Current Obsessions ...
"Knowledge comes only in lightning flashes. The text is the long roll of thunder that follows."
Walter Benjamin, The Arcades Project (1999)
Topos
(Short Monograph, in-progress)
On space, place, and the architectures of thought.
Tracing an Itinerary of the Native Informant
(Journal Article, under peer-review)
On mediation, representation, and epistemic authority.
Catastrophic Totality: Lukács, the Frankfurt School, and the Afterlife of Immanence
(Journal Article, peer-reviewed, in-progress)
On the persistence of totality after its demise.
Janus-Faced Cosmopolitics, including the case of Singapore and some Counter-Readings
(Literature Review, in-progress)
On cosmopolitanism's divided inheritance.
"Black Square", Kazimir Malevich (1915)
Space is not something that faces man. It is neither an external object nor an inner experience." - Martin Heidgegger, Poetry, Language,, Thought (1971)
Moving between phenomenology, structuralism, poststructuralism, and contemporary theory, this monograph traces the shifting fortunes of topos as both philosophical category and critical metaphor. It follows the ways space becomes place, place becomes relation, and relation becomes thought.
"African/American", Kara Walker (1998)
“To speak means to be in a position to use a certain syntax, to grasp the morphology of this or that language, but it means above all to assume a culture.” - Frantz Fanon, Black Skins, White Masks (1967)
Beginning with Spivak's native informant and extending through Lazarus, Brown, Sørensen, and contemporary postcolonial criticism, this article follows the problem of mediation across a series of colonial and postcolonial encounters. At stake are the figures who speak, translate, represent, and become represented.
"Movement in Squares", Bridget Riley (1961)
"The true is the whole." - G. W. F. Hegel, Phenomenology of Spirit (1977)
Through Lukács, Hegel, Adorno, Horkheimer, Martin Jay, Lacan, Derrida, and contemporary critical theory, this article examines the strange afterlife of totality within traditions that repeatedly seek to overcome it. Rather than disappearing, totality returns as the concealed horizon of modern immanent thought.
"World Trade Center", Hiroshi Sugimoto (1997)
"The peoples of the earth have entered in varying degrees into a universal community, and it has developed to the point where a violation of rights in one part of the world is felt everywhere." - Immanuel Kant, Perpetual Peace (1795)
Bringing Kant, Robbins, Appadurai, Appiah, Balibar, and contemporary cosmopolitan thought into dialogue, this review examines the tensions between universality and exclusion, hospitality and boundary, openness and belonging. Particular attention is given to Singapore as a site through which competing cosmopolitan imaginaries may be read.
More Obsessions ...
"The life of the mind is not the life that shrinks from the negative, but one that endures it."
G. W. F. Hegel, Phenomenology of Spirit (1807)
The Luminous Academy of Lagado
(Monograph, in-progress)
On pedagogy, absurdity, and the republic of letters.
After Transgression
(Monograph, Forthcoming)
What remains when transgression exhausts itself.?
The Bicentennial and the Treatment of Memory in Singapore
(Journal Article, currently shelved)
On memory, commemoration, and historical inheritance.
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Illustration: "The Engine", Gulliver's Travels, Jonathan Swift
"Writing is a kind of machine, a play of differences with no simple origin" - Jacques Derrida, Of Grammatology (1976)
Taking its title from Swift's Academy of Lagado, this monograph examines the strange lives of institutions, intellectual fashions, pedagogical experiments, and scholarly communities. Equal parts satire, criticism, and reflection, it asks what becomes of learning when knowledge loses sight of its object.
"The Incredulity of Saint Thomas", Caravaggio (1602)
“Transgression carries the limit right to the limit of its being; transgression forces the limit to face the fact of its imminent disappearance." - Michel Foucault, Language, Counter-Memory, Practice (1977)
TBA
"Approaching Shadow", Ho Fan (1954)
"Memory attaches itself to sites, whereas history attaches itself to events" - Pierre Nora, "Between Memory and History: Les Lieux de Mémoire" (1989)
Drawing on recent philosophy of memory and contemporary debates in public history, this article examines the 2019 Bicentennial commemorations and the competing narratives through which Singapore remembers its past. Currently shelved.