and political capacities are, and what must be rejected, retained, or reworked if its global resonance is to acquire counter-hegemonic force. The present rejoinder takes the four responses as an occasion to develop some of the questions that this unfinished project leaves open. In doing so, it further specifies the wager involved in bringing Williams and Hall into productive friction; distinguishes more sharply among diagnostic, explanatory, and transformative capacities; and develops the questions of totality, contradiction, overdetermination, and political antagonism that conjunctural analysis requires. The Forum also prompts a reflection on scholarly dialogue itself: not as a route necessarily leading to consensus or reconciliation, but as a practice capable of enabling collective elaboration, working through differences, and making otherwise irreconcilable contradictions more intelligible.