October 13, 2022
Facts, in Latour’s view, don’t exist “out there,” waiting to be discovered or understood.
In Thrall
How can we get closer to the wounded belly of the world?
Choose your own birth adventure: either you come out of a dark vagina or an iridescent anus. Taking over for Spinoza, the receding figure who is always with us, Kafka laughs at the childishness of a second creation story. In his work, the animal speaks while the human is, ultimately, struck dumb by anal bureaucracies of his own making. Legal fictions estrange humans from each other and create, in the most sensitive souls, fissures that never heal.
In the spirit of what he has called “unhinged generosity” toward the reader, Leyner wants to keep the gravy flowing.
Literary Miniaturist
Circle of Visibility
The familiar shadow of American self-realization
What is the remedy for dropping a bomb on fellow human beings, allowing their homes and the homes of their neighbors to burn to the ground, shooting at those trying to escape the fire, giving near life sentences to the survivors, and then, covertly, keeping the bones of those who died in the attack as trophies? What is the remedy for the creation and maintenance of the carceral state?
September 20, 2021
Said of the Sixties
Revising Said’s “out of place” self-image is a project worth pursuing further
Although Brennan’s book prioritizes Said’s English-department dramas, his longstanding anti-militarism is arguably at least as interesting a thread to follow, and one that seems destined to stay interesting longer.
The act of discernment is not merely punished; it’s made infelicitous.
Disambiguation, a Tragedy
February 20, 2020
Is the Future of French Feminism Female?
Walking a fine line between theory, activism, and literature
Regarding Bloom
He leaked humanity
It wasn’t “New Critical” thing-in-itself close reading, because poems weren’t things in themselves, they were living subjects, and as full of contradictions and private dramas and unconscious desires and hauntings as any other.
October 16, 2019
On Harold Bloom
1930–2019
This was one of Bloom’s gifts, to hear in any single work many voices. Poems were not themselves. A voice was not just one voice. And Bloom as Falstaff was not Bloom either, only a mask, a shadow: “I call to the mysterious one who yet / Shall walk the wet sands by the edge of the stream / And look most like me, being indeed my double, / And prove of all imaginable things / The most unlike, being my anti-self, / And standing by these characters disclose / All that I seek”—that’s Yeats, whose theory of antithetical characters was one of the sources to Bloom’s Anxiety of Influence.
Power seems to follow men, whose informal networks easily slink into the shadows.
Sexism in the Academy
You have one body and twenty-four hours in a day. An organizer asks what you’ll do with them, concretely, now.
Spadework
October 4, 2018
Orthodoxxed!
On “Sokal Squared”
Even where they exist as departments, fields like gender studies are less institutionalized, more poorly-resourced, and more disadvantaged in hiring, promotion, and funding compared to mainline counterparts like psychology—doubly disadvantaged in the case of even newer fields like fat studies, also targeted in the hoax. They also tend to employ more women, people of color, and LGBTQ people, whose individual marginalization is compounded by the structure of academic institutions. The low impact factor of most of the journals that published the hoaxers’ papers testifies not just to the barrel-scraping to which they were reduced when more prestigious journals rejected them, but also to the struggle their fields face in the broader academic community. This is to be lamented, not celebrated, for these fields do in fact produce valuable and effective scholarship.
