You See, This Is Why We Lose

So there I was, doing nothing special, drinking strawberry juice, when a friend (who knows I’m teaching Discipline & Punish this quarter) sent me an article from the Canada Globe and Mail about… Continue reading →

Beyond Values?

DM, at Antigram, has a new post up about the Zizek debate. It’s good; the first part of it is about Western “hedonism” and debate over enjoyment, which I’ll try to address in… Continue reading →

In response to Jodi Dean, on radicalism

Her post, and this post as a comment with uncooperative formatting, is here. First, radicalism does not have to be a rhetoric of defeat–and I don’t think it always is. I think of… Continue reading →

Absolutely Fun And True Fact #3: Superpowers

Rich Puchalsky, from the comments thread to my last post (note that Rich is being quoted out-of-context here, and is not being described in what follows): Since academic work is valuable, the problem… Continue reading →

Why I’m Not A Radical

There are individual exceptions; but so far as a man sees the need for converting himself as well as the World, he is approximating to the religious point of view. But for most… Continue reading →

Chaucer’s Prioress: Ignorance and Religious Violence

(x-posted to The Valve) Who’s up for a little Chaucer? Thanks to Eileen Joy’s new post, over at In The Middle, about “The Prioress’s Tale” from The Canterbury Tales, I’ve been thinking about… Continue reading →

Self-Esteem

Danah Boyd, the social researcher famous for her work on MySpace, has a new post up at apophenia about the book Generation Me, written by Jean Twenge. It’s along the lines of a… Continue reading →

Debunking Andrew Scull: Michel Foucault’s History of Madness

(x-posted to The Valve) It is time, at last, for me to confront Andrew Scull’s recent review (now a little less so) of Michel Foucault’s book Madness and Civilization. The book has come… Continue reading →

Derision Does Not Equal Theory

At the enjoyable, smartly written theory blog Antigram, Daniel has posted a new commentary by Jacques-Alain Miller (one of the executors of Jacques Lacan’s estate) on Google. Here’s an excerpt: Google serves a… Continue reading →

Plato and Derrida on Democracy: States of Desire

(x-posted to The Valve) In a recent post at the Lacanian blog Larval Subjects, the eponymous author (we’ll call him LS) writes: Is it truly possible, I wonder, to ever desire the difference… Continue reading →