Lacan, like Hegel, is one of those black hole theorists who absorb any difference and prevent any light from escaping the gravity of it. Which is why the refusal of them is a radical act of will. In different ways, separating Marxist thinking from them may be necessary for Marxism’s survival.

Portrait by Hobbes Ginsberg for @DocumentJournal. I wrote a little thing about the trans women artists and writers of BK documentjournal.com/2022/06/mckenz… Lil thread of work by some of the ppl I managed to squeeze into the story, starting with @gothjafar
soundcloud.com/gothjafar

Thinking of Frank Wilderson III as working in a genre I know well but which is far less common than it was for westerners: world-historical defeat. In the west that literature clusters around the defeats of 1937, 1956 and 1968. Orwell’s HOMAGE, Lessing’s NOTEBOOK. The astonishing late work of Debord.

It's Thursday, so I'll be talking to @Rick_Tuck_Lit about AND THE CATEGORY IS... at 2PM EST. Register here: event.newschool.edu/andthecategory… Same favorite lines from Ricky Tucker's book. This is on the list of names in Madonna's Vogue song: “white names and sensibilities are used as lube for the ears and sensibility of white audiences dying to be penetrated by the Black experience.”

Thankyou @johndmilla for this careful review of PHILOSOPHY FOR SPIDERS. I have some thoughts about this part: I think both Kathy and I experienced certain kinds of exclusion that were palpable precisely because of our different but still comparable upper middle class backgrounds. To have that and still feel exclusion can get one thinking of the interests of all the excluded.

There's a lot of "critique" whose tendencies I find frankly reactionary. It tends to be, let's say, "pre-Althusserian." It sees everything as imbued with the essence of an expressive totality. That expressive totality is, interchangeably, "capital," "power" or "technology." This "critique" sees its job as the reduction of any appearance to this essence.

I vent about The New School sometimes, but pls don't let that discourage you from applying for jobs there. I think it can be a great place for a lot of scholars. I was the 2nd person ever to make full prof who came up thru Lang (the undergrad liberal arts division). The 1st is dead & the 3rd retired. Nobody, including me, has quite figured out what to do with my cohort.

The problem with writing about the self is that selves are fictions. One is trying to write honestly about something whose sole purpose is to front, to evade, that is self-deluding. One solution is to attempt to write about how this fiction came into existence: to write about its production, about the situation of its making.

Oh no. Just learning of the passing of Sylvère Lotringer. liberation.fr/idees-et-debat… So many feelings about it. @SemiotextePress was do important to me in so many ways. The journal, the little black books.