The Mourning Cloak

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  • New Year’s Reflections: Sanctity and Sanity in 2018.

    In his Christmas address in 2016 the Ecumenical Patriarch Bartholomew I of Constantinople declared 2017 “The Year of Protection of the Sanctity of Childhood.” This statement was later incorporated, in February of 2017, into the joint declaration “Sins Before our Eyes: A Forum on Modern Slavery” issued in Istanbul by Patriarch Bartholomew and the Archbishop of Canterbury.…

  • Beyond Burning our World. A Review of Energy Dreams: Of Actuality.

    Works Reviewed. Marder, Michael. Energy Dreams: Of Actuality. New York: Columbia University Press. 2017 . One needs little convincing, these days, that our world is burning. While the concept of hell no longer plays a significant role in religious piety – at least in the North Atlantic world – the daily news tells a different story. From the…

  • Something went wrong: Enmity, friendship, and historical memory.

    I think it is a disaster that my students grow up in sheer ignorance of the Bible…  I should have devoted myself to this, but by vanity and fate I became a philosopher. I thought it wasn’t my calling. Today I see that a Bible lesson is more important than a lesson on Hegel. A…

  • Every Day

      A Meditation on Every Day.  Every Day War is no longer declared, but rather continued. The outrageous has become the everyday. The hero is absent from the battle. The weak are moved into the firing zone. The uniform of the day is patience, the order of merit is the wretched star of hope over the…

  • PermaWar.

    PermaWar.  There it is; a succinct description of the current stage of globalisation in which we find ourselves. The obscene rejection of all the principles of a true permaculture. Rather than build and design for peace and for the  true flourishing of human and natural activity, we are subject to the perpetual drumbeat of war. The onward…

  • Saudi Arms Deal: Canada has not done the right thing. A Reply to Professor Hansen

    It has been some time since I last attended to this space and, perhaps, a political rant is not the best re-introduction. Still, I was provoked. Irked, really, by the astounding lack of empathy and general good sense of a so-called “international security expert.” To be clear the personage in question, one Randall Hansen, is…

  • Red Rosa: On Economic Expansion and Militarism.

    Red Rosa:On Economic Expansion and Militarism. Works Reviewed: .  Luxemburg, Rosa. The Complete Works of Rosa Luxemburg. Volume 1: Economic Writings 1. Edited by Peter Hudis. Translated by David Fernbach, Jospeh Fraccia, and George Shriver. New York: Verso, 2013., 596 pages. Rosa Luxemburg appears to us today, in the gauzy film of hindsight, not so…

  • The Politics of the Image.

    Works Reviewed: Chiara Bottici Imaginal Politics: Images Beyond Imagination and the Imaginary. New York: Columbia University Press, 2014. Nevertheless human life was thus image-graced and image-cursed; it could comprehend itself only through images, the images were not to be banished, they had been with us since the herd-beginning, they were anterior to and mightier than our thinking, they…

  • B.R. Ambedkar: The Annihilation of Caste and the Future of Democracy.

    Works Reviewed: B.R. Ambedkar. Annihilation of Caste. New York: Verso, 2014. “Ambedkar was Gandhi’s most formidable adversary. He challenged him not just politically or intellectually, but also morally. To have excised Ambedkar from Gandhi’s story, which is the story we all grew up on, is a travesty. Equally, to ignore Gandhi while writing about Ambedkar…

  • The Flight of Minerva: Hegel and the Haitian Revolution

    Works Reviewed: Susan Buck-Morss. Hegel, Haiti, and Universal History. Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 2009. 151 pages. “The owl of Minerva spreads its wings only with the falling of dusk.” The twilight shade with which Hegel cast his work, at least here, lends an aura of sad nobility to the pursuit of philosophy. The pallor of grey in…