Oblation: Essays, Parables, Paradoxes

FORTHCOMING Summer 2024

Elements of this book, Oblation: Essays, Parables, Paradoxes, defy reason. They do so for good reason. Much of what we do, much of what we think, is oblation: sacrifice, offering, to something or someone. The root of “oblation” is “to draw near” or “to dwell in.” It refers to what is brought unto the altar,[…]

The Angels Won’t Help You

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Published: 12/22/2022

The Angels Won’t Help You is a book about the uniqueness and primacy of help, particularly in relation to care, love, and caritas. It relies heavily on psychoanalytic and philosophical accounts of help and care and finds that help requires the establishment of a real relationship between persons, where help is given and received in[…]

Critique of Fantasy, Vol. 3: The Block of Fame

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Published: 01/14/2021

In The Block of Fame, Edmund Bergler, like the thirteenth fairy in the “Sleeping Beauty,“ uninvited because there wasn’t an extra place setting, crashes the psychoanalytic poetics of daydreaming with a curse. He charges that the overview, according to which art making rarefies daydreaming and delivers omnipotence, overlooks the underlying defense contract. We are hooked[…]

Paris Bride: A Modernist Life

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Published: 02/21/2020

In July 1905, in Paris, a young Anglo-French woman called Marie Wheeler became the bride of a Swiss émigré, Johannes Schad. Immediately after the wedding, Marie and Johannes moved to London. And there they lived for nineteen years. In 1924, however, something happened to change their lives, and Marie, in many respects, simply disappeared. Paris[…]

Misinterest: Essays, Pensées, and Dreams

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Published: 06/27/2019

The term “interest” lacks a precise antonym. In English, we have “disinterested” and “uninteresting,” but we want for a term that denotes robust opposition to interest. The same appears to hold true in every other language (as far as we know). Interest’s missing antonym reflects not merely a widespread lexical oversight, but a misrecognition of[…]

Philosophy for Militants

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Published: 03/15/2017

My thinking is related to theology as blotting pad is related to ink. It is saturated with it. Were one to go by the blotter, however, nothing of what is written would remain. ~ Walter Benjamin “No longer imminent, the End is immanent.” “Ends are ends,” Frank Kermode goes on to clarify, “only when they[…]

Kill Boxes: Facing the Legacy of US-Sponsored Torture, Indefinite Detention, and Drone Warfare

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Published: 03/02/2017

Kill Boxes addresses the legacy of US-sponsored torture, indefinite detention, and drone warfare by deciphering the shocks of recognition that humanistic and artistic responses to violence bring to consciousness if readers and viewers have eyes to face them. Beginning with an analysis of the ways in which the hooded man from Abu Ghraib became iconic,[…]

The Funambulist Pamphlets 11: Cinema

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Published: 02/20/2015

The Funambulist Pamphlets is a series of small books archiving articles published on The Funambulist, collected according to specific themes. These volumes propose a different articulation of texts than the usual chronological one. The eleven volumes are respectively dedicated to Spinoza, Foucault, Deleuze, Legal Theory, Occupy Wall Street, Palestine, Cruel Designs, Arakawa + Madeline Gins,[…]