Synecdoche

“Does society need a mandatory time-out?” asks an article in The Atlantic. I am drawn to the notion of the Sabbath, albeit secular, for a number of reasons, not just thanks to my recent conversion to Judaism. ⇰ Continue Reading

The gestation of this post revolves around the realization that in a few weeks I am going to have to turn in a respectably well thought out, cogent paper applying Jacques Derrida’s not-method of deconstruction to a literary text of my choosing. Until recently I have been consumed by something approaching intellectual panic regarding both the choice of text, and something more fundamental: the purpose of deconstructing a literary text, given Derrida’s own thinking surrounding différance and deconstruction, namely the concurrent lack of origin and endpoint. If deconstruction can never arrive at a conclusion, why begin? ⇰ Continue Reading

Sometimes Plato reads like a Classical version of a “Casual Encounters” ad on Craigslist. ⇰ Continue Reading