Reading the Phenomenology
16 July 2025 Revisiting the Introduction
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An Undergraduate Essay: Simone Weil's Critique of Rights-Based Doctrines
The following is an essay I wrote in 2007, in a third year undergraduate class on political philosophy. I was not altogether surprised to learn from my tutor, many years later, that although he had offered essay questions on Simone Weil for a decade or more, I was perhaps the only student to answer one. My encounter with Weil, prompted by that course, was one of the most powerful of my…
What Ever Happened to the Institutions of Modernism?
The essays collected in Lawrence Rainey’s 1998 Institutions of Modernism: Literary Elites and Public Culture , written and published over the previous half-decade, participated mightily in the reorientation of literary critical endeavour we have come to call the “ New Modernist Studies,” as did the journal he co-founded with Robert von Hallberg in 1994, Modernism/modernity . But Lawrence (forgive…
Has Critique Run Out of Steam, or Have We Barely Even Tried It?
This is a version of the paper delivered on October 29, 2021, at the University of Adelaide’s and Flinders University’s Situations of Theory Conference. It will be revised and expanded for future publication. Slavoj Žižek, The Fright of Real Tears (Žižek 2001, 13) The enthusiastic professionalism of Post-Theory is often sustained by a stance of profound political resignation, by a will to…
On Lawrence Rainey
Lawrence Rainey, 1954-2020 I ONCE ASKED LAWRENCE if he had a favourite among the Cantos; without quite saying yes, he told me to read the fragment “ From Canto CXV ” : “ The scientists are in terror / and the European mind stops…” Neither of us could have anticipated the terrible resonance of these lines today (as someone remarked, “ ‘Literature is news that STAYS news’”). But the line from this…
Writing and Research Update No. 2
La crisi consiste appunto nel fatto che il vecchio muore e il nuovo non può nascere: in questo interregno si verificano i fenomeni morbosi piú svariati. The crisis consists precisely in the fact that the old is dying and the new cannot be born: in this interregnum, morbid phenomena of the most varied kind come to pass. Antonio Gramsci, Prison Notebooks , Third Notebook, §34 I’VE BEEN WRITING the…
The Rhetoric of the Ordinary: A Prose Poem
No. | Title | Author | Due date | Due time | Returned date | Returned time | Fine 1 Novel gazing : 16 September 2013 23:59 19 August 2013 14:42 2 The language of psychoanalysis; Laplanche, Jean 31 August 2013 23:59 16 August 2013 14:02 3 Irresistible dictation : Meyer, Steven, 1959- 29 August 2013 23:59 19 August 2013 13:18 4 The letters of Gertrude Stein and Carl Van Vechten, 1913-1946 / Stein,…
Writing and Research Update No. 1
STARTED A NEW NOTEBOOK the other day with thoughts on the Realism chapter. Planning to bounce off of the paper I will give (and the papers I will hear) at Alternative Modernisms in November by emphasising the failure of modernism–also looking at Josipovici in this connection. (Ofc Josipovici doesn’t it see the failure as belonging to modernism, but rather to British (English?) literary culture.)…
Stevens's Books
THE FOLLOWING IS the text of a short (PechaKucka) talk I gave at an event called “ Cloth and Paper: Queer Materialities,” as part of the 2019 South Australia’s History Festival. I hadn’t done the format before, and far from mastered it, although I was pleased with how literally my material answered the “ cloth and paper” brief. In any case, this will be fodder for a future essay. The images below…