The Post-Political Response and the Splitting in Time

Tony Perez’s Cubao-Kalaw Kalaw-Cubao (1995) begins after a gruesome crime. Some terrible event—criminal rapes kid, criminal kills kid, cop chases criminal, criminal kills cop, criminal kills self (xii)—is briefly sketched in the prologue that serves as “a short history before the novel begins” (prologue title) (xii). The novel itself (separated by a section title, “Kid,

Zone of Social Abandonment, Constructed, (In)Visible

[João Biehl and Catarina in Vita; image by Torben Eskerod from the book] There is a place outside of Porto Alegre in Brazil where families leave behind “undesirable members” (14) (mostly sick) to wait for their death. It is called Vita, what João Biehl, in an ethnographic work, describes as a “zone of social abandonment.”

Homo Sapiens 10.1: Rational Complexity of Aggression

Fellows, Friends, and Others, I am sending another one of my reports from the field. As stipulated, I am using the species’ own mode of transmission, their own semiology—what is referred to in these parts as “language” (though, technically speaking, they use many “languages” organized in a similar way as a system (i.e. as “language”),

Five Years On, Four Decades Later: Morality of Our Cause

[The New York Stock Exchange on Wall Street; Image from the New York Times] [Continues "Blood on Our Hands"] Roughly four decades earlier, in the midst of another war, the major newspapers performed an act against the government analogous to the exposés we witnessed of late. In 1971, the New York Times and the Washington

Five Years On, Four Decades Later: Blood On Our Hands

[Image from masternewmedia.org] [Continues "The Surge"] As the war effort was going on abroad, another war was being waged at home: the war of information, with the news media at the forefront. Frontline chronicles how the mainstream media was used by the White House to help build its case for war in Iraq. The media,

Five Years On, Four Decades Later: The Surge

[Image from University of Texas Library] [Continues "Record of a Neocon War"] The President did change the strategy. Belatedly towards the end of his term, perhaps concerned more for his legacy than the war’s consequences for the country (much less for conditions in the “free world,” much less for conditions in the Middle East, much

Filipino Revolutions

[A painting by Filipino Revolutionary artist Juan Luna, The Spolarium] Things have of late been stirring in the Philippines. The current President, Gloria Macapagal Arroyo (also referred to as GMA), is being challenged by a string of protests to step down from the post. Arroyo ascended to the Presidency in 2001 (same day as George

The Economic System and the Demoralization of the Humanities

It has been a common thing in academic circles to talk about the travails of scholars-in-training (i.e. graduate students) in the field of the humanities, most notably in the “superfluous” concentrations of philosophy, literature, history, anthropology . . . (where scholars-in-training spend at least seven years of their “most productive lives” (their twenties) reading books

American Polyarchy!

[Bartholomäus Strobel's The Beheading of Saint John the Baptist] The current electoral season in America has been built up–especially on the Democratic side–by the mainstream media (as was also my impression) as one of the most exciting in recent history, where, after what seemed to be exceptionally dark days in American politics (that witnessed, among

Agency in Love

[Image from the movie version of Everything is Illuminated] [A review of the psychoanalytic ontology of the Symbolic, the Imaginary, the Real would be helpful in reading this post.] There’s this passage in Jonathan Safran Foer’s Everything is Illuminated that, in the midst of the romanticism that permeates the book, stands out perhaps as so