The future seems to offer the promise of infinite possibility. In the present and in retrospect, however, history has always been deterministic for the bulk of its residents. The radical goal of politics (and of the academy as a whole—indeed for all human action) has been to shatter this determinism and replace it somehow with agency. Every failed revolution (and every failed morning) represents little more than a concession to the continued ascendancy of deterministic being after a moment during which the illusion of freedom has appeared. Emancipation is what marks the end of history, and that’s precisely why it must never be achieved.
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§ As you get older, the ghosts become more real than anything else.
§ Under the leaves, soil. Under the soil, stone. Under the stone, souls.
§ Radically empowering individuals in society may be the worst mistake we ever made.
§ Want to be a radical? Refuse to suffer. Then, wait for the assault.
§ Goodbye 2017, part two. (The real part.)
§ Sometimes you find home where you’ve never been—and you dwell where you aren’t.
§ The self can’t play Atlas for postmodernity because science is now supernatural.
§ Rehab is universal. So is history.
§ Identity, transcendence, and tactics.
§ Untitled. (a.k.a. Pretty faces, new old photos.)