Unemployed Negativity

I will admit from the beginning that I am not a Lacanian. I am minimally competent in Lacan. I have read him, sure, the selections from Ecri...

For the past few summers it seems that every blockbuster film has made some kind of oblique and often lazy reference to the "war on te...

In honor of the recent disruptions, almost a month since the last entry, I have decided to write some remarks on Love and Other Technologie...

Last week I happened to see two (relatively mainstream) movies that referenced Marx in some way. The first was the delirious Southland Tales...

I am currently teaching a class on the introduction to political and social theory. One of themes that I have been focusing on as of late i...

The last few entries on this blog have been notebook entries, the half formulated conceptual connections that used to belong in my little n...

There are several lines from Hegel that are not only cited often, but also modified to become the basis for new statements. I am thinking of...

For a bit of irony I should start with a confession; as I have indicated in my discussion of Lazzarato below, I have little or no patience f...

The following quote from Althusser is one that I am quite fond of, and have cited, or at least referred to, more than once: I claimed tha...

Every philosophical library, public or private, has to deal with the unstable division between “primary” and “secondary” literature. At what...

For Christmas this year I got a t-shirt that reads: “Movies: Ruining the Book Since 1920.” I am not sure if always agree with the sent...

Roland Barthes supposedly wrote “Those who do not reread are doomed to read the same thing over and over again.” I have always liked this ...

This evening, while in the midst of trying to do some actual work, my mind wandered to a presentation I gave years ago; so naturally I stop...

Illustration by Ben Gibson, from The Brief and Frightening Reign of Phil by George Saunders . On Wednesday I stepped out of my little ...

I have been nagging myself to write something, anything, on this blog for days now. Between grading, conferences, travel, and all the other ...

Image from Hugo Gellert " Karl Marx's Capital in Lithographs" For brevity’s sake, I am not going to go through the myriad pr...

In a few seconds of idly cruising the web I found out that Lance Hahn died. I have not listened to J Church or Cringer for a long while, a...

As I have mentioned earlier, I used to work in an animal shelter and continue to volunteer at one. It is because of this, and a long and ve...