June 9, 2023

Walter Benjamin’s Notes On Various Topics, Part 2

Translated by Rachel Thomas.  Edited  by Carl Raschke. The following is the second part of a series of translated fragments (or “short prose”) from the writings of Walter Benjamin, beginning around the time of World War I.  The first part can be found here.  Some of these fragments, such as the section on the famous […]

The Pharmakon and Ayahuasca Globalization (Roger Green)

Jacques Derrida theorized in an interview on “The Rhetoric of Drugs”: The production and distribution of drugs are, of course, primarily organized by right-wing forces or regimes, by a certain form of capitalism.  But in Western Europe drug consumption and certain drug culture are often associated with vaguely anti-establishment, left-leaning ideology, whereas the brutality of […]

Expanding the Rhetorical, Genealogical, and New Materialist Implications of Joshua Ramey’s The Politics of Divination (Joshua Hanan)

The following is part of a series of responses to Joshua Ramey’s book, Politics of Divination.  You can read our interview with Ramey here.  You can read Carl Raschke’s response to Ramey’s work here. Joshua Ramey’s book, The Politics of Divination, is one of the most incisive accounts of neoliberalism currently available to scholars in […]

The Problem With “Christian” Political Theology – It’s Greek, Not Christian (Jonathan Cole)

Christian political theology has a problem, which for want of imagination I dub its “Greek problem.” Michael Walzer highlighted the essence of this problem in his stimulating book In God’s Shadow: Politics in the Hebrew Bible: But there is no political theory in the Bible. Political theory is a Greek invention. Nor is there a […]

Call For Submissions – Drugs And Capitalism

Drugs and spices have long been at the center of global trade, but the concept of “drug” in its modern, Western sense is particularly derived from interactions with cultural “others.”  Thinkers such as Jacques Derrida have written on the ancient Pharmakon and its relationship to signification and sacrifice. As Richard DeGrandpre writes in the opening […]