Essays

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An unknown philosopher attends a conference, delivers a paper, launches a book: this hardly sounds like a memorable event. But Badiou’s arrival in Sydney was, in some sense, the opening of a remarkable and unlikely chapter in Australian intellectual life.

My daughter is nine weeks old, and I am strong enough to push the pram a short distance. The movement of her limbs as she lies in the pram bassinet is more controlled now, and she turns her head to listen to the sound of passing cars and low-flying cockatoos. Before the move to the suburbs, I used Google Maps’ Street View function to plan how I would leave the house with a pram and return safely. There are no footpaths on my street but if I go on the road to the street beyond, there is a footpath that takes me to the main road, where I find a humble collection of shops – butcher, newsagent, petrol station. I take this route a few times before realising that it is rather dull.

Leila carries a small bag but a lot of troubles.

When we meet at the Community Refugee Welcome Centre on unceded Gadigal land, the intention is to nurture a homely space so that people seeking asylum, especially women and their children can flourish in ways that are safe.

It is Friday afternoon. We gather every week to anchor this place in the practice of love, care and creativity.

These are our tools and they are all we have.

Yes, there are things I should consider—agreements between us, called ‘road rules’ and ‘traffic laws’—but if I disregard them, I can pretend that I’m the queen of my own little castle. So, vroom fucking vroom, baby! Let’s ride. 

Can the analogy between poetry and work help us understand capitalism in the contemporary moment? Is poetry itself a form of work? 

Dostoevsky’s reactionary sleight of hand in psychologising his demonic revolutionaries was to shift the political ground from the social to the individual.

Rurality and mobility are polarities within registers of logic that animate the new worlds of both women. Our protagonist wishes to retain both in the hope of dwelling perpetually in her personal landscape of myths as she journeys through myriad worlds. 

For me birth was illustrative of how becoming parents pegs you to a whole new set of heterosexual gender expectations: there I was, the new mother, left alone to cope through pain and fear; my partner, the father, sent to another room with no information; us now understood to be husband and wife.

Generative AI calls into question much that we think we know about the relationship between writing and the self. Or, to put it more precisely, generative AI surfaces the extent to which language is a set of patterns, ones that though they may be invisible to us, can in fact be recognised by a machine when trained on an unimaginably large corpus.