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.
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Critical theory
4 postsReadings 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.
Posts tagged with Critical theory
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.
Historiography
3 postsEssays on how historians argue. The pieces gathered here examine the concepts historians use and the claims those concepts license. Reviews of recent scholarship appear alongside essays on temporality and comparison, with sustained interest in what separates a demonstration from a resemblance.
Posts tagged with Historiography
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.
Thompson 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.
Surveying 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.
Diaspora politics
1 postEssays on exile and the political life of displaced communities, with particular attention to the Iranian diaspora. The work here draws on my research into Iranian student activism in postwar France. It extends that research to contemporary formations, including the uses of nostalgia in diasporic political movements.
Posts tagged with Diaspora politics
Royalist 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.
Profession
1 postEssays on scholarly life and formation. This is where I write about graduate training and the craft of research. It is also where I reflect on an academic vocation pursued between history and theology.
Posts tagged with Profession
I reconstruct my early graduate training as an uneven education in subordinating theory to evidence.