Marginalia

Notes from the margins,

written hastily.

Marginalia is writing from the margins of academia, from the debris of discipline in dissolution, from the ruins of a dismantled university, from the wreckage of a profession. From academia, it takes its research methodologies, its theoretical frameworks, its community of past scholars, and its rigor of argumentation, but it discards the empty formalism, the careerism, the plagiary, the pageantry, the high humorlessness, the proscription of the first person, and the cult of the signifier over the signified.

Marginalia also refers to the margins of a text, to the rough drafts, the outtakes, the B sides, the footnotes, the offhand comments, the rough edges, the chipped corners, the digressions, the rants and other spare parts. You will find all these orphans here, sleeping under the same roof, a collection of hitherto homeless non-fiction pieces. This section shifts attention away from research as a final product, squeaky clean and perfectly packaged, and places it instead upon writing as a process, with all the necessary missteps, the meandering, the striving towards without a guarantee of arrival. Isn’t that usually how we stumble into new territory? Isn’t that usually how breakthroughs come about?

From here, we venture out and will just have to see where it takes us.

Mourning and Melancholy, Pitfalls and Political Potential

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

6 hours ago

Revolution Reimagined, Fifty Years Down the Line

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

Apr 2