• Strange Prisoners and the Ends of Mythology

    “Individual responsibility” is code for the worst kind of social engineering: libertarian ideology. The only ideology that has no basis in reality, libertarianism attempts to enforce a dogma of selfishness without the least amount of effort toward understanding “self” and… more ›

  • Twenty-One

    Twenty-one years ago he was traveling by train from Warsaw to Szczecin with his friends in the Corps. It was late and after a bottle or two of Żubrówka. He wanted to doze, and he somehow convinced his friends to sing to him… more ›

  • The Homolithic: The Stone that Remains

    The space of human being opens onto the geological, inscribing strata of geological time into the very arche-writing of the elemental. Human being follows the being of the stone. We track the stone as that which remains anterior to the… more ›

  • Fireworks

    During the holiday fireworks over the weekend he remembered his grandfather who lost his sight in the early days of World War II. Every Fourth of July his grandparents would take him and his siblings and cousin to watch the… more ›

  • Translation’s Haunt (The Rolle Excursus), Part II

    When we examine Rolle’s practice in the Name of Jesus cult through the lens of medieval Christograms, we arrive at a truly demanding juncture of translation, (non-subjectivist) ethics, and the materiality of language—all facets of Blanchot’s own philosophical project that… more ›

  • Translation’s Haunt (The Rolle Excursus), Part I

    If we resort to merely philological evidence, we can readily see that translationhas always meant more than the narrowly defined project of transferring meaning from one language into another.  The primary definition involves the removal, transference, and conveyance of ministers… more ›

  • The Wounded Root

    Both Edmond Jabès’s The Book of Questions and Jacques Derrida’s “Edmond Jabès and the Question of the Book” convoke with “imaginary rabbis”[1]in a lexical Ouroboros: the disembodied voices spread like the “certain ivy” Derrida describes in the beginning of his… more ›

  • Nothing Really Matters

    Madonna’s “Nothing Really Matters” was on heavy rotation on British Airways on-flight music programming during the summer of 1998 while he enjoyed his summer break from teaching in Japan. He repeatedly listened to this track for most of the flight… more ›

  • Irigarayan Deinos & the Distance of Home, Part IV

    Reflecting the double abysses, a “double power” seems to surround man as well: the power of the natural universe around him, and the power of his created world (70). Man, however, does not recognize the cultured world as his own… more ›

  • Irigarayan Deinos & the Distance of Home, Part III

    To separate oneself from others and from our environment is the original violence we do, both to others as well as to ourselves. Yet one’s nature inextricably links oneself to others; that is, we are naturally at home among others… more ›