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Nowhere did I witness the guardsmen at the gates of the mind — those responsible for self-consciousness and self-doubt — more swiftly outsmarted, pacified, or outright killed than in that room. And the children seemed to inherently grasp the complex psychodramatic relationship they shared with their dummies — they were not sidekick, nor instrument, nor prop, but extension of brain and self.

As Sheehi recently argued, “It will be the university that enacts the violence of fascism. The fascist just sends off a letter. ” To this story we can add the psychoanalyst, who also seems all too willing to post. The university and its thinkers, and mainstream psychoanalysis and its analysts, have extended the Palestine Exception into the hollowed-out zones of purported free speech on the one hand and free association on the other.

You were an organic intellectual if you were an intellectual who organized. That was news to me.

Postcommunist Romania is manifestly a postcensorship society, a society in which everything is permissible and therefore explicit, lurid, cheap. Watching Bad Luck Banging, a film as pornographic as the society it critiques, it feels as if every line or image is a double entendre, even as the fucking is right there in front of us.

This is how Amel is remembered today: charismatic, courageous, defiant. Walking in Beirut’s Hamra neighborhood, you’ll likely encounter a stenciled image of Amel’s face, looking out with a beaming smile, with graffiti urging passersby to read his work. As a friend once remarked to me, the combination of Amel’s martyrdom and his difficult prose makes him a perfect object for cultish fervor. But the renewed interest in his work — in the streets, in movement spaces, in academia — is real and widespread.

For years now, commentators like Mounk have singled out the Democrats’ alleged fealty to “wokeness” as the reason for their electoral underperformance. Never mind that no nationally visible Democratic politician actually uses abolitionist jargon or gender-fluid pronouns; unlike the economic pain felt by a plurality of voters, the wokeness backlash really is mostly vibes.

George Floyd’s murder made being black at the university significantly worse. When I try to understand how, I can’t help but look back on the chancellor’s words, ostensibly full of hope that the “national crisis” could “catalyze powerful change” — and how those words did nothing. After all, the scholars and writers I’m drawn to are in the business of shedding light on linguistic and other structures that pretend to be something that they are not.

What is the tone of this literary-theoretical tone? Take away anything from reading these books together and it’s their similar vibe: something quietly persistent, invested in its own disinvestments, obsessive rather than obsessed; something that can’t notice without feeling implicated in what’s been noticed and so isn’t prone to anger. Hard as it is to wrap one’s hands around the vaporousness of tone, I’d still risk a label. The tone of the moment, if you take these books as a guide, is a habitual mordancy.

What does it mean to live in an era whose only good feelings come from coining names for the era ? On one hand, perhaps our surfeit of coinages, many inspired by various resurgent Marxian traditions, suggests an intellectual ecosystem in which, as Jameson wrote, “everyone” — well, not Brooks — “is a Marxist and understands the dynamics and the depredations of capitalism, ” albeit “without feeling it possible to do anything about them. ” What the left lacks in organization we make up for in analysis .  .  . surely a good sign?

In a majority-homeowner nation, the rental crisis alone cannot explain Harris’s defeat, especially since the concentration of renters in cities means that as a group they likely still tilted toward her. But the demographic overlap between tenants and those who moved away from Harris cannot be ignored. Moreover, the failure to adequately address the housing crisis exemplifies the fecklessness that doomed Harris’s campaign. Any effort to challenge Trump and the reactionary forces he spearheads must not make the same mistake.

By themselves, strong growth and low unemployment cannot wash away social divisions, any more than they can empower labor enough to substantively increase wages, to say nothing of raising the labor share of national income. The left must not be cowed into a narrow politics of income inequality and redistribution; it must look further, toward democratic control of capital itself.

Some of Trump’s voters—namely the rich and the superrich—will get exactly what they wanted out of the deal. Most will not.

As with any object under scientific investigation, theorizing philosophy scientifically requires locating its borders, which can only be accomplished by recognizing what is beyond and outside it—that is, what is non-philosophy.

The Grand Hyatt may have been achieved through blackmail, but once Trump and his enablers set the precedent, it became the paradigm still practiced in this city and many others. In the 1970s cities needed money, and rather than pursuing revenue by taxing the rich, many mayors—sometimes grudgingly, sometimes enthusiastically—embraced the idea that it would be better not to tax them outright, and instead inaugurate a race to the bottom between cities for who could create the climate most friendly to the rich .