Philosophers on Fake News

Arendt and Foucault on power and truth in media politics

Despite their irrefutable and continued presence in the world today, for some time the practices of banning and censorship have struck me as antiquated, almost quaint, like a desperate but not wholly effective grasp for control by a declining State. My admission of this admittedly unsubstantiated and impressionistic outlook—although not ...
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Philosophers on Fake News

Burning Man’s Experimental Dreampolitics

Does the iconic festival suggest a new way forward?

When the era of master narratives recedes and well-trodden Enlightenment principles cease to be relevant, progressives should issue the challenge to come up with an alternative thinking. It is quite a challenge today to bring about new reasoning when the distinguishing feature of our current condition is distrust and skepticism ...
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Burning Man’s Experimental Dreampolitics

Are Marx’s ‘Capital’ and Althusser’s ‘Reading Capital’ Still Relevant Today?

Princeton professor Nick Nesbitt argues for the transhistorical importance of both works

The following are excerpts from an interview with Nick Nesbitt conducted by the Brazilian newspaper Folha de São Paolo and from his introduction to the edited volume The Concept in Crisis. Reading Capital Today published by Duke University Press in 2017. Copyright 2017 Duke University Press. Folha de São Paolo: A century and a half after ...
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Are Marx’s ‘Capital’ and Althusser’s ‘Reading Capital’ Still Relevant Today?

Queers, Zombies, and Institutions

A Review of Lorenzo Bernini’s Queer Apocalypses: Elements of Antisocial Theory

Edelman’s words, published in 2004, may seem an already antiquated sentiment: (many) queers can now marry and fight in American wars; the Pope has ordered Christians to atone for the marginalization of LGBT people; and queer theory is fully lodged in American academia, making its charge for revolution resound less ...
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Rousseau and Critical Theory

An excerpt from Alessandro Ferrara’s latest book

Among the modern philosophers who have shaped the world we inhabit, Rousseau is the one to whom we owe the idea that identity can be a source of normativity (moral and political) and that an identity's potential for playing such a role rests on its capacity for being authentic. The idea ...
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Adorno’s Freud in the Age of Trump

Part 1

Let us recall Freud's fundamental thesis in Group Psychology and the Analysis of the Ego. In this text, Freud presents a general proposition about the process of constitution of collective identities. It is enunciated as follows: "such a primary mass is an amount (Anzahl) of individuals who have placed a single ...
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Adventures of a Postmodern Historian

An excerpt from the new book

Eight years after the end my Fulbright, at the beginning of April 1983, I return to Japan for ten weeks in an effort to connect to the world of the nineteenth century, return in an attempt to share experiences and feelings buried in the past -- theirs and my own. How ...
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Adventures of a Postmodern Historian

Why Does a Historian Write a Memoir?

The adventures of a postmodern historian

Aurell shows that professional historians have produced some 450 works of autobiography or memoir, the bulk of them in the last few decades. "It is possible," he suggests, "that no other academic discipline can boast of such a high number of autobiographies written by its professionals." Perhaps, then, my work ...
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Being an Activist, Having Privilege

Thoughts from inside the university

On the one hand, this line of thinking makes a great deal of sense to me. "The conversation" will never be "about me" (my own privilege will figure prominently in this essay), nor those like me, since we will never know what it is like to move through an anti-Black ...
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What Happened at Hypatia?

Peer Review, Academic Kinship, and Social Media

In response, over 500 feminists -- a mix of senior, untenured and independent scholars, as well as graduate and a few undergraduate students, signed a letter demanding that Hypatia retract Tuvel’s article. They argue that it “falls short of scholarly standards in various areas,” uses incorrect vocabulary, “deadnames” Jenner (refers ...
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What Happened at Hypatia?

A Utopia for Money

A visit to the secretive art warehouse at the Singapore airport

I have visited money’s utopia: it is not only a utopia for those with money, but a utopia for money itself. Sequestered in the winding roads of an industrial park, next to the airport tarmac of one of Asia’s busiest airports, a mere block away from the garrison of the border ...
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A Utopia for Money