In Case You Missed It

Excerpts from writings I posted or published elsewhere

This blog is too young to do a proper year-in-review, and in any case I have perhaps done enough navel-gazing to last most readers a while. But I wanted to take the opportunity presented by the conventions of the year end to highlight some writing from other venues that I’m especially proud of — complete with blockquotes of my favorite parts!

Never Break the Chain: On Living Amongst the Ruins (An und für sich, January 2, 2025)

Mass literacy is a kind of infrastructure, and like all forms of infrastructure in our neoliberal and now potentially post-neoliberal world, it has been allowed to crumble. Without a rapid course correction that appears to be nowhere on the horizon, we are headed down a path where many future generations are going to be gleaning from our scraps, because they have been deprived of the resources and knowledge they need to match our achievements. Who knows how long people will look back on the golden age of the Twentieth Century like medieval Europeans looked back on Roman times? As history shows us, it can be a long time.

Law and Justice (An und für sich, February 18, 2025)

We may be seeming to enter a new phase with the total brazen lawlessness of Trump 2.0. But I think it is, instead, the natural next step in the dialectic. Law shorn of legitimacy is already a kind of force, an inert brute fact — and so it should not surprise us that it eventually gives way to overt force. When law that has become nothing but a tissue of arbitrary technicalities, is it surprising that someone would eventually treat the concept of law itself as one huge annoying technicality?

Turbulence (An und für sich, February 23, 2025)

For a long time, I have been encouraging people to consider whether George W. Bush was even worse than Trump, but in a few short weeks Trump has demolished my case. Bush was an evil president using the power of the state to do evil things. Trump has effectively abolished the state. We do not have laws. We do not have a government. We certainly don’t have a Congress and we barely have courts. But in an important sense, we also don’t have a president. We have the irritable whims of two billionaires [Musk and Trump], handling domestic and foreign policy, respectively, and we have a bunch of psychos in charge of more detailed policy portfolios. The goal is not to change public policy, but to render public policy impossible. The goal is not to transform American society, but to destroy it completely, to destroy everything that makes it possible to call this great and terrible nation a human society.

Twin Peaks Bombs the American Dream (Critical Star Trek Studies, May 18, 2025)

It’s not about saving some nostalgic vision of America, not about retrieving some lost past, but about blowing up the whole project, which—for all its undisputed charm and appeal, for all the moments of real human value it enabled—is founded on an unspeakable evil. I think we can see this shift of valance in one of the most upsetting scenes from The Return, namely the hit-and-run in which Richard Horne (later revealed to be the offspring of BOB/Evil Cooper and Audrey) kills a young boy. We have seen this intersection before in Fire Walk With Me, in a scene where MIKE (the one-armed man) pulls up alongside Leland and Laura’s car and screams at them. The site where some very very specific plotlines and characters intersected has become the site of the most quotidian horror of the American way of life, a car accident. That anonymous suffering—the boy is never named—is absorbed seamlessly into the power grid that JUDY feeds on. No character is there to notice this crucial “clue.” It’s just another day in America. The boy’s death is produced by the most basic infrastructure of our life, the automobile and the power line.

The Thing Itself (An und für sich, May 22, 2025)

I can only report that I find [foreign language] work uniquely satisfying. A good morning foreign-language session makes me feel energized, in a way I now recognize as parallel to my feeling when I get done with a session on the rowing machine. I love entering that intellectual flow state, and I love seeing the structure and nuances of the other language. I love pondering what resists translation. And above all, I love encountering the thing itself, the original text, dwelling in it, meditating on it — simply for its own sake.

ChatGPT is Going to Kill God (An und für sich, July 27, 2025)

For Assmann, what monotheism does is not primarily or most importantly to reduce the number of gods, but to introduce a new kind of god — an exclusive God, one in relation to whom all other gods are false. A crucial technology for stabilizing the claims of this exclusive God is of course the written scriptural text, which remains a durable deposit even as day-to-day religious practice inevitably drifts away from the strict demands of the original revelation. The monotheistic God, in contrast to previous pantheons with their loosey-goosey translatability and porosity and their ever-shifting body of mythical tales, is a God of the letter because he is a God of law.

So if ChatGPT destroys literacy and law, then ChatGPT is going to kill God. By this I don’t mean that the bearded guy in the sky is going to be found dead of a gunshot wound to the chest, but that monotheistic religion as we have traditionally understood it will not be able to function in a post-literacy regime.

The Franchise Problem (Asia Art Archive: Like a Fever, September 25, 2025)

I once jokingly asked on social media whether Virgil’s Aeneid, which is a later sequel to Homer’s Iliad and Odyssey, is “canon” for the Homer Franchise. Among many humorous replies, I received one serious one: There is no set canon for pre-modern works. It is up to the individual author which previous stories, if any, they wish to treat as binding for their own writing. Virgil chose to regard Homer as “canon” for his own epic, and later, Dante treated both of them as “canon” for The Divine Comedy—but John Milton, for example, did not regard Dante as “canonical” for Paradise Lost, even though he does refer back to mythological traditions from Homer and Virgil. Only under capitalism, where particular stories and fictional worlds are subject to property rights and the owner can dictate who gets to tell new stories and under which terms, does the question of a clearly defined “canon” binding for all contributors to a franchise become relevant.

What Have I Been Doing All My Life? A Response (Oxford Literary Review Supplement, December 17, 2025)

[For me, the term “freedom”] refers to the indisputable, irreducible fact that human beings act in surprising and unaccountable ways. By this I do not mean to imply that freedom is a form of pure randomness or spontaneity—in fact, I believe that it is precisely our capacity for reasoned deliberation that allows us to interrupt the instinctual sequences that make up our evolutionary heritage. For the sake of political analysis, however, the important thing about this notion of freedom is that it proves that no project of total political control can ever succeed. My critical analysis of the Christian tradition shows that even the most radical vision of total control, predestinarian monotheism, cannot help but testify to the irreducibility of creaturely freedom, which resists God’s providential plan from the very first instant of creation through the endless wastes of an infernal eternity. If even the almighty God cannot secure complete submission, then neither can the program of neoliberal governance via the passive-aggressive nudge, nor the Silicon Valley aspiration to total algorithmic manipulation of human behaviour, nor even the Trumpist attempt at domination through a kind of perversely mocking coercion. All three projects have done tremendous damage, and the latter two look set to do even more. But the irreducible fact of freedom—a force so strong that not even the gates of hell can prevail against it—means that their ultimate failure is ontologically guaranteed.

As for the world that emerges from that failure, there is equally no guarantee that it will be better. The task of making it so is our unique privilege and responsibility as free human beings.