American Ecstatics: A Surfacing

Scholarship has to exemplify a love for each other, not just a love for an idea.

~ Linda Tuhiwai Smith, Massey University, June 30^th, 2020

New York in the 80s

Seeping into many an American writer’s romance with ideas is unworked-through “coloniality.”  Recently, I began to see this in myself.  I’m still trying to figure out what it means so that I can find my way during my time in Cleveland.  Coloniality infuses the ideas settlers absorb and which course through settler universities, too, and many scholars working in this country today grew up, as I did, in colonial conditions by way of such a mental swamp.  Coloniality is the quality of maintaining colonial relations through ideas and institutions.  In the United States of America, coloniality helps maintain ongoing settler colonization through ideological moves that rationalize, avoid, or erase it from public view.  Many of us folks who write books are unintentionally involved in coloniality and, since we almost always do not want this involvement, it is difficult to surface within it and bring ourselves to ground.  In Tarkovski’s Nostalghia, a deliriously drunk poet recounts a Russian parable:

A passerby finds a man being swallowed up by quicksand. Urgently, he pulls the man from the muck.

“You idiot!” says the saved one. “I live in there!”

This essay is about surfacing, a word I take from Margaret Atwood’s book of the same name. On a series of summer mornings mostly before sunrise, and sometime very early before the light, I’ve been revisiting an idiosyncratic current in American philosophy of the last half century that looks across the Atlantic toward French philosophy but ends up involved with American pragmatism.  Some of the things in this current repeatedly fascinate me as a nighttime wakefulness.  I work through them for a time and then decide that they fall apart on reflection – only to come back a couple years later to repeat the process again, making slow movements through them.  It is only recently that I began to see my fascination as a feature of coloniality.  There is something here that I am missing.

I take up a book that showed the current to me, Reiner Schürmann’s Le principe d’anarchie: Heidegger et la question d’agir (translated clunkily as Heidegger on Being and Acting: From Principles to Anarchy; the French should translate into The Principle of Anarchy: Heidegger and the Question of Action).  I choose it, because I have a strangely personal relationship to it.  Since coming across it in the late 1980s, I’ve picked it up every five or so years out of fascination, but also, before long, finding myself sick of it. I find it unfathomable, but in it, there’s the world I came into when I entered the still humming literary scene at Yale in the late 80s, a formative period for my perplexity with the academy. At that time, I had hoped that the book’s perspective would help open up political engagement that was more thoughtful than the politics I’d seen growing up. But before long, I wondered, was the book some kind of avoidance? At least, reading it began to feel that way.

My inchoate early 20s was spent with this weird book glowing like an iridescent-veined stone in the rows of books I kept propped up along my various bedroom floors.  Of one thing I was sure: because I was so distrustful of Heidegger and of Heideggerianism, I had an ambivalent relationship to the book. But there was something else too. I came to the current of American philosophy that I’ve noticed, because I intuited something very American, not just French or German, in books like this one.  The book’s sophistication plays into larger things – the romance of American academics and artists with French thought of the 1960s and 1970s, the prevalence of mysticism in American culture, and the recurrence of interest in American pragmatism as a contender for the main philosophical tradition of this nation state’s history.  I’ve worried that there’s something arbitrary about all of these, and I became explicitly interested in what I call “arbitrarianism” once Trump was elected.  Beginning in 2017, I began to see much of the Left and the Right reproducing an American commitment to arbitrary culture.  Maybe so-called “anarchist” idea-writers had a role to play in that too. Was such my unease early on – books advancing a world I couldn’t soulfully trust?

Note on the music & film: It might be fun to play these as you read, even letting them layer over each other.  Watching the films after reading may also work.  The piano tracks are improvisations made when music was called for, & they happened one singular time; that's it. During COVID, I began playing this way for and with our 1 year old, Emet.  I'm not trained in piano, only in classical, Western voice; so the tracks are punk. Thanks for rolling with them, chuckling or raising eyebrows.  With this essay, I had to put in skin, be vulnerable, or the films showing up didn't feel right.

