harakaat

in the arabic script, it is said, the vowels are not normally marked. an english transcription of an arabic phrase (…) has to insert the missing vowels. but this way of putting it is misleading. the vowel is a peculiar european invention, and is not something ‘missing’ from arabic. arabic words are formed by what [...]

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glaenzen

karyn ball, “wanted, dead or distracted: on ressentiment in history, philosphy [sic], and everyday life”, cultural critique 52 (autumn 2002), 249:
in his consideration of temporal experience in augustine’s confessions, paul ricoeur reads book 11 as a lament over man’s distance from god. the eternity of the judeo-christian god is portrayed as a transcendent substance, an [...]

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the family and the daemon

in order to complete fulfill this turn in these writings, this cycling around and orbiting of the ibrahimic (“with the names of the abrahamic, and even within its silences, the ‘abrahamic phrase’, almost a formula, ‘judaism, christianity, islam’, recurs in proximity to names that recall so-called empirical regions and religions. thus, it is also of history, [...]

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metonymy intersecting augustine

another month-and-some left at this particular grindstone, in sha allah.
i refer metonymy a lot, over and above the other three master-tropes. i’ll leave aside the reasons for now and will instead post some comments largely drawn from a reading class i took last winter, when a professeur and i met every week to discuss the genealogy [...]

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white-tower-tale-telling

(answer: i don’t know.
i pursued the individualized degree with a general sense that i’d like to read and write on performative textuality. this i understood to mean the intersection of butler’s insights on performative acts, foucault on relational power, derrida on citation, mcluhan on mechanical media, and frye on the anagogical universe of texts, all [...]

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east of the rockies, west of the rest

i like jeffrey foucault, and fred eaglesmith, and kris delmhorst, and corb lund, and gordon lightfoot, and the smell of baked bread, and working under the sun, and white curtains with red geraniums in kitchen windows, and plaid shirts. and i like fencing, and feeding animals, and even cleaning chickenhouse; i like the wind in [...]

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mid-knight confession

here the tired begins once more. once more because to speak of beginnings after entrance into past present, present present, future present is itself an echo (and) loaded with nostalgia.
last push to the end. a first push, ironically, to an end. am looking forward to writing (some of) these essays.
and then summer. work, outside / [...]

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foam on the sea

i think we can agree that civilizational thought is one of the more insidious and dangerous aspects of cultural apperception. we are familiar with inside/outside divisions, with exclusionary mechanisms, and can probably go further to say that undoing civilizational identification, as performed by huntington and lewis, is one of the more radical oppositions that should [...]

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calypso

beginning, always beginning:
the desire to finish once and for all, or to be done with definitively, is a legacy of the western logos, promising finite transcendence but also a new, infinitizing start; …terminization is as much a myth as origin, offering the narcissistic comfort that goes along with closure…
- avital ronell, epigraph to “introduction: declinations [...]

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after the linguistic turn

there is, i wrote, theory that is dry and self-absorbed and nothing. but there is also theory that makes me laugh aloud late at night, these moments of recognition.
what of it if, in the name of islam, there is at work a “hypercritical rationality”, one that does not turn away from what may at least resemble [...]

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