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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The Playstation Dreamworld

An excerpt from Alfie Bown’s latest book

Dreams are the fulfillment of a wish. Dreams are the disguised fulfillment of a wish. Dreams are the disguised fulfillment of a repressed wish. Dreams are the disguised fulfillment of a repressed, infantile wish. Even the first of these statements is already complex. For Freud, a wish is not just ...
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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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The Virality of Patriotic Antiracism

Combat Veterans and Geopolitical Racism

Today, however, the struggle to destabilize the institutional fabric of disenfranchisement, imprisonment, and wealth inequality risks being buried by viral images of combat veterans “taking a knee,” or the children of service members killed in combat signaling their support for the “cause.” Generally speaking, it has become patriotic to stand ...
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Neoliberal Horizons in Subjectivity

An excerpt from Jorge Alemán’s latest book

It’s definitive to admit that when it comes to the symbolic order of language, in its distinct variants and modes of appearance, we must always distinguish two different dimensions. Firstly, we must indicate the “dependence and subordination” of the speaking being, with respect to the structural and ontological order of ...
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A Pre-History of Post-truth

East and West

The end of “The End of History” arrived together with the end of belief in reality. The Cold War world was a world of warring ideologies; in the twenty-first century, both American capitalism and post-Soviet oligarchy employ the same public relations specialists catering to gangsters with political ambitions. As Peter ...
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Will the Internet be the Death of Metaphysics?

Thinking Gianni Vattimo through Black Mirror, the ‘Nosedive’ Episode

The philosopher Gianni Vattimo formulated his hermeneutics on ‘Weak Thought’, in his work Art’s Claim to Truth (1979). Weak Thought is “nothing other than the knowledge, acceptance, and recognition that philosophy, after the deconstruction of metaphysics, cannot capture the ultimate essence of its objects but must comply with multiplicity of ...
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Will the Internet be the Death of Metaphysics?

Aristotle on Charlottesville

‘Mixed Actions’ and Exercising Judgement on Violence

In the opening movement of book 3 of his Nicomachean Ethics, Aristotle argues that, at bottom, each and every human being is responsible for essentially every action they undertake; put another way: there is nothing a human being does for which they ought not to be praised or blamed. This ...
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Aristotle on Charlottesville

On Trump’s Response to Charlottesville

Political Encounters and Ideological Evasions

The recent clashes involving “Unite the Right” protestors and counter-protestors in Charlottesville, Virginia, cost Heather Heyer her life. Her death and President Trump’s response to it have dominated the news of late. To recount the salient events, fighting broke out between “Unite the Right” protestors (a group of white nationalists, white ...
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On Trump’s Response to Charlottesville

The Courage to Speak Truth in Untruthful Times

Reading Former FBI Director Comey as Parrhesiastes

On June 8th, James Comey, former director of the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI), gave honest and sincere testimony in front of the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence. His testimony concerned President Trump’s handling of the FBI investigation into General Flynn’s relationship to Russian interference in the United States presidential ...
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The Courage to Speak Truth in Untruthful Times