What is this a description of but free association and fantasy gone wrong?
November 18, 2021
He attracted and maintained an aura of possibility.
On Sylvère Lotringer (1938–2021)
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.
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?
If the web was the waking mind of human culture, GPT-3 emerged as its psychic underbelly.
Babel
July 15, 2021
Even at the Whole Foods, they were seeing genres and taking them apart.
On Lauren Berlant
Fire in the Hold
On Afropessimism
Inasmuch as the end of the world already feels imminent — we are, after all, staring down mass racial injustice, environmental catastrophe, and a global pandemic — vague gestures toward a radical restructuring of society without even a basic blueprint feel, if not incomplete, indicative of a failure of imagination.
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
October 17, 2019
Ethnicity As Counterculture
Counterculture is a praxis
Imagining the person of color as a counterculturalist, as a weirdo or bohemian, means imagining them as someone who cannot be processed easily into the threat/victim dichotomy, but must be imagined as someone who can wreak joy and pleasure and strangeness upon the world.
July 29, 2019
Behemoth Rises Again
Not an analogy!
June 4, 2019
Game of Groans
Green Hitlers, narrative prostheses, and the final episode of the world-pummeling HBO blockbuster
As the fanboys and reply guys will leap to point out, Game of Thrones is set in a fantasy world and thus is not offering us a historically accurate version of the European medieval past. But it is, at another level, just as obviously set in a version of that past, albeit one with giants and dragons and the living dead. And insofar as that temporal orientation is the case, in its final maneuvers the show cheats its viewers of the capacity to respect the very pastness of that past by overlaying a presentist moral logic of political development onto it. In this narcissistic political schema, characters who are untroubled by monarchy are evil, while characters who support electoral systems are good. The effect of this rigged historical framework is to generate a smug sense of quasi-recognition, coating the sedimented layers of a past-that-never-was with a zesty little spritz of incipience.
