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Benjamin’s usefulness for the writing of “critiques” in the contemporary academy has muted, even eclipsed, the theo-political intensity of this revolutionary anarchism. He has become a kind of Che Guevara for a portion of the intelligentsia that feels it must talk the talk but cannot begin to imagi…

For Benjamin, the horror of our historical trajectory lies in the Angel’s inability to close his wings. What prevents that closure is the insistent storm of “progress,” the stubborn belief of liberals, fascists, and communists alike that technology and rational control are positive forces that mere…

Yet the quiddity of Morrison’s writing ultimately is just that.

In essays like “The Foreigner’s Home,” one almost hears echoes of Jean Baudrillard’s theories of simulated life under late capitalism and Guy Debord’s The Society of the Spectacle as she examines the disorienting loss of distinction between private and public space and its effect on our interior li…

[...] The power of great fiction to challenge that common sense lies only partially in reflecting our lives back to us like a mirror; a great deal more resides in its capacity to dispossess us of our preferred assumptions, plunging us into knowledge like photographic paper into its chemical bath, r…