The pragmatic course I’ve been following bottoms out differently than the work of the Progressive Era did.  That work led to structural change.  However, the current running through books like Schürmann’s disappears in ecstasy – escaping in different ways views of life as rigid under rules or swamped by resentment or regret.  What haunts the philosophical current I’ve been following is a communal world of well worked out roles and relationships supple with the spirit of caring, where obligations matter, people have space for some fluidity, and where emotional work is part of community accountability.  Such is the world imperialism has destroyed for over half a millennium and continues to do so in the form of neoliberal capitalism, where abstraction does not create “liquid modernity” so much as intensified precarity, social disintegration, narcissism in many ideological and psychological expressions, and nihilism.  Like the characters of Antonioni’s La Notte (1961), philosophers could wade along in these American waters with the air of intelligence and grace, highly self-aware except that their toxic society is no way to live. At the same time, books like Schürmann’s can be reread to reveal some of a more sustaining social ecology.  They suggest something restorative that could accompany surfacing from them.  That’s what I would like to do, tarrying with my own history of philosophical desire in the process.

Distrust of Reason

In 1993, I almost moved to Williamsburg, Brooklyn to go to the New School for Social Research instead of the University of Chicago where I ended up.  Williamsburg was called “Boho” back then and was at the front end of what would become the U.S. hipster gentrification frenzy of the 1990s-2000s, even more so than Austin or San Francisco.  Reiner Schürmann was about to die.  I didn’t know it.  Erupting from sixteen years of schooling, the giddiness of possibility was all around.  But what that possibility was for was unclear, except for vague hopes – to create, to love, to join in “politics” and “social change.”  I was an American ecstatic, and books like Schürmann’s seemed promising even if they made me nervous. They marked the time in neon diner lights at 5 A.M. across the street from a Polish bakery about to open for the morning regulars on their way to serve the infrastructure of Manhattan.

With these tracks and images, I'm trying to convey a feel of some corners of New York City in the late 80s and early 90s, including its discontinuities, not to judge. This is my perspective on the land in which Schürmann & my family, too, lived & visited.

Schürmann’s Le principe d’anarchie is an epic study of Old World proportions by the former German Dominican priest who studied near Paris in the 1960s, earned his doctorate at the Sorbonne around 1980, and who helped Hanna Arendt create the philosophy department at the New School for Social Research’s Graduate Faculty in the late 1970s, after having taught at Catholic University in Washington, D.C. and Duquesne University in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania.  Schürmann taught in Manhattan throughout the 1980s until his death from AIDS in 1993 at the age of 52 (he would have been 80 this year).  His book, born from his dissertation, crossed the Atlantic from Schürmann’s time in Paris and became a part of the Continental pragmatism of the New School, exemplified most by the important pragmatist and social critic, Richard J. Bernstein.  Schürmann’s deconstruction of the historical relationship between theory and practice in the history of European metaphysics opened the way to a “life without principle” that has become attractive to American ecstatics as it was for Thoreau.  Schürmann’s book is interesting, because he wants to think through politics shorn free of foundational principles and to generate thinking from doing, rather than vice-versa. What these things could mean remains blurry, something not helped by pretentious and tacky Heideggerian language.

I was first drawn to Schürmann’s text my freshperson year of college when I was nineteen.  The scholarly accomplishment of the book involved with profound, political critique suggested to me a whole world of intellectual activity that would open up the superficial, lying, and greedy world of 80s Reaganite America in which I had grown up as a punk, culturally appropriating, without realizing it, hairdos like “mohawks” and writing slogans against Apartheid over my clothes to oppose the tacit consent to racism of much suburban life in the Mohawk River Valley of Central New York State.  The Principle of Anarchy (as I will henceforth call it) reads Heidegger’s corpus in reverse to bring out the ways in which his texts – if not himself – continuously sought to undo the totalitarian impulse that led the man, Heidegger, to remain all his life an unapologetic Nazi.  In effect, Schürmann reads Heidegger against himself, as someone unconsciously formed, rejecting Heidegger’s narrative of his “turn about” sometime after his appalling failure at being a person. In Heideggerian fashion, the name for the totalitarian impulse in question is “technology,” and it is linked to the dawn of Western metaphysics wherein the drive to make everything make total sense was born. So the story goes.

By reading Heidegger backwards in time from his late, poetic works to Being and Time, Schürmann exposes the extent to which Heidegger sought to show the historical contingency beneath everything, including every system of reason.  According to this view, the sense and meaning of any social world are “anarchic” – without a metaphysical foundation or principle (archē) – and that means both that sense and meaning can work in unexpected ways and that they are contingent as well, a view that could be connected, with some effort, to many American pragmatists’ views, whether in James’s “Will to Believe,”Quine’s “Two Dogmas of Empiricism,” or Rorty’s ironic politics. 

