Author Archives: Brice Cummings

I recently reviewed Robert Pippin’s latest collection of essays, Philosophy by Other Means: Philosophy in the Arts and the Arts in Philosophy (University of Chicago Press, 2021) for Athwart. It’s always a privilege to work with the fantastic editors over at Athwart. Here’s a link to the review: https://www.athwart.org/pippins-apology-for-a-philosophical-reading-of-art/

Athwart Magazine recently published an essay of mine that emerged as a byproduct of my ongoing dissertation-writing on the poet-philosopher Benjamin Fondane. I have enjoyed reading the thoughtful exchange of ideas facilitated by Athwart, and I am excited to join in that conversation with this piece.

My two previous blog posts have just been rendered mostly irrelevant — and I couldn’t be happier about this turn of events. As reported by Clare Roth, Janelle Lawrence, and Janet Lorin for Bloomberg, “The U.S. backed down from a high-profile confrontation with Harvard University, MIT and hundreds of other colleges over foreign-student visas, endingContinue reading “Update: The Bonfire Has Been Doused, the Students Can Stay”

D Magazine kindly undertook to post my letter with the aim of raising local awareness of the need to combat ICE / SEVP’s recent policy changes affecting international students:

To all my friends who – by virtue of birth, naturalization, cosmic accident, Providence, or whatever – happen to be American citizens, my international student friends could really use your help. Why am I asking you? International students do not have the privilege of voting in the United States. It is up to us asContinue reading “The New Book-Burning: International Students in the Age of Trump”

Ulysses impresses and disturbs. With each re-reading, I am impressed by the sheer meticulousness with which James Joyce artfully assembles such a sprawling mass of details. I am disturbed by a case of literary paranoia. If every novel must be both this grand and this banal, then Joyce’s literary genealogy leads ultimately to something likeContinue reading “James Joyce’s Ulysses: Nihilist Nadir (or) Zenith of ‘Homo Ludens’?”

« La mort, nous n’y sommes pas habitués. » [“To death we are not accustomed.”][1] With this bleak pronouncement Maurice Blanchot begins his 1973 collection of fragments Le pas au-delà. Giorgio Agamben has described Maurice Blanchot as the writer who answered for the survivors of World War II a question raised afresh in every generation: Is writingContinue reading “Le pas au-delà – Maurice Blanchot’s Morbid Masterpiece”

Giorgio Agamben’s Homo Sacer: Sovereign Power and Bare Life , translated by Daniel Heller-Roazen (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1998) has become a classic of continental political philosophy. Agamben builds an elaborate superstructure around the elemental concept of homo sacer. In Roman tradition (as interpreted by Agamben, that is) homo sacer referred to an outlaw banned from society, devoted (sacer) toContinue reading “Above the Law, Outside the Law: Giorgio Agamben on the U.S. Presidency, Refugee Crises, & Impeachment”

I once observed a customer open a copy of Victor Hugo’s Les Misérables in a Starbucks. Without a word being exchanged, the store’s baristas began whistling “The Song of Angry Men” made famous by Tom Hooper’s 2012 film adaptation (Universal Studios). The lyrics ask, “beyond the barricade / is there a world you long toContinue reading ““When Tomorrow Comes”: Mythical History as Utopian Entertainment in Les Misérables”