Tag: Philosophy

Whose Life?

This Life: Secular Faith and Spiritual Freedom, by the philosopher Martin Hägglund, who teaches at Yale, is a book anyone committed to public-facing scholarship ought to take note of. This is all the ...

In Memoriam: Agnes Heller

Agnes Heller, the Hungarian-born political philosopher, died recently, at the age of 90. The obituaries in outlets like the New York Times, Le Monde, and Deutsche Welle have been respectful, and even ...

Translation’s Burden

A book is a strange vessel of expectation. A published book imagines a reader, for a published book without a reader is a book that loses someone’s money. And a book about translation seems to have ...

Impossible Belonging

If the sharp end of critique’s job is to name injury, then it also has a soft lining that is oriented around recovery and repair. Even if a particular critical project stays with injury rather than ...

Knausgaard’s Ruthless Freedom

So here it is at last: the end of Knausgaard’s struggle. It is 1,160 pages long, divided into three parts. Part 2 consists of a long essay on Hitler. Both ...

Idleness as Flourishing

It is hard work to write a book, so there is unavoidable irony in fashioning a volume on the value of being idle. There is a paradox, too: to praise idleness is to suggest that there is some point to ...

Do Images Still Help Us See?

Contrary to what its title might suggest, Hito Steyerl’s latest collection of essays does not explain how to avoid customs charges at dubious borders. Much more ...