And Yet It is Round!
Untimely thoughts on Europe, Migration, and the State
Untimely thoughts on Europe, Migration, and the State
As I do every year, I have spent most of this summer on the Italian coast, in the region around the Gulf of Poets. This summer, as soon as I put my head underwater, I am struck by the beauty of the sea: the water is so blue that, at times, it turns violet; there are fish everywhere, sea urchins, sea stars, and seaweeds of such amazing sparkling colors as I have never seen in the region. People around me speak of a “tropicalization of the Mediterranean.” …
Slaves: The Capital that Made Capitalism
A re-post
This post, adapted from a lecture in the team-taught course “Rethinking Capitalism” at The New School for Social Research and first published last year, is being reposted today to provide critical insight into today’s headlines. Slavery was central to the development of the American political economy. Ott reviews the recent scholarship that shows how it came to be that Black lives haven’t mattered. -J.G.
Racialized chattel slaves were the …
The Ethics and Politics of Responsible Belief
On liberalism and faith
Prior to his death in June 2007, Richard Rorty turned his attention to religious belief and its place in the public sphere. Rorty had long been presenting himself as the “village atheist” in the domains both of academic philosophy and public intellectualism: he viewed religious belief as the most pervasive form of false metaphysical comfort, and as a political “conversation stopper” that is ineluctably at odds with the sort of foundationless liberal democracy he championed. But late in his career …
Growing up under Different Skies
Reflections at the Einstein Forum
I stand before you with more questions and contradictions than answers. I have chosen to speak of growing up “under different skies” because that was my destiny. What I don’t know is whether such a biographical accident sheds a very different light on growing up or whether it is more of the same with just greater geographical movement than in most young lives.
When I wrote a quarter of a century ago my intellectual autobiography …
The Mastery of Non-Mastery
A report and reflections from Kobane
As I write, the plug is being pulled on the steady-state.
Violence and tragedy take revenge on humanity through routinization. Sooner or later we become immune.
But is there a reverse process, such as Freud writes about in Beyond the Pleasure Principle, where the nightmare recurs so as to provide the anxiety that would have …
Minding the Gap of “The Great Divide”
A review of the book by Joseph Stiglitz
In the wake of Occupy Wall Street and the anti-austerity protests in Spain, Greece, and elsewhere around the world, economic inequality has emerged as one of the more hotly debated issues in the public sphere. One of the more prominent voices in the discussion is economist Joseph Stiglitz, whose May 2011 Vanity Fair article “Of the 1%, by the 1%, for the 1%” …
Ireland’s Victory for Marriage Equality, Continued
How Irish was it? And how much of a victory?
I very much liked Sinéad Kennedy’s piece on the yes to same-sex marriage in the Irish referendum. I share her sense that the 62% yes vote on May 22 was an impressive progressive victory. At the same time, I strongly agree with her statement, “As a political objective, same-sex marriage sits comfortable with prevailing neoliberal ideology.” I would like to add a few comments …
Another New Kind of Marriage
Has fiscal conservatism found a partner in gay rights?
On Friday, the Supreme Court of the United States issued a decision guaranteeing the right of same-sex couples to marry in every state in the nation. This landmark case concludes just as another marriage is crumbling: the marriage between anti-gay politics and fiscal conservatism.
Since the 1980s, Americans have grown accustomed to a national-level political discourse juxtaposing the buzzwords free markets, small government, and family values ...
