Works Reviewed: David Kishik. The Power of Life: Agamben and the Coming Politics. Stanford, California: Stanford University Press, 2012. “I was not entirely surprised to discover that Wittgenstein and Agamben, my “philosophical parents” to whom I have dedicated my first two books, happened to be born on the same day as my actual mother and father. This book…

Works Reviewed: Slavoj Zizek & Srecko Horvat. What Does Europe Want? The Union and its Discontents. New York: Columbia University Press, 2015. In the political pamphlet What Is To Be Done, published in 1902, Vladimir Lenin presciently draws a link between “Economism” and terrorism. He chastises those who are fixated on the spontaneity of mass-movements and action, even to the…

“Scripture is poison, so to the holy one. Only when it is translated back into oral use, the spoken word, can my stomach tolerate it.” – Franz Rosenzweig The ancient proscription of knowledge, of the knowledge especially of good and evil, falls heavy in our enlightened hears. Knowledge is our unqualified good, education the panacea…

Earlier today I suffered the weird experience of being drawn into the narrative drama of a newspaper article. The article was about Canadian military action against the Islamic State, and the pathos of Canada’s leaders struck me as viscerally believable. Citing the horrors of the Islamic State, one leader was quoted saying something like – “it’s not…

End the occupation: Henry Siegman speaks out against attack on Gaza | rabble.ca.