Calling Abraxas

Once again, earth opens its jaws,suspending reality in mid-air.Shops buzz, leaves fall, and planes roar overhead;time stubbornly sticks in place—only metaphysical questions remain. As receding planets provided the ancientsno hope for recovering what was lost,all the streaming tears and piercing wailswon’t reverse yesterday’s tide.They release the pressure of energy trapped—grief’s entropy. Once…

TimeI don’t know what happens tomorrow,and that’s sacred to me.Tomorrow is saturated—bursting with possibilities. So manythings could happen—many things I could never imagineare possible. Not knowing excites me—the mystery that tomorrow is.It delights me; I anticipate.I want more tomorrows, more questions,more possible heartbreaks and unknown disasters,more love, more aches, more friendships,…

What is “free speech?” Of course, there are definitions, and some people (especially libertarian weirdos) memorize particular definitions, but something about the idea of free speech is often overlooked. Just the phrase is contradictory. Why? Well, first, what’s speech, if not communication by way of language? Already, speech can’t be fully free; one must use some language or another. Moreover,…

Dialectical materialism Like any methodology, dialectical materialism encompasses both ontological claims about the nature of reality and epistemological claims about how we can know that reality. Its practitioners assert the primacy of material conditions—concrete social processes like labor, production, and reproduction—over ideas. Rather than being seen as independent forces, human thought…

Nothing’s sacred, anymore, andI suppose it’s thrilling.A long time ago, peoplekilled each other for God,but we don’t believe in God, anymoreso we kill each other for fun,for anger, for sadness, forthe thrill of killing one another.We don’t believe in humanity,so why not kill humanity?What the fuck is a “human,” anyway?An ape? A description in a biology book? lolKill ‘em with kindness;kill ‘em…

She would cut off a piece of herselfand hand it to you. She wants to be the clean white towelbeneath your razor. And, he is an ocean raging—trapped inside a mason jar.

Imane Khelif, Immediate Transcendence, and Fascism

In the first line of a recent article, titled, “I Said Democrats Should Pander More, and Kamala Is Delivering,” Josh Barro unabashedly confesses to being a dogmatist. His article responds to Kamala Harris’s announcement of an economic plan, part of which is meant to address grocery stores’ price-gouging. Oh! You hadn’t heard that grocery stores have been making record profits by exploiting the…

Objects To conceive of an object is to conceive of a boundary between, on the one hand, the work of more-or-less autonomous forces and, on the other hand, forces that might operate against external forces. In other words, an object is an object partly by being relatively autonomous with respect to the world around it; an object isn’t a transparent, permeable region of the world through which…

            This document came about because of a public (however small that public might’ve been) Twitter conversation. I lamented that people fail to read a great deal of very useful political epistemology literature. As evidence, I (not realizing that what I took to be an inconsequential complaint would unexpectedly turn) pointed to what I saw as a disappointing volume—that which Michael…

Some of my writing: “ Modern Dialectical Intensification and Fascist Compensation”

I think I was four years old. For my birthday, two different people gave me the same action figure. My family decided to test me. You know those experiments they run to see how long it takes for the child to eat the candy on the table? They told me that they’d exchange one of the action figures for a different one if I didn’t open them both. Of course, I was a small child. The point of the…

I met my friend from Turkey to attend this philosophical cinetalk with the director and some philosophers. Two short, kind of postmodernist films. On the way, my friend had been mad at me.             I’d left the apartment, and she’d called my name. I saw her. She looked beautiful in the twilight—she wore a black, sleeveless top and an olive skirt down past her knee—but she was angry. “Do you…

A soul is an analog—a whisp around you or me—liberty to all—packed and made compulsory. An individual withoutold customs to comply with,made antilegally devout—the law of the enlightened. Groups of “individuals,”walled in freedom-prisons—alone-together rituals—grateful in grey hedonism. Smiling faces, endless kindness,a wealth of traces of accruing prices,solitary waste in endless…

A creamy cloud—translucent in front of the three-quarter moon in twilight—like a sliding paper doorin front of a glowing lamp.Her favorite thing is when moonlight sparkles on the beach-mirror.She said what matters most is time spent with the ones she lovesand learning harder lessons ever more deeply.A man in Istanbul knows the five things everyone needs.A fresh, fuzzy kitten pounces on electrical…

(This text represents my argument developed in conversation with my friend, Phikria.) Authenticity is the concept of nothingness’s fullness. Why “nothingness?” Authenticity entails the supposition that, beneath the dirty surface of things, there lies a quiet, still, harmonious, ineffable being that contradicts all our ways of conceiving the material presence of reality as we experience it. One…

Maybe I’m a heartbreak hotel,but don’t pretend I was cruel to you.Don’t send Leonard Cohen songs,don’t ask what happens to the heart. Don’t we want a little tenderness this time?We fought around a healing wound—the silken bandage begged for mercy.The required patience constituted a crime. If I stole too many momentsand locked away accrued caresses,when we were thinking houses, deeds,then you…