The Empathetic Humanities Have Much to Teach Our Adversarial Culture

If they can encourage us to ‘always remember context, and never disregard intent’ – they afford something uniquely useful today

As anyone on Twitter knows, public culture can be quick to attack, castigate and condemn. In search of the moral high ground, we rarely grant each other the benefit of the doubt. In her Class Day remarks at Harvard’s 2018 graduation, the Nigerian novelist Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie addressed the problem ...
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The Empathetic Humanities Have Much to Teach Our Adversarial Culture

How to Think through Cages

What I liked so much about these suggestions was the subtle call to think without fear and without expectations. The cages will always be there, but I came to understand how important it is to create a philosophical cage that allows you to leave it. When would leaving become necessary? ...
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How to Think through Cages

Wendy Chun, on software and the machine

Is the relation between the analog and the digital itself analog or digital? That might be one way of thinking the relation between the work of Alexander Galloway and Wendy Hui Kyong Chun. I wrote elsewhere about Galloway’s notion of software as a simulation of ideology. Here I take up Chun’s of software as ...
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The Nothingness That Speaks French

Quentin Meillassoux's The Number and the Siren (published by Urbanomic and Sequence Press, and elegantly translated by Robin Mackay) is quite simply the most beautiful book by a philosopher that I have read for many years. It is a highly original reading of Stéphane Mallarmé's Coup De Dés.  If the objective of Meillassoux’s ...
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The Nothingness That Speaks French