​Christian Schnurr’s “Coming to Terms with Toxicity: Elements of a ‘Philosophical Toxicology’” investigates how toxicity can be conceptualized in a way that acknowledges both the growing diversity of hazardous substances (endocrine disruptors, allergens, mutagens, or asthma-inducing agents are hardly toxic in the same sense) while still preserving a conceptual core that stabilizes the term ‘toxic’ against increasing metaphorizations (since expressions such as ‘toxic relationship’ or ‘toxic masculinity’ detach the term from its chemical origins). The first challenge is addressed by applying Wittgenstein’s notion of family resemblance to the term ‘toxic’, and the second by proposing four focal points of meaning that distinguish toxicity from other forms of harm. Together, these ideas contribute to a broader reflection on how philosophy—understood as a contemplation of orientation in the world—can engage with the pervasive sense of living in a “toxic world.”

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Chanelle Dupuis, in her “The Body Surrounded: Smelling Toxicity,” establishes the toxic as a matter of smell. She presents a historical panorama of how (bad) smells have been perceived and conceptualized in Western traditions. Again, the toxic is not merely negative. Strong odors can even be used for resistance purposes.

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Joel Gn, in his “Oncological Resonances of the Plastic Condition” exposes the development of plastic since its invention and commercialization in the 20th century and shows that there is a semantic intersection of plastic with cancer. An oncogene is a gene that has the potential to cause cancer, and plastic’s cultural significance is linked to an intrinsic toxicity.

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The next articles examine toxicity as a typical phenomenon linked to the internet. Four authors show how the entanglement of human experiences with digital platforms creates toxicity. Puja Raj’s “Toxicity as a Symbol of Paradox in the Digital Self-Care Movement” can be read as a development of Schnurr’s scientific explanations. While for Schnurr, late modern “risk societies” experience a reoccurrence of premodern moralistic ideas of ‘poison’ and thus promote the ‘poison-free’ body and the ‘pure’ body, Raj explores the concept of ‘toxic self-optimization’ in the wellness and digital self-care business that put forward similarly moralizing approaches. The problem is that these approaches become toxic themselves. For example, performance pressures and commercial interests can lead to self-surveillance digital narcissism.

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Similarly, Paula Pérez-Rodríguez in her “The Toxic History of Instant Writing Culture,” analyses the instances of control that emerge through data quantification, data generation, and the production of writing on social media. “Conversational loops” can become toxic, especially when the signification is perpetually fluid and performative. It makes human interaction opaque, incoherent, and, finally, toxic.

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Ehsan Shahghasemi, in parallel with Raj’s toxic wellness analysis, detects moralizing forces on X in Iran. His “Becoming Good by Naming Evil: The Nietzschean Logic Behind the ‘Toxic People’ Label on Persian X” uses Friedrich Nietzsche’s theory of ressentiment to interpret the discourse on “toxic people” on the web. X is an arena for moral performance where users define their own goodness by condemning others, and the widespread invocation of the term ‘toxic’ on X is linked to this. Finally, John Bessai examines, in his “The Toxic in Public Discourse: Art, Media, and Digital Spaces,” the toxic in public discourse on digital platforms and in artistic media, focusing on digital storytelling techniques of the Canadian National Film Board of Canada (NFBC). The projects visualize the toxic atmosphere of urban spaces, online environments, and the public sphere.

Raj and Shahghasemi present in this special issue a Global South perspective. Raj shows that when the South tries to match with the Global North by following certain aesthetic or ethical patterns (of success, for example), this can easily become toxic.

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Next come two theoretical articles that analyze the notion of the toxic in the writings of Slavoj Žižek and Pierre Bourdieu respectively. Giorgio Armato, in his “Toxicity as Radical Ambiguity: The Role of the ‘Toxic’ in Žižek’s Philosophical Landscape,” argues that toxicity as it is developed in Žižek’s work, has a special function: it is not merely a harmful or pathological deviation but a structurally necessary ingredient able to both destabilize and sustain ideologies. Toxicity introduces ambiguity into ontology, ideology, and subjectivity, and this ambiguity is necessary for the latter’s survival.

