Blog Post

January 31, 2025 In the Ruins of a University, the Archive Speaks At the end of his 1996 book titled The University in Ruins, Bill Readings invites readers to dwell, as the title suggests, in the ruins of the university. The ideological project of the modern university that shrouded Western...

January 6, 2025 Keeping the World: On the Maternal Conversation with Gil Anidjar and Lette Bragg  This dialogue is based on a conversation with Gil Anidjar and Lette Bragg in November 2024 about their recently published monographs. Approaching the topic from different perspectives, they grapple with the maternal as a...

November 16, 2024 How Corals Remember: Archiving Sounds of the Anthropocene in Taiwan Does nature keep its own historical records? For environmental scientists, the answer is obviously “yes.” Ice cores, for instance, contain layers of ice accumulated over millennia, trapping air bubbles and particles—dust, pollen, and sea salts—that reveal past...

July 25, 2024 Strolling Hell, Strolling the Biosphere: An Interview with Timothy Morton Timothy Morton is Rita Shea Guffey Chair in English at Rice University and Director of the Cool America Foundation. They are the author of more than twenty books, including Hyperobjects, Dark Ecology, and Ecology Without Nature. Morton...

July 2, 2024 Revolution between History and Memory: A Conversation between Michael Hardt and Gavin Walker This is an edited transcription of a conversation held in the context of the Comparative Literature Theory Colloquium on March 8, 2024, at the Society for the Humanities, Cornell University.   In protest against...

March 20, 2024 Acquaintance: Loose Links and Fleeting Connections #3: 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...

January 23, 2024 Decolonizing North American Archaeology: An Interview with Paulette F.C. Steeves Paulette F.C. Steeves (Cree-Métis) is Canada Research Chair Tier II, Indigenous History, Healing, and Reconciliation; Associate Professor and Department Chair, Sociology-Anthropology; and Associate Professor, Geography, Geology, and Land Stewardship, at Algoma University.   On October 6, 2023,...

November 27, 2023 Acquaintance: Loose Links and Fleeting Connections #2: 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...

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...