Essays
Justice Antonin Scalia passed away in 2016 but his legacy and the myths surrounding his jurisprudence still impact our politics and our courts despite his often controversial and bigoted views on most of the important civil rights issues of our day. For example, not long after his death, George Mason University received a substantial amount…
Read Full Article... about The Dangerous Mythology That Still Surrounds Justice Antonin ScaliaMisogyny — contempt for women — is as old as patriarchy. However, it has taken new forms globally as women have increasingly gained prominence in fields like politics. Assertions of women’s power in domains that were traditionally the purview of men have given rise to new anxieties among some men, resulting in verbal, digital, and…
Read Full Article... about Political Violence Against Women: A Form of Misogyny?Shortly after he was elected, Emmanuel Macron mused about “successful people” and “people who are nothing.” To his critics, these remarks—made before an audience of entrepreneurs at the inauguration of a “start-up” campus—distilled everything they disliked about France’s new president, a former investment banker who assumed the nation’s highest office at the age of thirty-nine.…
Read Full Article... about “The People Who Are Nothing” Strike Back: The 2023 Retirement Age Protests in FranceIntroduction: The Viral Black Dead My adolescence is marked by the viral Black dead as dead Black people dot chapters in my life and mar my psyche. Simultaneously, and perhaps equally correlated, my psyche is also transformed by the internet. These two have come together to greatly contextualize my understanding of myself and my position…
Read Full Article... about How to Live (after we die): On Protest, Social Media, and queer Black deathWhat’s the matter with Tennessee? To an observer, it looks like the Volunteer State has something in the water making its public officials anti-comics. In the 1950s, Tennessee’s Senator Estes Kefauver chaired the Senate Subcommittee on Juvenile Delinquency which investigated the comic industry. Kefauver, who had previously led a Senate investigation into organized crime, was…
Read Full Article... about Maus in Tennessee: A Censor’s TaleIn 1906, Benedetto Croce, in his What is Living and What is Dead of the Philosophy of Hegel, inquired about philosophy in a new way. Instead of asking what is true and what false in the established idiom of philosophy, he posed the question in a way that was immediately historical: what was true might…
Read Full Article... about The Dissolution of Marxist HumanismIntroduction I adopt the basic outline of this essay from Miguel Abensour’s distinction of “two interpretations of totalitarianism” in Lefort’s work. In a word, his first critique was directed at defining, denouncing, and overcoming the practices of Soviet totalitarianism (and its influence on the politics of western Communist parties and their intellectual camp-followers). Step-by-step, beginning…
Read Full Article... about From the Critique of Totalitarianism to the Invention of Democracy…Man is only individualized through the process of history. He originally appears as a generic being, a tribal being, a herd animal….Exchange itself is a major agent of this individualization…Once the situation is such that man as an isolated person has relation only to himself; the means of establishing himself as an isolated individual have…
Read Full Article... about Cold War Aesthetics: Discriminations and DeterminationsThe polycrisis is a convenient global buzzword today that perfectly describes the complex, cumulative and unprecedented effects of multiple, disparate, and overlapping global crises which threaten human ability to cope, adapt, and survive.[1] The Covid-19 pandemic, climate crises creating wildfires, floods, and extreme weather events, burgeoning inflation and economic recession, multiple migration crises and fatalities, the war in…
Read Full Article... about Environmental Degradation and Forced Displacement in Africa
Latest Issue
2025: Vol. 24, No. 1-2
Latest Issue
2025: Vol. 24, No. 1-2
Between The Issues
The (Sad) Fable of Humanity
Adorno’s humanism is radical both in its stubborn desire to retain the human coupled with its willingness to concede the end of the fable of humanity.[1] There was once a small tribe of primates… “Archaeology is demolishing a sacred belief: that human history over the past million years has been a long tale of…
Read Full Article... about The (Sad) Fable of Humanity