Hilalah Dughayyim Aldhafeeri of the University of Hafr Albatin, Saudia Arabia, had her work on the representation of female psychic individuality effectively slaughtered by editing gaffes (I can relate). What little survived includes a definition of repression as “the cornerstone of all defense mechanisms” (Advances in Language and Literary Studies 11(2), 1-7, 2020). This framing […]
Now I remember what was the problem with hailing the power of a rising momentum, especially among those who would be astonished by the tarot cards of history, where not the least of these offenses consists in the delusion that the blind passions ushered in by historical forces will function in the capacity of a […]
Unless, like Liz Lemon, I’ve unwittingly stumbled into a fight club, not everyone has lost their mind in championing as a desirable outcome the strange logic of devaluation that undergirds the capitalist world-system, in which the cheaper the commodity, the higher its value.Fortunately, there are still those like Stephanie Lambert who, in a June 2021 […]
The question Vladimir Nabokov did not pose to his students at Cornell University concerning the magic of literature is whether there needs to be an actual wolf in the fable “The Boy Who Cried Wolf.”Out of curiosity I put the question to first-year lit students. Sentimental souls tend to wish away the awful comeuppance in […]
You don’t need to be Alexis de Tocqueville to ‘divine in one glance’ that the consumer landscape in America has reached a point of saturation in its gilding over of a clearly dissipated creative force.But I wouldn’t say the answer lies in a backward directed glance to Mary McCarthy’s brazen formulations demarcating for Simone de […]
A dazzling whiteness is the blank slate containing the full spectrum; the allowable bare minimum that is not the dreaded Nothing in the whitewashed absolutist sense, is not outside of any discursive community insofar as it is a response to the prohibition of creation ex nihilo. To perceive this constructed space is to enter upon […]
The universal character of repression invalidates it as the means by which something can be claimed to have a uniquely local integrity.As a mechanism of power, repression belongs to a schematization that has long been inadequate for its very universality of ‘efficaciousness,’ as that which, in the Kantian sense, is common to all members of […]
Feigned unicity is like whistling in the dark. Which is not to say it doesn’t play a role in society. If that which is feigned is named rhetoric and, after Lundberg, rhetoric is what names a failed unicity, this failure results from a structuring that has not allowed for excess, for enjoyment. This implies a […]
Many will remember the story of Walter Benjamin’s chiasmatic crossing of the politicization of art with the aestheticization of politics. He wanted to recover a time when news of the world didn’t come to us already shot through with explanation. The notion of an impoverished narrative tradition beyond journalism persists in non-marginalized cultures, the implication […]
But for German philosopher Martin Heidegger’s self-induced undoing, his writings about caring as a pre-requisite to knowing the truth of things would seem to be the right remedy to a hardened state that makes villains of what it does not know.Daniel O’Hara is among those for whom Heidegger can’t be wholly redeemed. Citing Jacques Derrida’s […]