This coming Thursday I will be starting a reading series on Freud's Beyond the Pleasure Principle (1920). I will host this series via Zoom on Thursday nights starting September 24th. We will read the text closely and reference Lacan's work throughout the series. On our first night, we will consider the famous "fort-da" game that …
Continue reading "Announcing New Beyond the Pleasure Principle – Reading Series"
My review essay of Domenico Losurdo's groundbreaking work on Nietzsche has been published.
Here's a new review essay on German Marxist philosopher Ernst Bloch and his intriguing book Avicenna and the Aristotelian Left. It's long been an interest of mine to put the Marxist tradition into dialogue with Islamic thought so naturally such a text is of profound interest to me. Give the piece a read here and …
Continue reading "The Materialism of Warm-Stream Marxism: Ernst Bloch on Ibn Sina"
I'm pleased to share an article I wrote based on a talk I offered to the Lacanian Forum of Washington, DC earlier this month. The editors at Everyday Analysis have provided some really useful edits to this piece. You can read "The Subject Supposed to Rebel" here.
Readers of this blog are invited to join me and my good friend Gabriel Tupinambá for a facilitated reading group on one of the most important Marxist philosophers of our time, Kojin Karatani and his work The Structure of World History: From Modes of Production to Modes of Exchange. This reading group will include six …
Continue reading "Reading Kojin Karatani’s The Structure of World History"
In light of the 2020 uprisings sparked by the murder of George Floyd taking place across America, I want to share an excerpt of a longer interview on riots and protests I conducted with the philosopher Alain Badiou in 2013. This excerpt concerns Badiou's definition of what a militant subject is today, that is, how …
Continue reading "Political emancipation and representation – Interview with Alain Badiou"
Readers may remember my references to the thought of Sylvain Lazarus over the years, including my piece on his Anthropology of the Name. I'm pleased to invite you to join me for a reading circle on Lazarus's thought starting on May 9th and concluding with a plenary event on May 30th featuring different papers on …
Continue reading "Socialists Think: Study Group on the Thought of Sylvain Lazarus"
A scholar of Rumi once told me that if Rumi had never met Shams he would have never found the pearl of deep spiritual insight. The function of Shams was that he possessed a certain knowledge, but Shams lacked the means to retrieve this knowledge and bring it up from the deep to allow it …
The traditional year-end inventory of my year in reading. Lists may be clichéd, but they really help me take a breath of air and look out on my intellectual projects and track where I am headed. This year I added the category of "best secondary literature and essays." If you want any of these essays …
Lacan has remarked that modesty is the most important virtue. Lacan thinks modesty as an affect that keeps one’s desire or symptom protected behind a veil. Yet when the veil is lifted through the gaze of the other, the subject undergoes shame. Where there is shame, the extimate part of one’s being, precisely their desire is exposed to the other. Shame thus awakens the subject to being riveted to oneself, to a foreign self inside oneself.
Todd Phillip's Joker is a film about class war in utero. The film sets the stage for a coming political world in which the class war in Gotham has been named and elevated to the undeniable antagonism that situates the injustice of society. The film is also a psychobiography of an antihero's journey into this …
With increasing interest in new forms of Marxism, the philosophical origins of Marx’s thought have been a topic of important debate with many studies locating Marx’s early thought in Christian theology. The early Marx often reads like a quasi-theologian when he discusses ideas of universality and the emancipation of the proletariat. But does Marx’s early …
Continue reading "On Kołakowski and the Neoplatonic Pre-History of Marxism"
I have a long essay up on socialism, liberalism and solidarity for the great working class think tank The Hampton Institute. Please give it a read here. The piece is entitled "Overcoming Liberalism from Within: On American Socialism and Solidarity."
It's time to restore a tradition on this blog: the classic year-end best books list. 2018 has been a fairly significant year for my research and reading. As you will see below, my primary concerns orbit around political economy, psychoanalysis, the history of Marxist thought, the Black Radical Tradition, the theological genealogy of socialist thought, …
The following is an interview I conducted with Lacanian psychoanalyst Thomas Svolos for The New Polis where I serve as Contributing Editor.
The great European Marxist saw in American philosophy a form of thinking that refused speculative thought and that presented a form of reason adjusted to exploitation of the status quo. The confluence of American philosophy produced a most insidious form of idealism.
In the 1960’s, capital valuation cycles occurred in an average of three-year cycles. Capital would hang around in one place for an average of three years. But by the 1990’s, capital valuation cycles were reduced to just three months. This hyper financialization of capital produced a highly unstable worker, and with it the rise of …
Continue reading "The Death of Storytelling and the Rise of Myth"
Arne De Boever's book Finance Fictions: Realism and Psychosis in a Time of Economic Crisis is not providing a new psychoanalytic analysis of psychosis, which I immediately thought it might offer. But it is an important contribution to what is now a steadily growing sub-literature within contemporary philosophy and theory on the topic of the market and finance. …
Continue reading "Is the Stock Market a “Camp”? Towards a Cosmic Politics "
Next month, I will teach a class for inmates in the DC jail as part of the JCI Prison Scholars Program. I'll most definitely plan to write about the class. Here is the syllabus for the course. Key Themes in Social and Political Thought JCI Prison Scholars Program, May – July 2018 In this course, …
I'm giving a lecture at St. John Fisher University in Rochester, NY called “Dissolving the I in the We: Love and the Problem of Community.” This lecture is a part of the annual St. Thomas More lecture series in ethics. I plan to address the theme of community and look more specifically at the function and …
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