by lewis levenberg A few words, this week, on the vagaries of hanging out our shingle once more. We’ve encountered setbacks, delays, challenges, and so on. But we’re still dogging this startup—this conglomeration of our assets into publication, incubation, and focused curation—and it’s time to share what we’ve learned so far. Here’s to the phoenix, […]
by Tom Bair I’ve been vaguely aware of the “Occupy Wall Street” movement since its first sighting on September 17th. Actually, I’d picked up The Post the day prior to find a little information on the coming weekend of football, and found something more alarming than Eli Manning’s sullen face. In that issue, Mayor Bloomberg […]
by Tom Bair But youth is also that fragment of existence when one easily imagines oneself to be quite singular, when really what one is thinking or doing is what will later be retained as the typical trait of a generation. Being young is a source of power, a time of decisive encounters, but these […]
The object of my analysis is not a reinterpretation or any revelation about Beckett’s body of work, although as writer I am tempted to travel in that direction; rather, my focus is on the nature of reputation, the public nature or publicity-factor of a writer, and how this can be contended-with, examined, thought-about, and whether […]
by Tom Bair This week Tom is working on a multi-part article, beginning with an examination of Samuel Beckett and his reputation as a bleak post-existentialist. Buttressed by Alain Badiou’s comments on the Irish writer and a fun Venn diagram, Tom will begin by loosely sketching the context of these readings articles, their readings of […]
My favorite border of the year is stalling, the snake has swallowed and digested its tail as it were, and I am in a city without leaves. I guessed that the weather would be tepid, dressed accordingly, and so now (as far as a day goes) I am prematurely fatigued and my eyebrows are waterlogged, […]
by lewis levenberg This essay tries to make ‘subalternity’ sensible for what Gramsci called our “special American conditions.” It traces the shifting referents of the concept for theory over the past eighty years. It tries to take the idea seriously, framing subalternity as an abstraction, an outcome of material conditions, and a mode of subjectivity. […]
Giorgio Agamben’s seminal works of political philosophy, Homo Sacer and State of Exception, contain problematic and undefined conceptions of sovereignty. His tergiversation demands, first, an explication of his deployment of the concept. This leads to the articulation of three dissents from his position, along historical, material, and geopolitical grounds. Those dissents recall the work of […]
by Tom Bair Much has been made of ABC’s latest high-gloss ensemble situation comedy, Happy Endings. The network debuted their suggestive title on Wednesday past, and boldly followed this premier by engaging the viewer with their crusty tip, or, in suit-speak, aired another episode. The jokey-thing just made could refer to the layer of cum […]