One focal point of Schürmann’s Heideggerian critique is a surprising interpretation of the Aristotelian pros hen relation in scholastic metaphysics.  The pros hen relation organizes the many things that appear in the world as senses of a unitary and underlying being.  According to Schürmann, Aristotle’s Physics set the groundwork for the ontological structure of action by interpreting any sense of action as belonging to one underlying form: actions must have an ultimate purpose – a sense that unifies motion – or they cannot make sense.

In the middle chapter of Pedagogies of Crossing, “Anatomy of a Mobilization,” M. Jacqui Alexander reflects on the turmoil surrounding several interrelated events during her time at the New School as a visiting professor that were taken up by a student led movement to demand more people of color on the faculty and to diversify the curriculum. In the background were a faculty proposal for a non-Eurocentric general curriculum for undergraduates that had been quickly rejected and the ending of Alexander’s short term contract, leaving the Graduate Faculty with very few Black professors. In Alexander’s chapter, the American pragmatists of the institution do not come across well, philosophical reasoning reverting to gatekeeping in the face of an obvious and justice-worthy point about the Eurocentrism of the institution’s canon back then. White scholars who may have been admirable in many contexts are taken as attacking Alexander and discrediting her work as a proxy for discrediting the larger student-faculty movement that had taken up her cause. What emerges is complicated, miscommunication proliferating seemingly everywhere. One lesson I took away is that to engage in decolonial work within academic institutions may involve unexpected, non-linear flare-ups of epistemic injustice much too close to home, where contingent histories and structural factors lead to cleavages that go against what people would actually like to see take place on all sides of the issue. That doesn’t mean we shouldn’t try to do the work.

You might then ask, what of more local actions? What of intentions that are agnostic about there being an ultimate point? Schürmann’s odd view of what Anscombe would analyze more prosaically suggests a lot of confusion around teleology. But his interpretation is fascinating when it moves to politics. If I understand his idea (I am uncertain that I do, while others may do so better), the legacy of Aristotelian metaphysics, construed as teleology, puts pressure on how European culture has accepted jurisdiction (the “saying” – dictio – of law – jus).  The multiple ways in which people appear within society must be interpreted according to the ultimate sense of the political order, its tēlos, and this sense is regulated in social life by a sovereign power – a king, a revolutionary class, “the people” – who “speak the law” according to the ultimate sense of the political order. The shadow of Aristotelian metaphysics is found in the irrelevance of those beings that do not fit within the polity’s ultimate purpose and fall outside the jurisdiction of the polity’s sovereign power to the extent that their lives should leave us speechless (‘Are they even people?” “Do they count?” “Is that what you call an ‘action’?”).

The way Schürmann draws on Heidegger is to suggest that the conformity of politics thus unified relies on a faint transposition of the metaphysical pros hen relation, itself making of governance a physics predisposed to technological manipulation, the shaping of a polity to perform the ultimate purpose of the age. Would this be capital now?

Schürmann’s take is, ironically, too clean and idealistic for its sought-after poetry, but you can sense the way Schürmann thought out a conceptual anti-fascism. You aren’t going to get an essential race or a pure and militarized identity from life without principle. And Schürmann’s plumbing of the history of European metaphysics keeps going, troubling even democracy. The sovereign power of the people in democracy, for instance, does not imply an ultimate purpose beyond autonomy broadly construed, but one can see how that purpose could produce a class of people who have little say in things simply because they do not organize their lives according to the mechanisms of personal autonomy. They’d be shut out of the system. Think of societies that privilege land-relations as the ground of self-determination.

The upshot of Schürmann’s account is that once we realize that things are mysterious at bottom – that emerging historically from that mystery, being is “plural” not “one” – politics loses its ultimate ground, its claim to grasp the way people must make sense together.  This could be taken to lean in the direction of what social critics like Jacques Rancière have said, namely, that society is contingent on “the part who have no part.”  Social norms are ultimately arbitrary to some extent.  For Schürmann, the withering of the grip of the pros hen relation in postmodernity means that we must come to see that when we presume to unify politics through an ultimate reason for being, we lay the groundwork for violence.  People are not expressions of an idea, nor can society be the reflection of any one thing.

What could politics be if it did not have to make sense according to an ultimate purpose and be arranged by a sovereign power? One of the things that interested me in Schürmann’s account is that the concept of politics starts to fall apart through his critique. Yet the critique appears animated by a great concern for the singular (and ultimately pointless?) flourishing – or at least joy – of people and related beings. Rather, if there is anything like governance, it comes from within things as they appear to make sense to each of us, not from outside of us in what is supposed to put us in order. In this spirit, Schürmann, like Lynne Huffer recently, invokes René Char and “archipelagic” speech – “DEMAIN LE MULTIPLE,” “tomorrow the multiple” (i.e., not the “One”).

