How to Live (after we die): On Protest, Social Media, and queer Black death
Introduction: 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 MoreMaus in Tennessee: A Censor’s Tale
What’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 MoreThe Dissolution of Marxist Humanism
In 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 MoreFrom the Critique of Totalitarianism to the Invention of Democracy
Introduction 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 MoreCold War Aesthetics: Discriminations and Determinations
…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 MoreReview Essay: Chile After Allende
In the 2019 UK General Election, beleaguered by a concerted campaign of print and broadcast media attacks, enfeebled by in-party subterfuge, and twisted inside out over how to resolve the salient issue of Brexit, a ragged and limpen Labour Party succumbed to a heavy defeat. Jeremy Corbyn, the first politician proposing a break from neoliberal orthodoxy to front…
Read MoreReview Essay: Reflecting On Evil
Evil is a concept with a hazy definition. Admittedly I use the term without having a confident grasp of what behavior constitutes evil. Does evil mean very or extremely bad behavior? Yes, but not precisely because evil, I conclude, connotes conduct that is not relative to other behaviors. It goes beyond them and touches the…
Read MoreRichard Wolin’s Heidegger in Ruins: Between Philosophy and Ideology
Standing as one of the most powerful works of twentieth-century philosophy, Heidegger’s 1927 Being and Time is a text that fundamentally shatters the metaphysical tradition since Plato by reposing the question of Being itself, a question that, Heidegger claims, has been forgotten by philosophy since the pre-Socratics. Moving from an interpretation of Dasein in its…
Read MoreThe Future of Black Leadership
What is the future of black leadership? In the wake of the Movement for Black Lives on the one hand and the “election” of Donald Trump (and the forthcoming presidential election) on the other, a range of intellectuals, pundits, activists, and organizers have begun to ask “what next”? Some suggest that black populations would be…
Read MoreInterview: Catharine MacKinnon on Abortion and Misogyny
We know that opposition to abortion was, for some on the right, a political strategy to manufacture an issue that would mobilize religious voters. What is the interrelationship between the use of abortion as a means to mobilize voters and a deeply embedded misogyny? Abortion as an issue is available to mobilize some voters due…
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