essays archive

observations, questions,
cracks i'm still sitting with.

The Grammar of Captivity

How Power Teaches the Trapped to Speak About the Trap
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Alone With the Same Fact

Power fears this reflexive moment. It fears the moment when knowledge ceases to be private property and becomes a common world.
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The Door Comes First

The unthinkable is often the unlivable and the first task of freedom may be to make another thought livable enough to be thought at all.
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The Permission to Err

When elites err, their failure is "complexity." When the excluded err, their failure is "unfitness." A subject who is never permitted to err publicly is never permitted to become mature. Their immaturity is preserved by the very system claiming to wait for it to end.
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The Politics of Distance

The powerless get judged at the scale of behavior. The powerful get excused at the scale of context. A poor person's mistake is character. A corporation's harm is a policy challenge.
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Despair as a Metaphysical Shortcut

"Despair kills every possibility, just to find safety in a dead end."
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