Poverty and Politics: Bolsonaro, Neoliberalism’s Authoritarian Alternative, and the Ongoing Assault on Democracy in Brazil

As the struggle against the authoritarian neoliberal regime continues to unfold, the actions of the organized labor-left in general, and the PT in particular, will be pivotal for constructing an opposition capable of defeating right-wing neoliberal authoritarianism. The heightened quality of the political conflict ahead will also challenge the way in which left and progressive forces perceive and develop political action, demanding a left capable of organizing and mobilizing resistance in multiple (institutional and non-institutional) spheres of politics simultaneously.

Ben Lerner’s Theater of Dissent

Ben Lerner’s second Adam Gordon novel, The Topeka School, offers both a genealogy of right-wing political speech and, presumably, an alternative. But insofar as the novel’s politics culminate in political theater, that alternative is reduced to the politics of the status quo. The Topeka School, and those critics for whom its success rises or falls on its ability to provoke aesthetic experience, conflate political experience and political action. While no work of art is likely to do the work of dismantling structures of inequality for us, the work of art that asserts its irreducibility to the “inflexible laws” of the political status quo, and our experiences of it, might provide a new way of seeing or imagining it together—something that the attention to aesthetic and political experience alone cannot do.

Deneocolonize Your Syllabus

It hardly needs saying that the term “decolonize” once meant something wholly different than it does now. To put it not a little too bluntly, in the heyday of the anticolonial movement it was the colonies and the colonized that needed decolonizing, not the colonizers, but now even that need, as we like to say, has been “colonized.” Of course we understand that the “decolonize” in the slogan “decolonize your syllabus” is metaphorical, that it means diversify or “decenter” (as we also like to say), but that does little to allay the fact that, formally, rhetorically, it collapses the distinction between colonizer and colonized. Sometimes, decentering oneself and one’s syllabi means little more than absolving oneself of accountability for the colonial past. Just to give it a name, we might call this phenomenon “colonial narcissism.”

Why You Might Want to Pay Attention to Autonomy: Response to José Eduardo González

The Vanishing Frame began as an attempt to understand the origins and consequences of a postdictatorial reality that was emerging in Latin America during the 1980s and 1990s, one that centered on the commitment to human rights as the primary position through which the Left articulated the concept of injustice and how to confront it. This political reality was as much a consequence of the state that inflicted abuses on its citizens as it was the upshot of international solidarity movements that sought to address and bear witness to these abuses.

I Pay No Attention: Autonomy and Latin Americanism in The Vanishing Frame

Many of us are familiar with the ending of Jorge Luis Borges’s “Tlön, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius,” in which the world is being taken over by a man-made universe turned real, in a now too clear reference to Nazism: “Then English and French and mere Spanish will disappear from the globe. The world will be Tlön.” The story, however, contains one more line, not as well-known, but perhaps more significant to the real meaning behind the narration: “I pay no attention to all this and go on revising, in the still days at the Adrogue hotel, an uncertain Quevedian translation (which I do not intend to publish) of Browne’s Urn Burial.”

Betting on “The Greek”: How the NFL Is Banking on Biological Racism

With the Super Bowl set to kick off on Sunday and media-fueled football fanfare ramping up accordingly, it is worth revisiting the NFL’s preseason scandal that wasn’t—its apparent use of biological racism in denying the compensatory claims of black former players for traumatic brain injuries sustained while playing in the league. Here we interrogate this case, the impotence of disparitarian antiracism to confront it, and its implications for egalitarian politics.

Issue #33: Sensation and Perception: Modernity as Self-Constitution

Essays on Kleist, Impressionism, Adorno, and Racism as Disorder.

The Moment of Impressionism

From the first the landscape Impressionists were seen as pursuing an “advanced” pictorial agenda with roots mainly in Manet’s painting, a view of their collective enterprise which rendered all but invisible what I have been calling the momentousness of their shift away from the figure painting project. To this day, that shift has escaped comment by students of Impressionism. Ultimately, the advent of landscape Impressionism amounted to nothing less than the emergence of a new paradigm for ambitious painting, keyed not to figure painting and antitheatricality as theorized by Diderot but rather to a linked series of “formal” issues and demands that had no single master critic or theoretician.

Is Racism a Disease?

The pathological perspective ignores the historical character of racism and race and fixes individuals (perpetrator and victim) in place and, notably, outside of time. In lieu of understanding the conditions that shape the vast inequities that exist within society, explanations that naturalize racism lead us to believe that it is a universal and unchanging force. This way of seeing reinforces and perpetuates the notion that racism is a problem lodged permanently in people’s heads and bodies, not a problem of public policy. The rise of unprecedented levels of inequality offers us an opportunity to comprehend the ways capitalism harms the vast majority of its subjects. We can choose to unite in the struggle against the damage present social relations inflict on all human life, or we can proliferate more categories that pathologize and divide us.

A World of Intensities (On Kleist)

It is one of the accomplishments of Kleist’s writing to have brought the openness of the now—its unforeseeable character, its multiplicity and fluidity of circumstantial determinants, its catastrophic turns, its capacity to carry one along, in short: everything Goethe meant by the phrase gewaltige Gegenwart—into the very structure of the sentence.