Some thoughts on some books 📚 open.substack.com/pub/thewaste...

“As something presupposed, reason and faith are abstract, empty representations; for them to become concrete they must be explicated and viewed as unfamiliar” (Hegel, History of Philosophy, II.132).

On Hegel's mixed metaphors, the mismatch of word and image, and making the best of abstraction. tinyurl.com/3s4y2s48

A new essay on Robert Burton's Anatomy of Melancholy, the conflict of reason and imagination, and Burton's attempts to escape the universal folly that his work diagnoses and performs. tinyurl.com/4hsw4aux

A new essay on Robert Burton's Anatomy of Melancholy, the conflict of reason and imagination, and Burton's attempts to escape the universal folly that his work diagnoses and performs. tinyurl.com/4hsw4aux

A new essay on Gillian Rose’s final poetic works, unhappy consciousness, and the Pearl poet’s representations of the absolute. substack.com/home/post/p-...

A new essay on Gillian Rose’s final poetic works, unhappy consciousness, and the Pearl poet’s representations of the absolute. substack.com/home/post/p-...

In case you missed it -- a new essay on Gillian Rose, Arthurian myth, and the philosophy of shame: open.substack.com/pub/thewaste...

In case you missed it -- a new essay on Gillian Rose, Arthurian myth, and the philosophy of shame: open.substack.com/pub/thewaste...

meanwhile Greg @thewastedworld.bsky.social has a new blog up and running. Go and subscribe to that instead! bsky.app/profile/thew...

The Wasted World thewastedworld.substack.com?r=nfkpl&utm_...

A new essay on the contradictory duties of tragedy and the comedy of shame in Gillian Rose's Love's Work and the Middle English romance of Sir Gawain and the Green Knight: thewastedworld.com/2025/11/21/s...

A new essay on the contradictory duties of tragedy and the comedy of shame in Gillian Rose's Love's Work and the Middle English romance of Sir Gawain and the Green Knight: thewastedworld.com/2025/11/21/s...

The fragments, composed in parallel with the final drafts of Dialectic of Enlightenment (possibly outlines for its unwritten sequel), challenged everything I thought I knew about 1940s Critical Theory—been working on getting these ready to share for about a year!

Starting this Monday! -- My lecture series with the Melbourne School of Continental Philosophy: a semester-length reading of Hegel's Phenomenology of Spirit from cover to cover!

Honestly if there's any way that you could learn Hegel's Phenomenology, cover-to-cover in a lecture series guided by Greg (my nemesis) would be easily one of the best, most interesting, and most transformative. There are people who read Hegel for 80 years but they Can't Do What Greg Does.

Excited to announce my upcoming lecture series with the Melbourne School of Continental Philosophy: a semester-length reading of Hegel's Phenomenology of Spirit from cover to cover! mscp.org.au/courses/even...

Excited to announce my upcoming lecture series with the Melbourne School of Continental Philosophy: a semester-length reading of Hegel's Phenomenology of Spirit from cover to cover! mscp.org.au/courses/even...

no one believes me when I say Deleuze was a big fan of Negative Dialectics, but it’s right there at the crux of the critique of capitalism in the Geophilosophy chapter of “What is Philosophy?” (pp. 99-100)

French theory reads the Frankfurt School Foucault: Yes… the enlightenment *&* sociology—very ambivalent… Deleuze: Sure I’m doing Negative Dialectics. Habermas got lost after debate club & ended up in philosophy. Derrida: *Guy who’s only read Heidegger* Benjamin is giving me major Heidegger vibes

Just received from @umbrellaent.bsky.social — the 4K restoration of Wake in Fright, complete with the novel by Kenneth Cook, and a booklet of essays on the film (including a critical comparison of the book and film by yours truly)!

Very pleased to announce that I will be presenting a lecture series with the MSCP on Hegel's speculative thought -- including introductory forays into the Phenomenology, Logic, and Lectures on Fine Art. Starting on June 20th, in-person and online! mscp.org.au/courses/wint...

Get on Greg's course. you won't regret it (well ok it's Hegel, you'll gregret it a *little*, but not much).

Very pleased to announce that I will be presenting a lecture series with the MSCP on Hegel's speculative thought -- including introductory forays into the Phenomenology, Logic, and Lectures on Fine Art. Starting on June 20th, in-person and online! mscp.org.au/courses/wint...

If we want to better understand large language models, and what they are and aren’t capable of, we can look at earlier versions of the same technology – like Erasmian humanism ⁠

obsessed with middlemarch and I love the Virginia Woolf quote about it being a book for adults. rip queen, you would’ve loved having a letterboxd

posted a translation of Adorno’s letter to Scholem on his reactions to reading the Zohar—tying in Gnosis, Benjamin, Kafka, and yes an extended comparison between reading the Zohar for a sense of its “topology” & the search for goat-antelopes over mountainous terrain (Link below)

right part II is out: open.substack.com/pub/simonere...

as promised: translations of 5 polemics by Max Horkheimer (1933-1938), with two interludes on the critical theorist between history & theology & two appendices on dialectics during late Weimar & pre-WWII decline

Reading reviews like this, you'd think all conceptual problems could be solved by finding better words

"The lot of man is ceaseless labour, Or ceaseless idleness, which is still harder, Or irregular labour, which is not pleasant" (Eliot).

they should make hold music that is even louder and tinnier

The Waste Land, pt. II: A Game of Chess

January

This essay is excellent, and the material on Rose on the contradiction of Kant's transcendental method, leading into the hermeneutic trap of reduction of Hegel's method to simply lingustics, this is good fodder for the weird project I'm working on...

My go to man on all things Pynchon has been busy...

A quick thread of recent publications -- on Gillian Rose's speculative poetics of philosophical style, Pynchon's reckoning with the genesis of America's empire, and his short writings on the enchantments of literature. Links below...

This is the definitive David Lynch take to me newleftreview.org/sidecar/post...

Burton’s Anatomy, I.306.

hey want to read something insane about Schelling’s argument for the philosophical (speculative) identity of philology & geology, & a translation of a “Report” he gave to this effect in 1811? Good news open.substack.com/pub/jamescra...

getting my substack up and running again (mostly a supplement to @crittheoryworkgrp.bsky.social projects, some history of philosophy & Schelling on the side)! open.substack.com/pub/jamescra...

wrote about the demons (ie how being a writer is only going to get worse and how terrified I am) open.substack.com/pub/thelater...

new simone writing about the minutae of religious law just dropped simonereadstexts.substack.com/p/on-second-...

tl;dr for my new line on “Frankfurt School” reception is: anyway the problem isn’t “their Anglophone reception” - it’s their reception! & that problem begins (& imo is most severe no matter how much nuance is spread over it) in W Germany. Their 1940s in the US are almost always botched!

Itinerary for 2025. You heard it here first. Don’t get left behind.

Program for the Melbourne School of Continental Philosophy has just dropped, and it's a beauty as ever. mscp.org.au/courses/summ...

What if a demon crept after you in your loneliest loneliness, and said to you: “This life, as you live it at present, and have lived it, you must live it once more, and also innumerable times.” Would you gnash your teeth and curse that demon or would you answer: “Happy New Year!”