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

For readers who are unfamiliar with the life and work of Regis Debray, he was a prodigious student of Louis Althusser at the École normale supérieure in Paris in the late 1950s who went on to teach philosophy at the Universidad de Havana in the mid-1960s, where, in close association with Fidel Castro and Che Guevara, he became a prominent theorist of and participant in Latin American revolutionary movements. In 1967, he published Revolution in the Revolution? Armed Struggle a

He wouldn’t shut up about the oboe. I’m not one to point out other people’s mistakes, so I was willing to let it slide. At first, I mean. Oboe, clarinet, what’s the difference, right? Who cares if he thought there was an oboe in the orchestra? Who cares if the wind instrument in question was really a clarinet? But he wouldn’t let it go. He kept going on about the oboe. “No wonder the sound has so much body,” he said, exalted. “Do you know the difference between a mediocre orc

It’s true that he sat in the folding chair, immobile for hours, days perhaps, in the backyard. It didn’t take long for the blue green moss to appear on his pant legs, with their deep creases and striations, their constellations of scars, like tree bark, one is almost tempted to say. The birds hid twigs in his beard for future use, little pieces of string, once a twist tie even. Complicit, he cast his gaze over their heads, over the ridge too, anchored it somewhere in the dist

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