CRITICAL THEORY | SOCIAL ANALYSIS | POLITICAL PHILOSOPHY AND THEOLOGY
A recent article in The New York Times by anthropologist Bruce Alpert relays the story of a fifteen-year-old Yanomami boy, Alvaney Xirixana, who died from Covid-19 earlier this month. He notes that part of the disaster that the Yanomami and other Indigenous Peoples comes from “the absurd negligence of local health services,” and that multiple […]
The Great Global Covid-19 Pandemic has functioned in recent weeks as a gigantic, media-tinged Rorschacht ink blot upon which anyone and everyone is invited to project both their deepest political fears and their most cherished fantasies. That the effects of the pandemic are totally unprecedented, at least for modern times, is something of an understatement. […]
Oedipal Disease A plague has befallen the city. It is the nature of any sickness to reveal what lies hidden under one’s body. For through its symptoms the sickness manifests what has remained invisible, hidden inside the body—or, to be precise, because it is hidden by the body. It is the sick body that allows […]
The very idea of divine judgement expressed in natural disasters seems outdated and, at the least, unpleasant to us. There are three basic reasons for this: science, ethics and theology. Thanks to modern science we have a pretty clear idea about the natural causes of droughts, floods and other disasters. We no longer think of […]