Symposium

Preface:  We have chosen our title, gesturing to Michael Frayn’s comedy, which portrays a bungled attempt at a play by a group of actors not up to the task.  In the first act, we see the play; in the second, the backstage shenanigans that underlie it; in the third act, what remains of the play […]

The Boghossian committee’s report on humanistic scholarship claims that the main disciplines have widely subordinated scholarship to politics (Boghossian, “Report”). This has led, they write, to a “widespread deterioration in scholarly standards” ( 5).[1] The report’s categorical judgments, however fudged, cast low scholarly standards as the defining feature of humanistic academia today.  Standards are so

It’s not because of the trash talk. Through a forest of caveats, and they go on for pages, the report winds its way toward its accusation. The humanities and humanistic social sciences, the report suggests, display a lack of intellectual rigor. In academic terms such accusation, no matter how eloquent and/or qualified, boils down to

There is a line of argument in Emmanuel Lévinas’s 1951 essay “Is Ontology Fundamental?” that guides many of my assumptions about what it means to think. Lévinas is discussing Heidegger’s argument that to think is to throw oneself into history and its unfolding dramas. According to Lévinas, this launch seems to produce a rupture with

There’s a unique move, equal parts noble and petty, that academics have long since mastered.  With utter intellectual seriousness, they assess and wade into scholarly debates, arguing with their sharpest logic and most passionate rhetoric for the side they have decided is right.  Much like Cicero, they then forward their argument through smearing and undermining

Reading the “Vanderbilt Report” on the humanities, commissioned by the chancellors of Vanderbilt and Wash U, is like traveling back in time to the late 1980s and the height of the culture wars, where the conservative right, accompanied by traditional old-school academics, hurled epithets at the left, centering on the crimes of postmodernism and relativism.

“An embryonic cybernetic power is vainly trying to put language under the control of the machines it controls, in such a way that information would henceforth be the only possible communication.” Guy Debord, “All the King’s Men” (1963) Part 1: Infidelity The “Report on the State of Scholarship in the Humanities and the Humanistic Social

The recently released Vanderbilt–WUSTL report on the humanities and humanistic social sciences has already attracted significant attention in debates over academic freedom, the relationship between politics and research, and the state of contemporary scholarship. Praised by some commentators as a necessary defense of free inquiry and criticized by others as a politically motivated intervention, the

Today we begin publishing our first book forum, a set of essays critically engaged with Zahid Chaudhary’s Paranoid Publics: Psychopolitics of Truth (Fordham 2025). Chaudhary, through a provocative intermingling of Foucault and Freud, excavates the contemporary psychosocial conditions of truth in the world of alternative facts, conspiracy, and widespread paranoia. An essential critical work on

  I read the really fascinating symposium on Paranoid Publics.  I haven’t read the actual book yet, so I can’t really respond to its concrete arguments.  But the symposium itself was rich enough and stimulating enough that I wanted to send some thoughts for the purpose of conversation.  Hopefully, they don’t miss the point.  I’ve tried to