The Mourning Cloak
transformation & rebirth
recent posts
- Birthquake: The Literary After-Shocks of the Great Kantō Earthquake in Arthur M. Mitchell’s “Disruptions of Daily Life.”
- Looking Good: A Review of Yasuda’s Beauty Matters.
- Unanchored Reason: Gaston Bachelard and Surrealist Philosophy.
- (Positive) Vibrations
- Loving in the Wreckage: Salvaging Liberal Theology.
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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…
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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…
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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…
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“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…
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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…
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Works Reviewed: Alain Badiou and Elisabeth Roudinesco Jacques Lacan Past and Present: A Dialogue. Translated by Jason E. Smith. New York: Columbia University Press, 2014. 82 pages. One does not necessarily expect a book about Jacques Lacan to be compulsively readable. Lacan was an enigmatic thinker; his use of language is alluring, though extremely difficult to follow.…
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Works Reviewed: Adrian Johnston & Catherine Malabou Self and Emotional Life: Philosophy, Psychoanalysis and Neuroscience. New York: Columbia University Press, 2013. 276 pages. The age of neurobiology has, apparently, arrived. Bookshelves groan, figuratively for the most part, under titles such as The Brain that Changes Itself, Brain Rules, and Clinical Neuroanatomy Made Ridiculously Simple. The…
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End the occupation: Henry Siegman speaks out against attack on Gaza | rabble.ca.
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I shall not cease from Mental Fight Nor shall my Sword sleep in my hand, Till we have built Jerusalem In England’s green & pleasant land. – William Blake The first time I heard the anthem Jerusalem, in an Anglican church in Canada, I was struck and somewhat embarrassed by the incongruity of these words.…
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Works Reviewed: William James The Heart of William James. Edited by Robert Richardson. Cambridge, Massachusetts: Harvard University Press, 2012. 334 pages. Pragmatism. Conceived as a political option it could suggest a callous cynicism. In the spiritual register an agnosticism. An agnosticism, in fact, of many kinds that weds the uncertainties of experience to a thoughtless…
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