Somebody, for the love of God, please make it stop. Once again, the New York Times has given us embarrasingly reductive, bordering on cartoonish and condescending, reportage about Memphis politics. This time, it’s an article provocatively entitled “Black Candidate Brings Race Into a Primary in Memphis.” (I’m shocked that they were able to refrain from…
Read MoreJust today, I posted a solicitation for book recommendations as my Facebook status. I asked for fiction recs– proscribing Stieg Larsson in advance — and almost immediately received a host of literary endorsements from my many bibliophile friends (and, a pleasant surprise, from my students as well). I was happy to see that most of…
Read MoreIf you’ve been stuck under a rock for the last couple of years, you may not be aware that vampires are all the rage right now. Since I’m not a huge fan of scary movies, scary monsters, or scary things in general, I’ve managed to sidestep any real exposure to the recent vampiremania, though a…
Read More“What’s the most resilient parasite? An idea.” — Dominic Cobb, protagonist in Inception If you buy the basic premise of the new film Inception, most of our ideas (perhaps all of them) begin deeply in our subconscious, in our dreams. There, they are born and grow, fertilized and fed in a world in which they…
Read MoreI’m not ashamed to admit that philosophers can be quite persnickety in our insistence upon precision in language. Much of what we do, after all, involves precisely defining things, concepts, meanings, values, processes, systems, states of being and the like. That’s not to say that we are actually settled on precise definitions for everything; in…
Read MoreFrom his most recent novel, Diary of a Bad Year (Viking, 2007, p.3), J.M. Coetzee’s chief narrator, Señor C, speculates: Every account of the origins of the state starts from the premise that “we”– not we the readers but some generic we so wide as to exclude no one– participate in its coming into being….
Read MoreEarlier this week, the International Criminal Court (ICC) issued its second arrest warrant for the President of Sudan, Omar al-Bashir, for war crimes and crimes against humanity committed on his watch in the course of the ongoing conflict in Darfur. Included in the charges against Bashir is the crime of genocide, which the ICC claims…
Read MoreFrom The Origins of Totalitarianism (Harcourt/HBJ, 1979, p. 295-6), Hannah Arendt tracks the coincidence of statelessness and rightlessness: The calamity of the rightless is not that they are deprived of life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness, or of equality before the law and freedom of opinion– formulas which were designed to solve problems within…
Read MoreAs many of you know, I was a tad bit obsessed with a certain theory in robotics known as “the uncanny valley” several months back. I even delivered a philosophy paper this past Spring using the uncanny valley as one way of explaining our aversion to racial passing. (You can read my series of posts…
Read MoreIn State of Exception (University of Chicago Press, 2003, p.86-7), Giorgio Agamben writes:The aim of this investigation– in the urgency of the state of exception “in which we live”– was to bring to light the fiction that governs this arcanum imperii [secret of power] par excellence of our time. What the “ark” of power contains…
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