The shopping mall has a special relation to time. Even if the individual retail spaces change hands countless times, and are constantly refurnished and updated, they cannot escape the obsolescence of the whole.  From the start, they become marked by the ruination peculiar to the suburbs: nothing will break off or fall apart, nothing will turn derelict and dilapidated, everything  will remain in working order. No dust will accumulate. [...]

What if every conversation added a chapter to the descriptive grammar of the language. What if instead of deep or high structure, each utterance provided a model of structure for the next, so that only by listening and responding, imitating and distorting–not by learning or habit–language became speakable and hearable. “I hear you” would then [...]

The utopia of high school is the musical; of adult life (marriage, work), humor.
The essence of the high school musical is transformation constrained within a logic of the typical. (Sandy in Grease is exemplary in this regard)
College, like philosophy, is its own utopia: hence only the cinematic representation of college life is possible, whereas on [...]

There is something slightly paradoxical about the gentle warmth that radiates out from electronic devices.  Electronics is supposed to be cool: The heat — a byproduct of other operations, a sign of an irreducible inefficiency — betrays this coolness.
Can a semiconductor be a superconductor? This is a question for physicists. But this much, at least, [...]

The problem of living, and of growing up, always comes down to this: how can we remain true to our youth. Or rather: how can youth remain true to itself.
With each new generation the problem assumes a new form, and sometimes history involves tectonic shifts of a greater order. Every past answer is a preemptive strike [...]

The essence of popular culture is wit: that startling conjunction of things that do not seem to belong together. The dialectic of popular culture would be a dialectics to the second power: the reason of the phenomenal is not its hidden reason, but its manifest unreason. There is no moment of dissolution inherent to the structures [...]

Achieving the feeling of having already read something is indispensable for reading it well. This sounds more paradoxical than it is. The first time you read a text, there is an anxiety that arises from not knowing its parameters, not knowing, in short, how much it will require of you. Every text could be the [...]

On the absurd imperative to be untrue (the demand for difference, or toward a truly historical scholarship):
Be untrue!
1. To be untrue to this imperative is to be true to it. In the first intuition, this is correct (since to be true is to be untrue to the imperative); on the second intuition it is the [...]

Granted that violence follows upon flight, that violence is a flight from flight: this only suggests the absolute, dire necessity of a critique of flight — of thinking a prospect of flight that does not simply reproduce violence, that does not produce violence as the flight from flight. We may even concede that no actual [...]

Traditionally, a metaphysics of morals manifested itself in the concept of flight, if not in every actual flight. Flight was flight from God and flight from the self — fugere se ipsum, whose remedy for Augustine was carried out in his confession: “retorquebas me ad me ipsum” — I turned myself back to myself, which [...]

Just as the critique of violence seeks to articulate the interior structure of violence, ultimately seeking to think violence (which has always been understood by reason in the only way reason can understand things: as the relation of means to end) in terms of the relation, no longer thinkable by reason, between a pure, non-violent [...]

At least one addendum to the critique of violence is necessary: a critique of fleeing. For it would be a mistake to think that history (or evolution) has only to do with modalities of violence (law-creating, law-preserving, and law-destroying), or, for that matter, with law. It is only from the perspective of law-creating violence that [...]

The idea is not the ground or measure of experience, but its illumination. There is, however, no simple correspondence between experience and the illumination of experience.  The illumination of experience is a decision that at once belongs to experience, and transcends it.   Every experience awaits illumination, and yet what it awaits is not absent, but [...]

When you give an infant a pacifier for the first time, it seems like a miracle. Suddenly there is nothing to worry about, for parent or child. The mystery of its cries, the ineptitude of the parent, the existential terror of mortality reflected in natality, the political terror of an as yet totally undominated life–all [...]

“Finally, it’s time to write and think this body across the infinite distance that makes it ours, that brings it to come from a site more remote than any of our thoughts: the exposed body of the world’s population. (Whence a necessity still completely indecipherable: this body calls for popular writing, popular thinking.)” [Jean-Luc Nancy, [...]

Lest we forget, the roman heritage of this word brings with it a republican politics of the throng, the crowd, the multitude, envisioned as as unruly, politically potentially ruinous, but always susceptible to repression by means of the brightest spectacle, caesar’s golden crown, crucifiction, or the crimson blood spattering the floor of the circus maximus. [...]

The public venture was a flop. No one submitted. In an act of desperation,  digging up ghosts from the past, we even submitted, ourselves. This still could not save us.  But enough. We leave the public arena, which we never entered, with our dignity intact.  Back to solitude… or duality.  
If you feel that an injury [...]

There once was a girl who skipped too many steps. Her friends couldn’t play hopscotch with her anymore.