Blog Post

September 18, 2023 Acquaintance: Loose Links and Fleeting Connections #1: The concept of “acquaintance” has historically been given much less attention than notions of “friendship” or “love,” the idea seemingly relegated to the bottom of the hierarchy of influential social/intellectual/spiritual connections. And yet, much of our engagement with others—in social...

June 17, 2023 Capitalism, Slavery, and the Non-Appearance of Blackness: A Review of Nick Nesbitt's The Price of Slavery and Denise Ferreira da Silva's Unpayable Debt   Unpayable Debt by Denise Ferreira da Silva. London: Sternberg Press, 2022 The Price of Slavery: Capitalism and Revolution in the Caribbean by Nick Nesbitt....

Diacritics is 50: A golden anniversary is a significant milestone for any academic publication, let alone one that began from a rather eccentric (dare I say punk?) ethos. Rather than the usual toasts or special commemorative issues, we have asked our readers and writers to reflect on the history of...

Diacritics is 50: A golden anniversary is a significant milestone for any academic publication, let alone one that began from a rather eccentric (dare I say punk?) ethos. Rather than the usual toasts or special commemorative issues, we have asked our readers and writers to reflect on the history of...

Diacritics is 50: A golden anniversary is a significant milestone for any academic publication, let alone one that began from a rather eccentric (dare I say punk?) ethos. Rather than the usual toasts or special commemorative issues, we have asked our readers and writers to reflect on the history of...

December 30, 2021  Diacritics is 50: A golden anniversary is a significant milestone for any academic publication, let alone one that began from a rather eccentric (dare I say punk?) ethos. Rather than the usual toasts or special commemorative issues, we have asked our readers and writers to reflect on...

Diacritics is 50: A golden anniversary is a significant milestone for any academic publication, let alone one that began from a rather eccentric (dare I say punk?) ethos. Rather than the usual toasts or special commemorative issues, we have asked our readers and writers to reflect on the history of...

July 23, 2021 Diacritics is 50: A golden anniversary is a significant milestone for any academic publication, let alone one that began from a rather eccentric (dare I say punk?) ethos. Rather than the usual toasts or special commemorative issues, we have asked our readers and writers to reflect on...

June 28, 2021 Street signs and billboards collected on an Ithaca-Philadelphia trip in 2017. Pictures collected on Juneteenth 2021, courtesy of the author.

June 3, 2021 A letter from Gregory Bateson to the social psychologist Uriel G. Foa dated February 7, 1969 reads: A schizophrenic patient once pointed out to me that there are two worlds. The first he called “commodital.” The other world he called “dementiaprecoxal.” We discussed the commodities of the...

January 6, 2021  When the House Burns Down Translated by Kevin Attell Originally published as: Giorgio Agamben, “Quando la casa brucia,” Quodlibet, October 5, 2020, https://www.quodlibet.it/giorgio-agamben-quando-la-casa-brucia. “There is no sense in anything I do, if the house burns down.” And yet it is exactly while the house is burning that...

August 5, 2020 One of my favorite French courses that I ever took was on twentieth-century quotidian literature. The syllabus included texts by writers such as André Breton, Francis Ponge, Georges Perec, and Annie Ernaux, in addition to philosophers and literary theorists working on and around the idea of the...