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@ethicopoliticolit
It is Written
Living in California for four years I became fond of âEureka!â moments, and on July 30th, I had the âEureka!â moment to end all âEureka!â moments, a day after Lindsey Graham was laid to rest right here in South Carolina: that Israel belongs to all Godâs children, not just to the Jewish people. This insight, which came to me as I was perusing the daily Scripture readings sent out by the U.S.âŠ
Topsy-Turvy
(Cross-posted in full to my Substack.) Netanyahuâs appearance on Fox News Sunday morning, in which he decried New York City mayor Zohran Mamdaniâs accurate characterization of him as a war criminal for leading the genocide in Gaza, represents a new low in human discourse and intellect. Calling the charge âhate speech,â the Israeli prime minister explained that Mamdani was âfomenting hateâ byâŠ
Out of the Lion's Den
(Cross-posted to my Substack.) Greetings and salutations, anyone who happens to read this update, a bit of a return to my Substack practice after a few months off. After trying and failing to land a full-time job in the educational sphere, I realized all I needed to do to secure my financial future was to writeâfinallyâQuĂmica Divina, to which the performances on this platform, writing andâŠ
The You in I-Thou
(Cross-posted to my Substack.) A readerâand dear friendâinquired about the ending of my last post, in which I posed the following rhetorical query, concerning the imminent (and immanent) potential for peaceful coexistence in a world that may, on the surface, seem increasingly fractious: The question remains, as ever, neither canât âweâ all get along nor can âwe,â but why canât you getâŠ
It's a Family Affair
You know, itâs funny: I did an interview the other day for a teaching job Iâd very much like to have, helping young people to understand the world. And the first question I was asked was about the ethics of such instructionâthat is, what are we to learn from studying the world, and what are we supposed to do with such knowledge? For me, I replied, the teaching of global Anglophone literatureâtheâŠ
Minding the Anti-Semitism Gap
Editorâs note: This blog post has been chilling in my Apple Notes for a fortnight, but with the launch of the U.S.-Israeli war against Iran, the matter of separating anti-Semitism from legitimateâand necessaryâcriticism of the Israeli state is all the more urgent, especially as traditional American Jewish communal groups are forcing the conflation. And so Iâm publishing it today, prompted by theâŠ
A Jungle is a Jungle
Joe Biden worried in 1977 that certain de-segregation policies would cause his children to grow up âin a racial jungleâ This post writes itself. Friday I learned Trump posted a video online rendering the Obamas as apes. Today I learned Biden thought desegregation would create a âracial jungle.â In the first instance of white supremacy, Trump was roundly condemned as a racist. In the secondâŠ
Big Ups, No Follow
One of the bedrock principles of the first era of my academic teaching career (2010â2021) was to connect new learnings to past learnings. And as I move forward in this just-beginning nine-year cycleâwith the Year of the Fire Horse in the offingâI have the chance to practice what I preached to my students on this very blog (âblogâ being a throwback term Iâm reclaiming in the context of WordPressâsâŠ
In this incarnation, she appears in the archive of slavery as a dead girl named in a legal indictment against a slave ship captain tried for the murder of two Negro girls. But we could have as easily encountered her in a shipâs ledger in the tally of debits; or in an overseerâs journalââlast night I laid with Dido on the groundâ; or as an amorous bed-fellow with a purse so elastic âthat it will contain the largest thing any gentleman can present her withâ in Harrisâs List of Covent-Garden Ladies; or as the paramour in the narrative of a mercenary soldier in Surinam; or as a brothel owner in a travelerâs account of the prostitutes of Barbados; or as a minor character in a nineteenth-century pornographic novel. Variously named Harriot, Phibba, Sara, Joanna, Rachel, Linda, and Sally, she is found everywhere in the Atlantic world. The barracoon, the hollow of the slave ship, the pest-house, the brothel, the cage, the surgeonâs laboratory, the prison, the cane-field, the kitchen, the masterâs bedroomâturn out to be exactly the same place and in all of them she is called Venus.
âSaidiya Hartman, âVenus in Two Actsâ (2008)
In this incarnation, she appears in the archive of slavery as a dead girl named in a legal indictment against a slave ship captain tried for the murder of two Negro girls. But we could have as easily encountered her in a shipâs ledger in the tally of debits; or in an overseerâs journalââlast night I laid with Dido on the groundâ; or as an amorous bed-fellow with a purse so elastic âthat it will contain the largest thing any gentleman can present her withâ in Harrisâs List of Covent-Garden Ladies; or as the paramour in the narrative of a mercenary soldier in Surinam; or as a brothel owner in a travelerâs account of the prostitutes of Barbados; or as a minor character in a nineteenth-century pornographic novel. Variously named Harriot, Phibba, Sara, Joanna, Rachel, Linda, and Sally, she is found everywhere in the Atlantic world. The barracoon, the hollow of the slave ship, the pest-house, the brothel, the cage, the surgeonâs laboratory, the prison, the cane-field, the kitchen, the masterâs bedroomâturn out to be exactly the same place and in all of them she is called Venus.
âSaidiya Hartman, âVenus in Two Actsâ (2008)
Just learned that Claudine Gay was forced to resign at Harvard after initially weathering the backlash to her Congressional testimony last month. Iâm stunned, because I thought if any institution in this country I call the Union States of America could withstand the new McCarthyism masquerading as anti-anti-Semitism, itâd be Harvard. (And please note Iâm inaugurating a new era for this Tumblr, making my own statements after collecting all the othersâthat is, othersâ.)
