Stories that begin with the claim to be the story of all stories, the summation of affairs as they stand in a given place and time, benefit from the force of unity without having to do much other than have their narratives set within an absolute final condition which, seemingly on its own, takes on […]
The problem with what is referred to as the valorization of war in Shakespeare’s Troilus and Cressida is the close identification it encourages between wound and body. It compromises and diminishes redemption proper, prolonging and delaying relinquishment of the privation.Whereas, among the conditions for self-invention or spontaneity of thought is the enabling or inserting of added time […]
What sometimes gets written off as hysteria is the misperception of conditions as ‘totalitarian’ or headed in that direction, to be remedied by partition or dissolution. Often these convictions are marked by a confusion of physical perception with mathematical conceptions such as infinity or a divisible continuum, when these need not correspond. The resultant ‘truth’ […]
I’m no longer convinced of primal aggression as the wellspring of cultural pursuits in light of a claim elaborated by Chakraborti in his 1985 study of the unhappy consciousness (called up from the dusty stacks of the New York Public Library) – a claim that Thomas Mann had already asserted when he called Freud a […]
The arrival at an original or authentic condition is considered a virtue that calls for the taking up of structuring antagonisms and the production of meaningful expression that is simultaneously independent of any such structure yet informed by it somehow, all of which ought to be incidental in manner.From Kant, that which limits is a […]
Contemporary critiques of provincialism rarely stray from the observation that even those representationally disadvantaged with respect to post-humanist, post-capitalist values and norms tacitly and in an uncomplicated way share in those very assumptions. Such discourse is unsatisfying insofar as it means to diagnose as at bottom an excess of passivity on my part, and in […]
What counts as data?With the addition of something like a cut, I take away from the emptiness or innocence of sense-data so that the form is less receptive/susceptible to any meaning whatever. So goes the well-worn move, such that attenuated, uprooted forms forfeited of meaning, “purified” of experience, constitute meaning that is collectively determined on […]
An unwritten life, one lived only to the extent it is imposed like a death sentence, lived out to its inevitable conclusion, this is insufficient to ward off disaster. There is a deficiency about it, an incapability. It can only be lived as a life of privation. The same life, lived as though one is […]
Time gratuitously given without demands for reciprocation seems to be the lesson dispensed in Shakespeare’s Merchant of Venice. It is what buys time, what bends it in your favor. The consequences of the withholding or absence of this gesture can be observed in Marx’s “Imperialism in India.” There a maxim that Marx posited as truth […]
The concealment of a functioning subjectivity and the continued project of suppressing this side is what allows one to be confirmed in his illegitimate sovereignty, a condition that obtains given the fact of radical temporal discontinuity which implies the possibility and no longer the permissibility of redemption, and therefore and moreover that any such redemption […]