While phrases such as “Brazil first,” “America first,” or “Brexit is Brexit” may suggest a will to restore sovereignty around…
Before anything, above all: No decision
Walter Benjamin
(Tell me one thing) More than this
Can such a realignment, or anything invoking that great conversation-stopping word “awe,” be narrated? (How does eroticism work, anyway?) Contemporary…
eBay and the historical imagination
Some seek God in algorithms. Others seek a kind of divinity in the pastness of the past. The former seek…
Ground: Zero
Hence, the tenets of liberal positive theory are opposed in Kahn’s book via the recourse to questions of state violence,…
American exceptionalism redux
I find Kahn's book as a whole less coherent than some others have. One issue I want to raise is…
Implicated and enraged: An interview with Judith Butler
Judith Butler, a professor at the University of California, Berkeley, is among the leading social theorists alive today. Her most…
The sun shone fiercely through the window at Starbucks (Part II)
Soon after reading Varieties of Secularism in a Secular Age, I turned to Courtney Bender’s The New Metaphysicals. It is…
The sun shone fiercely through the window at Starbucks (Part I)
Let us recognize, from the outset, the delicious perversity of inviting comments upon comments about the comments about Charles Taylor’s…
Judith Butler and Cornel West in conversation
In a recent symposium held by the Institute for Public Knowledge at NYU, the Social Science Research Council and the…