Everything you wanted
to learn at university
but didn't.

Wait, a radical politics of melancholy? Correct me if I’m wrong, but doesn’t sadness tend to be politically unproductive, reactionary even. Cut off from the world, cut off from others, the melancholic person fixates on pain, loss, and defeat. Isn’t this why we say that sadness is often self-indulgent? Isn’t this why we use words like ‘wallow’? Attachment to a lost object, an expired past, leads to damage to the ego, a debilitating loss of agency, a type of paralysis, and an i

Things are starting to come unstuck. We are no longer speaking about the historical past in the same way. Here and there, little slippages. Added together, they constitute a qualitative shift. Situated within the history of how we speak about political violence in The Southern Cone, they signal the advent of a new sensibility. This shouldn’t be surprising, considering recent historical and political developments, namely the dramatic surge of far-right governments that followe

1. The overeducated janitor sensed that the end was near. He felt it in the same way that you can feel the closeness of a wall without actually touching it, with your shoulder, for example, just millimeters away. And, the overeducated janitor had read enough novels to know how it ends. The room, at the end of the story, is empty. Empty and tidy. So tidy, in fact, that it feels like it is no longer lived in. The bed is carefully made. The clothes are neatly folded, nestled in

It had been over a month since the overeducated janitor had last checked his email. What was the point? Nobody was writing him back. More than a year had passed since he left The Almost Ivy League University, and he still hadn’t heard back from any of the seventy-three teaching and research jobs that he had applied to. His research grants had all been rejected due to a lack of institutional affiliation. He tried to defend his trade as an independent researcher, but, from the