And while itâs highly ironic that a Black woman such as Gay should be charged with âinadequate citation,â itâs also unfortunate that she apparently did indeed omit some quotation marks in her early work. Iâm no Gay, of course, but thatâs why I was fanatical about zero-error attribution in my own scholarship and teaching. I guess this is because I was a journalist prior to entering academia, and specifically a factchecker at the beginning of my editorial career; I knew writers and publications could get sued for such mistakes (and were).
Anyway, speaking about lawsuits: the recent DEI SCOTUS case that Harvard had a role in was also at play here, per Nia T. Evans at Mother Jones.
The ousting of an Ivy League president is a telling sign of what's to come.
Steal This Book is, in a way, a manual of survival in the prison that is Amerika. It preaches jailbreakâŠ.It implies that the reader is âideologically set,â in that he understands corporate feudalism as the only robbery worthy of being called âcrime,â for it is committed against the people as a whole. Whether the ways it describes to rip-off shit are legal or illegal is irrelevant. The dictionary of law is written by the bosses of order. Our moral dictionary says no heisting from each other. To steal from a brother or sister is evil. To not steal from the institutions that are the pillars of the Pig Empire is equally immoral.
âAbbie Hoffman, Steal This Book (1971)
There are times in life when the question of knowing if one can think differently than one thinks and perceive differently than one sees is absolutely necessary if one is to go on looking and reflecting at all. [Para.] People will say, perhaps, that these games with oneself need only go on behind the scenes; that they are, at best, part of those labors of preparation that efface themselves when they have had their effects. But what, then, is philosophy todayâphilosophical activity, I meanâif not the critical labor of thought upon itself? And if it does not consist, in place of legitimating what one already knows, in undertaking to know how, and up to what limit, it would be possible to think differently?
âMichel Foucault, quoted in James Millerâs The Passion of Michel Foucault (1993)
Tomorrow, I thought for the hundredth time, I shall kill a man, and I wondered if the crying child and the woman across the way knew. [Para.] I did not know the man. To my eyes he had no face; he did not even exist, for I knew nothing about him. I did not know whether he scratched his nose when he ate, whether he talked or kept quiet when he was making love, whether he gloried in his hate, whether he betrayed his wife or his God or his own future. All I knew was that he was an Englishman and my enemy. The two terms were synonymous.
âElie Wiesel, Dawn (1961)
Almost all the media coverage of AIDS has been aimed at the heterosexual groups now minimally at risk, as if the high-risk groups were not part of the audience. And in a sense, as Watney suggests, theyâre not. The media targets âan imaginary national family unit which is both white and heterosexualâ (p. 43). This doesnât mean that most TV viewers in Europe and America are *not* white and heterosexual and part of a family. It does, however, mean, as Stuart Hall argues, that representation is very different from reflection: âIt implies the active work of selecting and presenting, of structuring and shaping: not merely the transmitting of already-existing meaning, but the more active labour of *making things mean*â (quoted p. 124). TV doesn't make the family, but it makes the family *mean* in a certain way. That is, it makes an exceptionally sharp distinction between the family as a biological unit and as a cultural identity, and it does this by teaching us the attributes and attitudes by which people who thought they were already in a family actually only *begin to qualify* as belonging to a family. The great power of the media, and especially of television, is, as Watney writes, âits capacity to manufacture subjectivity itselfâ (p. 125), and in so doing to dictate the shape of an identity. The âgeneral publicâ is at once an ideological construct and a moral prescription. Furthermore, the definition of the family *as an identity* is, inherently, an exclusionary process, and the cultural product has no obligation whatsoever to coincide exactly with its natural referent. Thus the family identity produced on American television is much more likely to include your dog than your homosexual brother or sister.
âLeo Bersani, âIs the Rectum a Grave?â (1987)
Dwelling too long on problems of rabbinic self-definition or the issue of originality in traditional literature may be missing the point, however. The question is less to determine if the rabbis thought they were doing something ânewâ when they wrote the classic texts, than to consider what this enterprise is all about on its own terms. [Para.] Let us consider, then, the issue of the relationship of Torah to the vast body of literature that attempts to comment upon, elucidate or explain the Torahâthat is, the great traditional texts of postbiblical history. Or, to use the language of the tradition, let us ask: what is the connection between the Written Torah and the Oral Torah? In place of the modern issue of originality I would suggest that the Oral Torah had a different goal: namely a special kind of interaction.
âBarry W. Holtz, âIntroduction: On Reading Jewish Texts,â Back to the Sources: Reading the Classic Jewish Texts (Summit Books, 1984)
Part II
Implicit in this epistemological framework are the worldviews of those who have been cast as non-Human or less-than-Human: Frantz Fanon's les damnĂ©s, imperial constructs who can only be understood as the difference outside. Les damnĂ©s are the anthropos in relation to humanitas as humanitas is defined by those who conceive of themselves as Human. Here, clearly, imperial epistemologies emerge alongside the widespread coloniality of knowledge: Christian theology, secular philosophy, and sciences that were formed and shaped under European geographic monarchies and nation-states (which also provided the unification of Western knowledge systems in six modern/imperial languages grounded in Greek and Latin). This is the belief system that Wynter's work unveils: the naturalization of and thus a steadfast belief in modes of thinkingâthe principles and rules of knowingâthat calcify a commitment to an epistemological tract that profits from replicating itself. By unveiling this system, she draws attention to the conditions through which the epistemologies of les damnĂ©s are made. The epistemologies of les damnĂ©s do not seek to arrive at a perfect or true definition of the Human, for there is no Human 'out there' beyond the Western imperial concept of Man/Human from the Renaissance on.