“I Love You” (in Theory)
Blake Smith
“I love you!” Barthes said really means “Love me!”
Tradition is stalked by the uncertain possibility of either faithfulness or infidelity, handing down or handing over.
There is a world within the world, and that world is not, as it is for the Marxist, a metaphor. It’s where the lizard people meet.
There is the looming sense that critical theory is somehow near the center of the crisis of our time.
We bad-movie watchers have our own anticriteria, the sorts of badness we prefer.
Michael Marder approaches question of ethics and ontology through a reflection on plant life, hoping to move metaphysics beyond the bounds of the human toward what he calls “vegetal existentiality.”
What could be more relatable than for your work life and private life to have merged into one?
Membership without inquiry is bland and unthinking traditionalism; inquiry without membership is little more than captiousness or kibitzing.