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Debates

How Not to Be Replaced

Political currents around the world have witnessed the rise of white nationalists who fear they are being replaced and express a desire to leave a world in which their children …
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Modern Money and the Future of the Aesthetic

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Aesthetics is an expansive and foundational category of modern life, organizing our thoughts, institutions, and practices. As a professor of film and media studies, I typically engage aesthetics through the …
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Political Correctness Goes to the Vatican
8 years ago

Political Correctness Goes to the Vatican

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Pope Francis usually displays the right intuitions in matters theological and political. Recently, however, he committed a serious blunder in endorsing the idea, propagated by some Catholics, of changing a …
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Post-Modern Conservatism
8 years ago

Post-Modern Conservatism

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Irrationalism, The Political Right and Collective Identities

Many on the Left maintain that, in contrast to conservatives, we must have greater respect for difference. Conservatives are seen as supporting a …
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The Love of Wisdom

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Flowers exist. Flowers are symptoms of sexual selection. Sexual selection is incredibly expensive from the genome’s point of view. So if genes are “selfish” in some sense, sexual selection is …
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Liberal Politics and the Challenge of White Supremacy: Anti-anti-Eurocentrism and the Question of Identity Politics

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An important moment in the highly emotional debate over President Trump’s controversial comments about white supremacist terrorism went unnoticed in the mainstream media: On CNN’s Don Lemon’s show, African-American Professor …
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Everything Is Your Fault
9 years ago

Everything Is Your Fault

. . . her imperfection, which seemed to her to be the cause of all the evils in the world.

– Catherine of Siena

 

This is the sign of …
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A Great Awakening and its Dangers
9 years ago

A Great Awakening and its Dangers

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On November 7 2017, Judith Butler helped organize a conference in São Paulo, Brazil. Although the title of the conference was “The Ends of Democracy,” and thus had nothing to …
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Trump, Freud, and the Puzzle of Femininity

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Of late we’ve been hearing the word “repudiate” a lot. It’s ever on the lips of those who deplore President Trump’s tactics, rhetoric, fiats, tweets, and lies. After Charlottesville, heard …
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We, the Orphans of October

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It’s November 7, 1987. Along with hundreds, if not thousands, of other children I am in the main hall of Moscow’s Revolution Museum, since renamed State Central Museum of the …
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