Featured Philosophy and critical theory essays
On Not Asking ‘Should I Insert Myself in the Text?’
How should researchers acknowledge their selfhood in their writing? Kate Rossmanith addresses this question as both a compositional and philosophical issue, unpicking the assumptions behind the most common strategies for self-examination.
The Antipodean School
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.
Calling Bullshit
The gimmick, is, therefore, perhaps the aesthetic category that captures the affective experience of life as mediated by the capital relation. The gimmick names the ambivalent judgement by which we come to apprehend the very process through which capitalism reproduces itself, and the abstractions that naturalise that process. When we judge something to be a gimmick, we are experiencing ‘dissatisfaction—mixed, for all this, with fascination—linked to our perception of an object making untrustworthy claims about the saving of time, the reduction of labor, and the expansion of value’.
Philosophy and critical theory
On Not Asking ‘Should I Insert Myself in the Text?’
How should researchers acknowledge their selfhood in their writing? Kate Rossmanith addresses this question as both a compositional and philosophical issue, unpicking the assumptions behind the most common strategies for self-examination.
The Antipodean School
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.
Calling Bullshit
The gimmick, is, therefore, perhaps the aesthetic category that captures the affective experience of life as mediated by the capital relation. The gimmick names the ambivalent judgement by which we come to apprehend the very process through which capitalism reproduces itself, and the abstractions that naturalise that process. When we judge something to be a gimmick, we are experiencing ‘dissatisfaction—mixed, for all this, with fascination—linked to our perception of an object making untrustworthy claims about the saving of time, the reduction of labor, and the expansion of value’.
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.
