The End of the Beginning by Douglas Penick

It is difficult to bid farewell to Gamal al-Ghitani: a friend, an author, a true Cairene who taught us how to read and admire our history, walk in our cities, feel the power of narrative, and stand in awe of its literal and allegorical significations.

On the train, out in the fields, I was among the only people whose 4G connection was working, and so I became an information-relay station for frightened Italian vacationers and Parisian students returning home to their families.

Long ago, when the Universality of a ‘Western Empire’ was both the premise and the purpose of political strategy the West’s identity was born.

A response — Bartleby’s response — foregrounding the fact that it is the “I” that “prefers not to”: not that ‘I cannot’ nor ‘I will not’ but that this is a preference.

For Wayne, a more authentic anti-bourgeois understanding of Kant will emerge once we place aesthetic experience back at the heart of the critical project, allowing us to reframe broader political issues of freedom, community, reification and the spectacle.

Philosophy is typically depicted as a solitary activity conducted in remote natural settings — a hut next to a fjord, a clearing in the middle of a forest, a cave on the slope of a mountain, or, these days, a rocking chair on a porch in a quaint college...

I try not to weigh in on ephemeral online outrages, but there's one thing I just can't resist the urge to bring up in connection with the recent flare of fascination with Rachel Dolezal's inner life and its outer expression.

Our current system of credit-based capitalism entails not only the material, but the social, moral, and affective estrangement of its subjects. Is there a way out?

The key figures are Cardinal Richelieu and Chancellor Séguier, and Foucault thinks it is important that he can discern the “first great deployment of the ‘arms’ of the State independent of the person of the King”.

The old believe everything: the middle-aged suspect everything: the young know everything.