About Michael Steinberg

Michel Foucault’s The Order of Things (a title he preferred to the original Les Mots et les Choses) was the book that made his name. It has never been without …
Read More

This essay begins, in its first part, by questioning the assumption that human agency is individual and identical with the activity of a pre-social core of conscious experience. Its second …
Read More

The first part of this three-part essay began with the near-universal assumption that we are independent subjects, ultimately identified with a center of conscious experience outside of social life. Both …
Read More

For to comprehend reality means to comprehend what things really are, and this in turn means rejecting their mere factuality. (Herbert Marcuse)[i]

Some things seem utterly unproblematic. We think …
Read More

Earth, water, fire, and air Met together in a garden fair, Put in a basket bound with skin: If you answer this riddle you’ll never begin.             –The Incredible String …
Read More

Grau, teurer Freund, ist alle Theorie, Und grün des Lebens goldner Baum.                         –Goethe, Faust, Part One.[i]

In explaining his choice to present a Critique of Pure Reason instead …
Read More

I am a devotee at a South Indian temple a few miles south of Rochester, New York. It’s caste and gender neutral, at least in theory, and its murti, which …
Read More

I moved to Canada during the Vietnam war and almost by accident found myself an undergrad at Saint Michael’s College at the University of Toronto. I’m anything but Catholic, but …
Read More

The subject of self-consciousness is strewn with intellectual land mines. There is no consensus about what kind of consciousness this is or what it is that we’re conscious of when …
Read More

There is a bat in our bedroom. We don’t know how it got in, but bats can crawl through the narrowest of crevices and passageways, and our old house is …
Read More