Category Archives: Philosophy

Some thinkers are exciting to disagree with, not only despite how exasperating they are, but maybe because of it. I have whiplash from alternating nodding and head-shaking, reading Richard Rorty, Achieving Our Country. Marginalia from the last three pages: “yes” … Continue reading →

A tradition of self-criticism might be comprehensible only to self-critical individuals who have developed their own capacity for justice through long, painful process of increasingly severe self-criticism and overcoming of personal flaws, mistakes and profound errors of judgment. For those … Continue reading →

We call “nouveau riche” the newly rich who do not know how to be rich gracefully, who clumsily act out how they think rich people are. We need the term “nouveau puissant” for the newly powerful. Nobody knows what it … Continue reading →

Agonistic pluralism is perhaps the most important political concept I’ve learned in the last ten years. It holds that all liberal-democratic political positions are uneasy bundles of internally contradicting principles (or, more accurately, heuristics) which will, inevitably, be interpreted differently … Continue reading →

I got very little from Nietzsche until I learned to read him oppositionally. I had to want urgently to know exactly what he was explaining and what he was implying, not only at the aphorism-level, but the book- and corpus-level, … Continue reading →

“We are losing a fantasy — … — and a person losing a fantasy is a very dangerous person.” — Tim Morton

In Irreductions, Bruno Latour (echoing Lacan?) said “The real resists.” Should we call the reciprocal complement to existentialism resistentialism? We exist, others resist our existence, we resist back, and so on…

We stand on the shoulders of titans, and it is only from that height that we can survey the damage we did. Our current privileged perspective on justice is merely the top layer of layers upon layers of former justice … Continue reading →

If you think being right is a matter of avoiding being wrong, you’ll neglect a more important and more interesting challenge: trying to be even more right than you already are. The deepest religious conversions do not have the structure … Continue reading →

I’ve called my metaphysic a “metaphysic of surprise”. To get what I mean by this, it is helpful to keep in mind the basic terms of my metaphysical conceptualization, which are 1) metaphysical reality versus 2) our understanding of reality … Continue reading →

Magic is wisdom splattering against the inner wall of a philosophy.

Ritual is performed symbol.

Metaphysically, I am a mystic. Ethically, I am, at bottom, and maybe only at bottom, Reform Jewish. Somehow, not exactly epistemologically, I am a Deweyan pragmatist, an Instrumentalist. I suspect I believe epistemology is one huge category mistake. Maybe my … Continue reading →

Some lusts are nothing more than impersonal appetite. Some lusts are nothing less than a profoundly personal drawing into otherness. Was it (only) insatiable greed or was it (also) need to sail over the map’s edges? To reduce the latter … Continue reading →

Of all objects of envy, inspiration is the most enviable. Of all kinds of envy, envy of inspiration is the most damaging, to both the envying and the envied. “If I cannot be the light, let there be no sight.” … Continue reading →