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What Does the Monster Want?
(Talk given on April 1st, 2021, at Miami-Dade College, West Campus; part of the Literary Fest program produced by the Literature Club) The question that I want to pose today is “What Does the Monster Want?” It’s a question that I’m borrowing from a far more famous or perhaps infamous question that was posed by…
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Death Drive
What we saw on January 6, 2021, was a shocking political sight. We saw Trump-supporting mobs break into the US Capitol. We saw the looting of Congressional paraphernalia. We saw a man proudly sit in the office of the Speaker of the House, his feet up on her desk, looking defiant. From what reporting says,…
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Citrus/Being
Poetry has often been difficult for me to understand. Of all the literary arts, it’s the one closest to the divine, to incantation. At the same time, poetry can be very mundane. The poems by William Carlos Williams or Frank O’Hara are beautiful because they’re so simple, because they’re so earthy. What all good poets…
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Gender and Sexuality in Judith Butler
Divine, drag queen (Bellaphon) (Talk given on March 4th, 2020, at Miami-Dade College, West Campus; part of the “Fluid Lines: Philosophy of Gender and Sexuality Symposium” series sponsored by The Humanities Edge) Before we get into it, and for the sake of clarity, let us define some terms that I will use with some interchangeability…
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The Factory and the Gaze of the Animal
(Talk given on November 5th, 2020, at Miami-Dade College, West Campus, online; part of the “Dare to Dream in the Anthropocene” series sponsored by The Humanities Edge) The Factory and the Gaze of the Animal Let me begin this talk by remembering an old video I saw of a hyena devouring a wildebeest alive. I…
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A Single Man
The story is an existentialist plight. George, the college professor, tries to deal with the loss of his partner, Jim. The film is absurdly beautiful. Directed by Tom Ford, it shows us what is cinematographically possible when a man with an eye for visual detail writes, produces, and directs an adaptation of a very subtle…
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On “L’étourdit”
One of the things that most fascinate me about “the West” is its occasional patience or even craving for texts that are inscrutable and difficult. Purposefully so, the authors of these texts have been fully aware that their readership would be small, that the feeling that they would inspire in their readers would not be…
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Love I
I remember one night, as I lay next to my girlfriend of the time who was already asleep, that the thought of something bad happening to her came to me suddenly. I remember that it gave me utter dread. It was the first time I had experienced that regarding someone who wasn’t an immediate member…
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On Difficulty
A criticism I sometimes get is that my writing is complex, sometimes too technical. My few readers find difficult words here and there and I lose them. But what exactly is it that loses them? Is it the diction or the sentence structure or the weightiness of the content of the sentence? I find this…
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The Mask
In his first Seminar, Lacan said that the ideal of psychoanalysis is “to render the subject capable of sustaining the analytic dialogue, to speak neither too early, nor too late” (p. 3, 1988, Norton). It is an early statement that makes me wonder about the degree to which psychoanalysis could have been successful at all:…
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Ruminations 