Glorifying the arbitrary once we come to see the contingency of the imperatives of our time, the Heideggerian approach Schürmann rejuvenates is a way of improvising on things as they appear between people so that, rather than worrying to determine what should ultimately be directing – and justifying – people and their worlds, we come to appreciate the singularity of our lives.  Things and people here hang together out of their own affinity, without ultimate rationalization – unless some violent technology – an ideological uniformity – steps in. Even the distinction between people and things is subject to a similar opening of negative space around it, aware of the historical formation of the “game of truth,” as Foucault would put it, that orders things and people in ontological duality.

As a genealogist and someone within the tradition of immanent critical theory broadly construed, Schürmann does not think we can presume an outside perspective to the historical moment that we are in (he calls such moments, following Heidegger, “epochal“). Concepts like individuation – “making sense to each of us” – or even of sense – that it is, say, something that is “made” – are deeply historical themselves, subject to the same underlying contingency. Without practical contradiction, Schürmann’s concepts are subject to the same concerns – they, too, are of our time, one he calls in Heideggerian fashion, “the closure of metaphysics.”

The point that Schürmann would appear to be making is that modern European thought is now bound up with historical contingency, seeking an awareness of how things could be otherwise. This is why he prioritizes “life without why.” By being a state of wonder, it opens space around the world as we think it. What is interesting about Schürmann’s position is that it combines the need for genealogical scholarship into the “epochal principles” – the major ordering forms of how jurisdiction gets legitimated – with mystical practices. The mystical is not unstudied, then. Nor is study without its cosmic openness.

Imagining mysticism and scholarship blurred into practice (and vice-versa), what Schürmann explores in the last stretches of his book is a philosophy of non-hierarchical and pluralistic being, where postmodern people, broadly aware of the historical contingency of their world and spacing out around the major imperatives that shape their age that they have come to understand through critical, genealogical reflection, allow themselves to act unruly. Here, acting is entangled with creative thinking if only people figure things out as they go by allowing sense to emerge “anarchically.”  Obviously, this is poetic, experimentalist, and convenient for American pragmatism.  Anticipating a phenomenology of givenness, Schürmann urges us to be open to things as they arise, critical of any “imperialism of principles,” because principles intervene between us and what we experience to foreclose how everything can become and be. 

When I thought about it, one thing that Schürmann’s book opens is a space for soulful desire that is ontologically promiscuous, where the imperative of being emerges from within longing, waywardness, and play and does not stay stuck within cultural forms.  A queer ethic in a sense sympathetic to the movements of intimate self-determination Saidiya Hartman has imagined while filling in the historical record with her dream-like prose, the thing that will bring people together is being moved by the appearing of affinity and shocks of compassionate sympathy, not the imposition of principles.  Around it all is a counter-metaphysics (for Schürmann’s Heidegger does presume things about the nature of being) of historical contingency and of the drift of rational order.

Where is coloniality in all this? One thing Schürmann leaves us with is being meditative and erotic. At first, this sounds promising. It is tempting to imagine meditative, erotic people softening the world from within or taking scenes by storm in their mysterious passion. Pulling oneself from the Heideggerian morass, however, one might wonder whether what haunts this picture is a form of imperialism, found today in various modern tools – colonialism, capitalism, industrialism, and scientism – that Schürmann’s pretentious Heideggerianism, as if by a Eurocentric and idealistic unconscious, relays back to decisions about how to approach reality in ancient Greece.

And all our storms come up toward the house, / Drawing the slow waves whiter and whiter and whiter.

~ Robert Frost, “A Servant to Servants,” North of Boston, 1914

After all, Schürmann’s view is filled with distrust of reasoning.  But the vast, Eurocentric picture developed from The Principle of Anarchy amounts to Schürmann not actually having a good sense of reasoning as a loving relationship between people.  The picture holding Schürmann’s Heidegger captive is of a society where people unwittingly use reasons to dominate each other and to fence each other in, including to fail to make sense to themselves.  Strictly speaking, these are not good reasons – considerations in favor of something that make sense to those who consider them honestly and sincerely, without threat of domination and with time to sit with things, and who have enough context to be able to understand what is being reasoned about.  Rather, these are commands at best and forms of violence at worst.  I wonder whether Schürmann, as many Europeans and Americans have done, lets the reason of empire colonize the reasoning of people.

