Featured Philosophy and critical theory essays
The Sea That We Swim In
For those of us on the left who want to shift how we do politics, we have to get clearer on what liberalism looks like, how it is rationalised, and how everyone is implicated, to differing degrees and effects. More than just ‘clarifying misconceptions’, we have to identify and unlearn the liberalism that runs through our lives.
Empire of Dissent
Is it possible to write a collective review of Insurgent Empire across the lines of colour and colonialism in our group? Perhaps, but this is not our agenda here. What we offer instead is a suite of vignettes that reflect on how we, a group of readers interested in understanding place and race, came together to think about the ideas in Insurgent Empire.
Philosophy and critical theory
The Sea That We Swim In
For those of us on the left who want to shift how we do politics, we have to get clearer on what liberalism looks like, how it is rationalised, and how everyone is implicated, to differing degrees and effects. More than just ‘clarifying misconceptions’, we have to identify and unlearn the liberalism that runs through our lives.
Empire of Dissent
Is it possible to write a collective review of Insurgent Empire across the lines of colour and colonialism in our group? Perhaps, but this is not our agenda here. What we offer instead is a suite of vignettes that reflect on how we, a group of readers interested in understanding place and race, came together to think about the ideas in Insurgent Empire.
Always Incomplete: A Mixtape after Moten and Harney
We continue to study and dance and sing and eat in order that we might remind each other of our own incompleteness and continue to assemble again and again and again. Or we make a mixtape so that we might feel the intensity of pleasure, and in doing so find our way back to the principle of incompletion – a small reminder that undercommon sociality cannot be stilled by enclosure of flesh and land that is the imposition of private property.
Philosophy in Troublous Times
I started composing this review during the peak of the bushfires in January. I returned to complete it as the coronavirus pandemic settled into its critical phase. The globalising, unifying elements of such crises are palpable, and resonate with Hägglund’s focus on fragility as an ineliminable element of political effort, just as it is for life as such. And yet his universal philosophy betrays a startling parochialism in the way it apportions which routes of anti-capitalism are viable and which aren’t.