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 theoryAn Intellectual Memoir of Early Graduate School: I reconstruct my early graduate training as an uneven education in subordinating theory to evidence.
ProfessionSartre’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 theoryLeonard 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 theoryCiaran Cronin argues that Bourdieu offers a more actionable account of power than Foucault, but his critique demands a normative framework neither thinker claims to provide and misreads Foucault as foreclosing resistance; the two are better combined than opposed.
Critical theoryRoyalist nostalgia in the Iranian diaspora and hawkish U.S. Iran policy operate as mutually reinforcing formations, each lending the other moral warrant and institutional durability; a genealogical reading exposes the contingency and silences that sustain this co-produced longing.
Diaspora politicsThompson and Koselleck offer mirror-image narratives of temporal modernity: Thompson traces a compression of plural premodern rhythms into disciplinary clock time, Koselleck a proliferation of horizons as eschatology dissolves. The divergence is methodological.
HistoriographySurveying four monographs on colonial violence in French Algeria (Brower, Sessions, Surkis, Cole), this essay shows how each abandons the colonizer/colonized binary for a view of violence as plural in logic, and treats metropole and colony as a single analytic field.
HistoriographyReading Snapchat through Preciado’s pharmacopornographic regime and Steyerl’s critique of linear perspective, this essay argues that the app’s ephemeral, haptic architecture works as a biopolitical dispositif, exteriorizing subjectivity and folding self-produced erotic imagery into biocapital.
Critical theory