CRITICAL THEORY | SOCIAL ANALYSIS | POLITICAL PHILOSOPHY AND THEOLOGY
In my previous post, I argued that as a pagan figure, Pan manifests an Edwardian desire to re-enchant England as a critique of the British Empire while also remaining intellectually and culturally elitist. Here I continue to analyze the figure across various texts. J.M. Barrie’s Peter Pan famously comments on the growing disenchantment of children via a […]
In my previous post, I explored the distinction between the state of exception and Maurice Blanchot’s opening remarks from The Writing of the Disaster. I ended pondering some of Blanchot’s remarks on the disaster and forgetfulness with respect to Pan and “panic.” In this post, I want to more explicitly focus on some literary representations […]
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 […]
I ended my first post in this series considering David Scott’s description of the tragic disposition as an obligated action in a world where values are “unstable and ambiguous.” I have been rethinking Horkheimer and Adorno’s Dialectic of Enlightenment with particular attention to the role a conception of the Literary plays in their work because that […]
I am often perplexed, sometimes disturbed, and generally intrigued by the use of Literature in philosophical arguments. While there is a robust tradition of Marxian-influenced material critique within Cultural Studies, the conception of “the Literary” within literary studies also went through its own kind of “secularization” during the latter half of the twentieth-century. In the […]
In this post, I argue that postmodern writer, Raymond Federman’s reluctant commitment to text, his necessity to return to and interrupt narrative and to make text, emphasizing its artificial nature, exhibits a Jewish ethical commitment to resist representation. In doing so, Federman continues longstanding themes in Jewish hermeneutics as well as presenting examples of what […]
Yesterday, an article by Josh Katz and Margot Sanger-Katz in The New York Times drew attention once again to an opioid abuse epidemic in the United States. As they write, the 2017 death rate caused by such abuse is “so steep that they have contributed to reductions in the country’s life expectancy over the last three years, […]
A variety of competing descriptions of ‘whiteness’ making up racist retreats to Romantic imaginaries of Anglo-Saxon identity go at least as far back as Thomas Jefferson. Jefferson had imagined himself in an anti-papal tradition of resisting “the Norman yoke,” installed in with the papal backing of the French invasion of England in 1066, and the […]