Brothers Abdullah (L) and Umut Tagi, winners of the national Best Herring award. Leiden, Netherlands, 2012 by Markha Valenta The accounts, symbols and feelings that we have about national identity were largely imagined, created and popularized in the nineteenth century. The word ‘nationalism’ itself dates from the early nineteenth century and marked the increasing use…
Read MorePostcard of Wimbourne, Dorset, c.1930 From The Glass Half Empty: This is intended to be a conservation book with a difference. While most others concentrate on the gloom and doom, my aim is to explore the glimmers of good news. ere is no doubt that nature is in grave trouble and that time is fast…
Read MoreTristan Garcia by Graham Harman The French philosopher and novelist Tristan Garcia was born in Toulouse in 1981. This makes him rather young to have written such an imaginative work of systematic philosophy as Forme et objet,1 the latest entry in the MétaphysiqueS series at Presses universitaires de France. But this reference to Garcia’s youthfulness…
Read Moreby Rachel O’Dwyer and Linda Doyle Introduction In The New Socialism: Global Collectivist Society is Coming Online, editor of Wired magazine Kevin Kelly (2009) argues that the collaborative cultures emerging around web 2.0 platforms cultivate a “digital socialism”, with broad political and economic implications for the producers of online culture. Kelly, alongside others, sees the…
Read MoreJosiah Ober Josiah Ober is a classicist and political theorist at Stanford University, and his work on ancient Greek democracy is widely read in both disciplines. The Art of Theory recently spoke with him about Athens, democracy, and fly-fishing. The Art of Theory What prompted your interest in classics? Josiah Ober I attended a troubled,…
Read MoreTheory graffiti tags by Kenneth Reinhard [In this talk, I am drawing largely on the work of Alain Badiou, Slavoj Žižek, Ernesto Laclau. In particular, I am guided by Badiou’s essays “Philosophy and Desire,” “Eight Theses on the Universal,” and his books Saint Paul: The Foundation of Universalism and Being and Event. Žižek’s work, from…
Read Moreby Legacy Russell Poet Richard Siken begins his “Dirty Valentine” [1] by confessing, “There are so many things I’m not allowed to tell you. / I touch myself, I dream.” I do, too. We live in a confessional culture wherein the most detailed minutiae of everyday life is splayed out via the platform of social…
Read MoreParis Commune, 1871 by Jonathan Moses Rebel Cities: From the Right to the City to the Urban Revolution, by David Harvey, Verso, 206 pp. It would be impossible to cover here the range of ideas in Harvey’s recent book, Rebel Cities, but it is worth considering one of its key themes: how might the city,…
Read Moreby Paul van der Stap and Elisa Veini, Titojoe Documentaries Chengdu, 2011 2012, the Year of the Dragon, started in China with a clear message from the state: Chinese people should consume more. In the coming year, they should buy more luxury consumer goods in order to help boost the Chinese economy. The Year of…
Read Moreby Paul van der Stap and Elisa Veini, Titojoe Documentaries Chongqing, 2011 Until recently it has been said that the Chinese do not have a word for loneliness. China remains the promised land of the group. Family, classmates or colleagues, the village, and other more or less involuntary groups are the decision makers for who…
Read Moreby Travis White-Schwoch and David N. Rapp Reading Watchmen: A cognitive perspective In the opening sequence of Watchmen, by Alan Moore and Dave Gibbons (1986-1987), a disheveled man wanders the streets of New York, carrying a sign warning of the end of the world. He steps through puddles on the sidewalk, while a blood-stained smiley…
Read MoreCrescent Nebula and the Soap Bubble, photograph by Adam Evans by David Beer Bubbles: Spheres I by Peter Sloterdijk, translated by Wieland Hoban, Semiotext(e), Los Angeles, 663 pp. According to Peter Sloterdijk, ‘[a]s a nobject, the vulva is the mother of granite’ (302). Where should we start with a statement like that? Indeed, the question…
Read MoreEarly vaudeville photo from the collection of Bob Bragman, as featured in the San Francisco Chronicle by Peggy Nelson Short attention span theater is hardly the new kid on the block. In the vaudeville era, an act was viable if it could manage to keep the audience’s attention for three minutes. Three minutes! That’s a…
Read Moreby Legacy Russell They killed our dog. It was December. I was in the garage. I was hiding. I hate to admit it, but I was hiding next to the goddamn freezer. It was propped open: the freezer. We had won the local sweepstake at the school pre-Christmas fundraiser and they had given us some…
Read MoreThe Library of Babel, Eric Desmazieres by Sheila Cavanagh It’s no secret that times are tough for scholars in the humanities. Jobs are scarce, resources are stretched, and institutions of tertiary education are facing untold challenges. Those of us fortunate enough to hold tenured positions at financially stable colleges and universities may be the last…
Read MoreMarianne Moore throwing a pitch, 1968 From Poetry: She has no heirs. She has several epigones but their detail-laden lacquered ships for me don’t float. She flares singular, exemplary, a diamond absolute the American East forged in a pressure chamber we have yet fully to excavate. It is said that, for all her formality, Marianne…
Read MoreJane Gallop by Natalie S. Loveless 1. Anecdotalizing Theory I always try to get us to that place where learning begins to dance. [2] The anecdote is a slippery knowledge maker, its politics suspect. On the one hand, it claims the authority of the first person, of presence. But this “I was there” aspect of…
Read MoreAdvertisement for Olivetti Typewriters, illustrated by Ernesto Pirovano From The Chronicle of Higher Education: Is the time spent reviewing other people’s books more important than writing your own stuff, making your own contributions? One of my graduate-student friends has published a number of book reviews, the assignments often passed along by his adviser and other…
Read Moreby Dan Arnold In the fraught and often vacuous discourse on religion vis-à-vis science, cognitive-scientific research has recently come to have especially high profile significance. In academic religious studies, such research has perhaps most often been enlisted to support reductionist accounts of human religiousness, with books like Pascal Boyer’s Religion Explained typically purporting to show…
Read MoreIllustration by DonkeyHotey by A. Staley Groves I admit a smile crossed my face when I read Breitbart was rushed to the Ronald Reagan UCLA Medical Center and pronounced dead. Not because his children would lose a father, nor his wife a husband. Rather that the iconoclastic boy-warrior was welcomed into eternity in no other…
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