Blake Smith, An Unlikely Intellectual Convergence, City Journal, October 20, 2021 Christopher Lasch and Michel Foucault told a similar story about the modern obsession with identity—and its dangers. Christopher Lasch and Michel Foucault are rarely read side by side. Yet the two thinkers praised each other’s work, recognizing themselves as involved in a common project. …
Michael C. Behrent, The True Foucault Dissent Magazine, September 30, 2021 The issues most important to Michel Foucault have moved from the margins to become major preoccupations of political life. But what did Foucault actually teach?, Suddenly, it seems, everyone has a lot to say about Michel Foucault. And much of it isn’t pretty. After …
Five intellectual fashion statements from history that anticipated today’s dark academia trend, The Conversation, UK September 17, 2021 Writing with a quill pen dipped in ink, sitting in the flickering of candlelight in a book-lined study, and vintage tweed paired with knitted jumpers and brogues have all become the height of fashion for autumn 2021. …
Richard Seymour, How postmodernism became the universal scapegoat of the era New Statesman, 24 June 2021 In the slew of rightist culture-war bogeymen, from “cultural Marxism” to “critical race theory”, one of the most surprising candidates for obloquy is postmodernism. In December 2020, the women and equalities minister Liz Truss bewailed “postmodernist philosophy – pioneered …
Geoff Shullenberger, How We Forgot Foucault, American Affairs, Vol V no.2, Summer 2021 Late last year, British trade minister Liz Truss caused a stir with a speech that pinned the failures of the British education system on “postmodernist philosophy,” which, she said, “puts societal power structures and labels ahead of individuals and their endeavours.” Due …
Julian Castronovo, Palantir’s Picture of Michel Foucault, or How to “Discipline and Punish” Brooklyn Rail, May 2021 The new all-seeing overlords have read the theory. There is a bewildering photograph in a recent New York Times Magazine article on the controversial and secretive tech company Palantir. The scene is this: four figures appear at the …
Byung-Chul Han, The Tiredness Virus. The Nation, April 12, 2021 Covid-19 has driven us into a collective fatigue. Covid-19 is a mirror that reflects back to us the crises in our society. It renders more visible the pathological symptoms that already existed before the pandemic. One of these symptoms is tiredness. We all somehow feel …
The Repressive Politics of Emotional Intelligence. By Merve Emre, The New Yorker, April 12, 2021 Daniel Goleman’s pop-psychology blockbuster, now twenty-five years old, turned self-control into a corporate management tool. […] It is a vision of personal freedom achieved, paradoxically, through constant self-regulation. “Emotional Intelligence” imagines a world constituted of little more than a series …
The Public Intellectual Series So Far, Cassandra Voices David Langwallner, November 7 2020 The Public Intellectual Series offers inter-disciplinary journalism, focusing on relevant authors and subject-matters crucial to negotiating our current age of extremes. We avoid specialisation, demystifying topics to provide readers with access to a broad view on contemporary challenges. Our aim is to …
Kyriaki Papageorgiou, Humanity, Technology And The Pandemic Crisis, Forbes, Jun 10, 2020. The speed and scale with which Covid-19 has spread over the course of just a few months are reconfiguring the way we think and act alongside technology to tackle grand challenges in times of crisis. Since being forced to move our lives indoors …
