April 1, 2023

Critical Conversations 8 – Theory In Action: The Art Of “Doing” Theory With Jonathan Fardy (Announcement)

Participants are invited to join us live in the eighth of a monthly series of “Critical Conversations” (Zoom webinars) with eminent scholars from around the globe. If you are interested in joining us, please contact us by email at editor.thenewpolis@gmail.com. If you have not participated in previous seminars, please provide us with a brief sentence or two […]

A Gloss On ‘Political Theology’ And The Psychedelic Nature of Recent Political Unrest (Roger Green)

What follows updates some excerpts from my book, A Transatlantic Political Theology of Psychedelic Aesthetics (Palgrave 2019). Related excerpts may also be found with respect to Walter Benjamin in The Journal For Cultural and Religious Theory. Preparing for our Critical Conversation next week on An American Indian Critique of Sovereignty, a colleague who’s been to several of […]

Literary Conversations 2 – Jennifer Denrow and Mathias Svalina (Roger Green)

Jennifer Denrow is the author of California (Four Way Books, 2011). Her chapbooks include How We Know it is That (Horse Less Press, 2014) and From California, On (Brave Men Press, 2012). Her writing has appeared in journals such as Gulf Coast, jubilat, Alaska Quarterly Review, Octopus, and Poets.Org. She holds a PhD in English from the University of Denver and is […]

Anne Waldman’s A Dark Flower For The End Times (Roger Green)

In times of crisis, we turn to art. Today, Meep Records in Denver has released A Dark Flower For The End Times. This week, as many of us sit at home amid an international pandemic, we at The New Polis invite you to listen to Waldman’s words commenting on our times. Anne Waldman w/ Roger […]

“No Women Amongst Us” – Bare Life, Violence, And Gender in Byzantium (Jared Lacy)

 Neil Jordan’s film Byzantium (2012), which tells the story of a pair of mother/daughter vampires on the run from a male-only secret society of vampires known as Brotherhood, has been widely read as a feminist approach to the literary convention of the vampire.  The depiction of female vampires that are neither villainized for a predatory relationships to men, […]

The Dialectic Of Enlightenment From A Postsecular Lens, Part 3 (Roger Green)

In my previous post, I took a turn from direct analysis of Dialectic of Enlightenment to engage with David Scott’s writing on tragic disposition in Conscripts of Modernity.  I then focused on Emmanuel Levinas’s early essay, “Reality and Its Shadow.”  I merged Levinas’s pessimism concerning art and his call for a distinctive kind of criticism with […]

Althusser And Baudelaire: Flânerial And Utopian Theory (Jonathan Fardy)

This essay sprang from an effort to understand one of the more obscure passages in Louis Althusser’s contribution to Reading Capital of 1965. Althusser’s commitment to anti-humanism – inaugurated by Marx according to Althusser – demanded a new concept of theoretical production voided of the humanist concept of the subject (qua consciousness). I argue that this […]