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Essays

A bit of housekeeping

This is just a quick recap of a presentation that I gave today at a conference at the annual Finnish Conference of Linguistics. As I pointed out in a previous essay last summer, I happened to watch Bo Burnham’s ‘Inside’, which includes ‘A White Woman’s Instagram’, which I thought (and still think) is a great […]

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Essays

All Heil the Emperor!

I had something else planned for this month, but with the recent turn of events, with our dearly beloved neighbor, Russia, (read: not neighbors, not the people of Russia, an important distinction to keep in mind here), inviting itself to one of its other neighbors, Ukraine, I thought it would be apt to comment on […]

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Essays

Nth-articulation

This is continuation to the previous essay, in which I focus on stratification. I did my best to avoid mentioning assemblages and abstract machines in that essay. Why? Well, to be clear, they are relevant to stratification, but I thought it would make more sense to discuss that first and then move on to assemblages […]

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Love and hate, pleasure and pain

I covered parts one and two of Baruch Spinoza’s ‘Ethics’ in a previous essay and this time I’ll cover the third part of it, dealing with emotions. I was going to include the fourth part in this essay as well but getting through the third part turned out to be more of a slog than […]

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Essays

What is not and not what is

I was browsing through ‘Desert Islands and Other Texts: 1953–1974’, a collection of short texts by Gilles Deleuze, not really knowing what to read, not being sure what I had already read, while I noticed something that tickled my fancy. It’s contained in ‘“He Was my Teacher”’. Deleuze (79) mentions Jean-Paul Sartre as having created […]

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Essays

God wills it all, or it is what it is

I was writing another essay, which led me to crawl through Baruch Spinoza’s ‘Ethics’. There is this bit in Sartre’s ‘Being and Nothingness’ where he (lvi) makes note of people’s tendency to attribute whatever it is that they fail to explain to the will of God. I’ve mentioned this before, but I’ve mentioned this issue […]