The Uncanny John Mearsheimer

. Popularly understood as something eerie, strange, and supernatural, the uncanny in Freud retains that sense of the strange, yet adds to it the contrary feeling of the familiar. This clash of contrarieties is profoundly unsettling. [T]his uncanny element is actually nothing new or strange, but something that was long familiar to the psyche and […]

The End of Memoir II: Allison Benedikt and Life before Thinking

(Yesterday: The End of Memoir, part I) Though he did it not well, Jose Antonio Vargas, in “My Life as an Undocumented Immigrant,” had a compelling reason to write. He is not merely affected by illegal immigration: he is, individually, a story of illegal immigration. He has lived the subterfuge, the fiction, and the uncertain […]

The Personal Is Not Political

I have been traveling on the East Coast all week, and will be for a while longer, which is why blogging has been light, except for my definitive statement on postcolonialism, the literary canon, and Newt Gingrich, rendering the first two no longer necessary subjects of discussion and, with any justice, ending the puny political […]

Facing National Wrongs

Over the past several days Jeffrey Goldberg has been blogging about what I like to refer to as recalcitrant Southern boobs – the kind of people who display the Confederate Stars and Bars, who advocate and maintain that flag as any part of a state symbol, or who argue that there was anything honorable in […]

The Hypocrisy and Bullshit of Glenn Greenwald: I

One of the most salient features of our culture is that there is so much bullshit. Everyone knows this. Each of us contributes his share. But we tend to take the situation for granted. Most people are rather confident of their ability to recognize bullshit and to avoid being taken in by it. So the […]