Here is where I find coloniality seeping in. If trying to understand the world and what makes sense between us were imperial, then Schürmann would be right.  But making sense together isn’t like this.  When, without even a background threat of domination, you ask me to consider something and try to explain it accurately, you’re not stuffing it down my throat.  The stuffing-it-down-my-throat part comes from the background of domination, not from the nature of reasoning. To begin with, we have to be in a conversation where we each can consider things.  The plurality is right there between us when we reason.  Reasoning together is a plain and simple way that we show love for each other, disclosing things that we care about as they open up to consideration.  When reasoning, we are considerate of each other – despite conflict – and consider a shared world together.  The process isn’t one-sided. We consider what is really going on, what’s beneficial, or what’s simply relatable. What swamps things here isn’t reason but background threats of domination.

When Schürmann distrusts reasoning as domineering, his work takes imperialism for granted, soaking it in.  He internalizes trauma.  The background threat is everywhere. This unintentionally represses the possibility of a community where people can make sense by considering things together.  It lets evil win, and then works within it. The ecstasy that results is tangled up in coloniality for this reason, and so was mine when I was attracted to the book.  When cities are tinged by the corruption of a society that manipulates everything – as New York City does with its Wall Street, oligarchy, and globalized despair in the form of hustling for an American dream – it makes sense to wish to be lost in them.  But the only thing redeeming about such cities would be the communities in them, and these can be found wherever people, difficultly separating apart from background threats of domination, consider each other for real and grow, through fits and starts, to trust in each other’s minds.

Decolonization & the Future of Philosophy

Perhaps, charitably, Schürmann’s non-hierarchical governance is a matter of autonomous dignity – provided that it doesn’t slide into a mysticism so distrustful that people can no longer consider things together.  Are American ecstatics on to something, that something refracted as life in America is?  Let us suppose that, ambivalently, coloniality has found its home inside a leftist space such as Schürmann’s; the thing to surface then would actually be decolonization – addressing the background threat. Rather than going at metaphysical principles, it would be going at imperialism. Within that, one might surface into a different way of approaching society, not through theory and practice but through good relationships. Then American ecstatics would have been sensing how a different world is possible, entangled in their old world all the while.

Demanding that the U.S. government and each of the United States honor all treaties and respect Indigenous law makes room for societies that are not imperial. This is not to romanticize Indigenous societies, but to set settler society on the path toward good relationships, rather than abstract questions of theory and practice that seem, at their heart, to be bound up with mental narcissism (i.e., the attempt to bring the totality of the world under mental – and then practical – control, which Schürmann et al. call “technology”). Stressing our relations, and thus the imperative to decolonize, also shifts the focus from (yet more) European-inspired thinking to the background context of domination that tacitly gives that thinking its recurring grip. It’s important to remember how philosophy can unconsciously avoid coming to terms with decolonization, which is more than theoretical.

Decolonization is primarily a matter of sovereignty and jurisdiction within lands returned to Indigenous self-determination. Within that healing and morally necessary switch, Indigenous law, not academics about it, can resurge. This is to side-step “theory and practice” to focus on the ground-level – not metaphysically grounded – work of making good relationships with people and the more than human world.

A spirit of healing leads to larger questions about the conditions for healing. One obvious place to join work on the academy with attention to lands is to hold the fossil fuel industry accountable for its extractive land-relationships and non-ecologically-reflexive economy. Divesting our educational institutions from fossil fuels or engaging in multi-university-alliance shareholder activism can be part of the framework for decolonization, much needed, even if separable and insufficient for actual restoration of sovereignty and reparations.

If we focus on decolonization as we morally must and psychologically should, trauma must be worked through and actions prudently taken by those who are morally committed to a “life without imperialism” (rather than Meister Eckhart‘s “only that without a principle properly lives”). People must care for each other in common so that people can grow to be themselves together.  Governance must become part of our daily lives in each of our roles and relationships, not something imposed from above.  Sense must be something that we can come to in our own time, lose, and go back to with a different mindset later, letting time shape meaning.  In many of these things, Schürmann was prescient.  But we also must be careful that imperialism hasn’t warped settler culture so much that many an American ecstatic will think that being thoughtful, having integrity, or considering things together is controlling, rigid, or domineering.  The twin processes of accountability and healing are needed.

