Writing
Resemblance Is Not Structure
Historians routinely flatten analogy and homology into near-synonymy, but the two concepts make claims of fundamentally different kinds, and recovering the distinction changes what a historical argument can demonstrate and how far it can travel beyond the case at hand.
Critical theoryLearning to Think Slowly
An Intellectual Memoir of Early Graduate School: I reconstruct my early graduate training as an uneven education in subordinating theory to evidence.
ProfessionThe Politics of Sartre’s Grabuge
Sartre’s 1961 anecdote about rejecting Le Grabuge as a title for Les Temps modernes is no incidental aside but a compact demonstration of retotalization, showing how class position crystallizes in an act of naming and how refusing that name remade disposition into disciplined engagement.
Critical theoryFoucault’s Radical Historicism
Leonard D’Cruz asks whether Foucault’s radical historicism truly escapes transcendental philosophy or smuggles it back in through the historical a priori, omnipresent power, and subjectivation, arguing that naming this tension strengthens historicist critique rather than defeating it.
Critical theory