Readings in twentieth-century European thought, with recurring attention to Foucault and his interlocutors. These essays test what theories of power and subjectivity can do when pressed against particular texts. The aim throughout is to treat concepts as tools with specifiable limits.
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.
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.
Ciaran 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.
Reading 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.