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Georgios Bouyiouris and Era Domi, in their “Winning the Toxic Game: The Toxic Illusio and the De-Aestheticization of Toxicity,” analyze toxic relationships through the prism of Bourdieu’s sociological theory. For Bourdieu, the “toxic aesthetic” is a product of habitus and symbolic violence. What the authors term “toxic illusio” is a social force that aestheticizes and romanticizes harm. In such cases, toxicity can become meaningful. Similar to Zizek’s destabilizing toxicity, the toxic illusio structures social games by introducing asymmetries of power. The authors demonstrate the validity of their theory by means of an empirical study.

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Last come four essays that detect toxicity in particular areas of society, which they examine empirically. Shane Epting’s “Toxic Mobility: Normativity Behind the Wheel” shows how “toxic relationships” can emerge in transportation systems. As a matter of fact, toxic language is very present in human-vehicle relations, and the phenomenon can be called “toxic mobility.”

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Franlu Vuillermet and Kristien Hens show in their article on the early Japanese environmental activist Tanaka Shōzō (1841–1913)[, how his concept of nagare (flow) can be useful in contemporary Western contexts. “Purify: Tanaka Shōzō’s Flows and Toxic Environments” explains that “poison” (which Tanaka reifies as a concept called doku) has today become institutionalized through metric-governed management regimes and excellence driven discourses that produce a competitive mindset in the most unsuitable situations and thus obstruct the nagare, the “flow.” The authors speak of “doku academia.”

Finally, Maria Grajdian, in her “Toxic Love: The Interplay of Productivity and Seduction in Postcapitalist Societies,” investigates the Japanese all-female musical theater Takarazuka Revue, which displays a “toxicity of love concept,” which is similar to the toxic illusio described above. Takarazuka Revue’s all-encompassing concept of love relies on the capitalist logic of production and consumption in the name of state-driven mechanisms of traditional capitalism: it is the opposite of an existential pursuit driven by a sense of “healthy” love. “Toxic femininity” is bound to emerge, too.

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As diverse as they are, these articles highlight common features of toxicity in contemporary societies. Often the toxic is due to a phlegmatic and shortsighted vision of how the “good” (for example, the fight against burnout and depression) can be implemented. As a result, it produces the “bad” (for example, anxiety, surveillance, and division). In digital self-care, according to Puja Raj, visual appeal is often considered more important than sustainable mental health. Or corporate imperatives privilege “apparent efficiency at the user-end level while optimizing screen time consumption […] ensuring that users remain perpetually engaged,” as writes Paula Pérez-Rodríguez. Excessive commodification or, in the case of Tanaka Shōzō’s Japan, hasty approaches towards industrialization, promise advantages that eventually turn out to be unsustainable. In such situations we often speak of toxicity.

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The articles also show that toxicity is not simply evil. This is precisely the reason why the term toxic is so preponderant: toxicity cannot be traced to a unique evil perpetrator. Societies can create excessive performance pressures or rules about self-optimization just “for the sake of it,” without an evil perpetrator being implicated. Further, toxicity is an ethical problem, but often it is inspired by aesthetic appreciation. Toxicity emerges not so much in the form of an action (though it can be due to actions) but more commonly as a structural problem. In the worst case, it leads to toxic positivity and develops an aspirational culture advocated for by digital platforms, companies, and schools. Except for perhaps Tanaka’s nineteenth century Japan, where greed was the driving force of toxicity, in contemporary spheres we rarely detect distinct sources that can be identified as evil. Bessai calls such constellations the “aporetic condition.”

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Many paradoxes surround toxicity. Toxic environments are not merely harmful but also spaces where power, identity, and ethics are continuously negotiated. The toxic, hated as it is, is also an intrinsic part of our cultural landscape. Joel Gn even observes a curious “interplay between life, death and biological matter” that he believes to resonate in plastic. For Zizek, as mentioned, the toxic is not merely harmful or pathological but also has a beneficial function, as shows Armato.

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In summary, this special issue presents the toxic as an aesthetico-moralistic idea inscribed in the capitalist logic of production and consumption in an amazingly large variety of ways. Toxicity produces an intrinsic unwell-being through data quantification, digital storytelling, excellence-based management regimes, toxic mobility, and other forms of symbolic violence. Very often it is a tool for asserting moral superiority. However, it can also also have positive functions of resistance or serve the stabilization of ideologies.