Of course, one might argue on Schürmann’s behalf that comfort with reasoning, even on the humane and interpersonally relational picture I have suggested, remains oblivious to the “epochal” principles of, say, personalism and of moral equality that are presumed within it, metaphysically grounded – some might say – in the priority of self-consciousness as basic for all sense and meaning. Both the awareness of this metaphysical inheritance and meditative, negative space around it would be called for.

But I still find coloniality in this criticism. It puts too much trust in principles of thought, rather than in the inherited lives of practice and relationship. It even assumes personalism as a principle, rather than as an evolved, relational intelligence born out of trial and error. Or, rather, the criticism locates thought in philosophy, rather than in the practices and personal relationships that communities sometimes manage to keep alive. Throwing off what doesn’t fit them over countless iterations and adaptations, communities born of good-enough relationships weather their practices into working, and the relationships become inherited stories. In the reiteration, and in conditions of ordinary life outside of strong codifying institutions where background domination can be flexed or allayed, these practices and stories are “open to the outside” and are thoughtful in a non-narcissistic way. In them, people are motivated soulfully, are capable of rolling with things, even changing, and do so bit by bit, innovating and adapting in countless acts and connections, small to large, of everyday care, concern, and enjoyment. Why isn’t thought and “letting be” contained sometimes in these ordinary traditions of practice and the familiar stories that co-constitute them? Not everything ordinary is domination. Traditions are not total anything. Why reduce so many kitchen tables, dance hall moves, high holidays, early morning prayers, and anecdotes about grandpa to principles that come from narcissistic philosophy?

This is some healing work shared from out West of where I live.  As Hopinka writes, "Told through recollections of youth, learning, lore, and departure, this is an imagined myth for the Xąwįska, or the Indian Pipe Plant - used by the Ho-Chunk to revive those who have fainted."

When worked out in good relationships, familiar practices of making sense together include mystery and awareness of contingency, not ecstatically, but in how people share modest tasks and life over time. Metaphysical openness – let us call it “wonder” – may be contained in rituals, ceremonies, and in the intelligence of traditional practices just as within families and their lore. Erasing the work of the relational plays into imperialism, capitalism, and industrialism that in various, entwined ways crush the social intelligence – the thoughtfulness and personal connections – contained in living traditions of practice and oral history. Then the mystical, like romanticism, starts to look like imperialism’s shadow. I’m much more interested in ordinary, good relationships that continually chafe against oppression and domination, because relating ain’t like that. I’m much more interested in what happens to our thought when we become accountable to others who’ve been wronged and work toward the conditions of societal healing.

The book I’ve revisited waymarks an ecstatic course that flowed around me in the 80s, as many of us tried to negotiate a weirdly imperial space in a still classist university system within racially segregated cities always reeling from the afterlife of slavery. The author had travelled from France to New York City by way of Washington, D.C. and Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania – most of these colonized lands.  Today, somewhat run aground, his book reveals a ghost decoloniality that would have a world of self-governance, communal care, and passage beyond trauma, but that also overshoots these things in its ecstatic resistance and poetic desire.  Such a world would be decolonial in that the violent forms of European imperialism would begin to come undone. 

Yet the book remains gripped by Eurocentrism in being committed to working within an aeitiology of Western metaphysics, rather than recognizing unruly ways of being that have – always so far – survived colonialism. Without engaging in explicit decolonization, settler colonialist readers of books such as the one that I’ve discussed might then help themselves to a world of privilege wherein a bare, ecstatic orientation – standing on mounds of European scholarship and conceptual work – produces the illusion of surfacing, what Kyle Powys Whyte and others call an “innocence gesture.”  American ecstatics would become a feature of coloniality, entangled in the history of American imperialism and escaping within it.  Although that’s one way to be haunted by a violence that benefits you in your lectern, American academics would do better to help decolonize this land and to diversify our institutions as a matter of working toward on-the-ground conditions of healing. We can’t escape; we live here in this daily and nightly decay.

Summer 2020 – Spring 2021

This is an installment of Into Philosophy.

Sidra is taking a break from the series for the month of April, and so this is April's installment of Genealogies of Philosophy.  I'm grateful to Romy Opperman for feedback and for organizing the moving and profound panel, "Finding Ceremony."  Thanks also is due to the Planetary Justice Virtual Community of the Western Political Science Association, Yugan Sakthi, Katherine Cassese, & Misty Morrison.  The piece is dedicated to Rori Knudtson in memoriam. I bid thee well to the mystery.