Activity

What can one learn from the expression of people who refuse to be commodities, but also once were commodities? What does history look like, or the present, or the future, from the point of view of those who refuse the norms produced by systems of violence, who consent not to be a single being? Thes…

In his criticism, Moten is especially attuned to a zone that Brent Edwards (a close friend and interlocuter) has called the “fringe of contact between music and language.” He’ll draw the reader’s attention to the “surplus lyricism of the muted, mutating horns of Tricky Sam Nanton or Cootie Williams…

A decisive turning point came when literary critic Barbara Johnson arrived from Yale to teach a course called Deconstruction, and he first read Jacques Derrida, Paul de Man, and Ferdinand Saussure. At the time, in a class on James Joyce, he was also reading Ulysses. “It had a rhythm I was totally f…

What is supremely profitable today is contemporary art. How profitable? In 2019, a work called Rabbit by the artist Jeff Koons sold at auction for $91 million, setting a new record for a living artist. Walker’s work fetches hefty sums too. Yet aesthetically, and more importantly, ethically, I think…

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…