Muscovite

An excerpt from “The Book of Unconformities: Speculations on Lost Time”

During the years I was writing this book, my mother began to lose her memory, or, as she often said, she started “getting stupid.” I traveled frequently to London at this time, and on one of these trips visited the house in Belsize Park in which Sigmund Freud spent the ...
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Muscovite

The Enigma of Rescue

On a recent history of The New School for Social Research

The New School for Social Research holds a story of rescue dear. This is the tale of how its co-founder and first president, the economist Alvin Johnson, climbed a mountain of correspondence and paperwork to save scores of German scholars after Nazism’s rise to power in the early 1930s. Johnson ...
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The Enigma of Rescue

Pizza Rat, a Totem of Our Time

Humans, animals, and life in 2015

For a brief moment in late September, New York City had a new celebrity: Pizza Rat. This furry character -- either endearingly repulsive, or repulsively endearing, depending on your sensibility -- appeared in most of our social media feeds after a quick-fingered commuter snapped ...

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Althusserians Anonymous (3)

This post has been revised here: https://publicseminar.org/2016/02/aa/ Let’s look at two famous Althusser essays from the period 1962-1963. Contradiction and Overdetermination’ builds on Althusser’s ‘On the Young Marx’ essay, in deciding against the various Hegelian readings of Marx. Althusser rejects the metaphors of ‘turning Hegel right side-up’, or ‘restoring the rational kernel of ...
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Althusserians Anonymous (3)