Hannah Arendt, The Man of Action, and She Who Watches
This piece is based on the experiences of Jane Kinzler when she was a student at Barnard College in 1967. We spoke several times, expanding upon her account, uncovering more details, before she passed away from cancer in November 2015. JJ (John Jacobs) was famous as a fiery campus radical ...
Libidinal Ecology: Sex and the Anthropocene (II)
The May 2015 issue of National Geographic features an article entitled, “Quest for a Superbee.” This piece is illustrated by a series of extreme photographic close-ups of bees with pieces of technology attached to their bodies. One caption reads: “A syringe places a minute droplet of phenotrin on ...
Ecology, Security, and the Death of Liberal Democracy
In a recent episode of the FX series Fargo, Minnesota Sheriff Lou Solverson answers a key witness’s refusal to accept police protection from a local crime syndicate by recounting his experience in Vietnam: “There’s a look a boy gets when he’s been shot, or a landmine takes off ...
Blog-Post for Cyborgs
On Donna Haraway
On the Academic Calls to Boycott Israel, Part III
The Jewish Question and the debate over the Israeli academy
The “Jewish Question” was defined in turn of the century Europe as a question about the manner and degree to which Jewish difference was compatible with the ideals of European modernity (Librett 2014) as well as with political projects that took shape with and against its geopolitical contexts (Bauer ...
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 ...
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 ...