I turn fifty-eight this Wednesday. I have been planning for retirement with something closer to obsession than diligence: watching accounts I cannot influence, building calculators to predict a future that has no obligation to cooperate with them, and treating Social Security as the floor beneath the floor. I never trusted the state enough to loveContinue reading “The Body as Verdict”
Tag Archives: Odyssey
Pandora and Helen
Helen is not the subject but the test case. She is the figure around which questions of causation, perception, agency, and the reliability of language organize. The movement runs from Homer, where she is a condition, through Euripides and Gorgias, to Thucydides where she disappears entirely and the mechanism persists. The distance between the laterContinue reading “Pandora and Helen”
Odysseus
Odysseus did not want to go to war. When the oath he had devised to bind the other kings was called due and the kings of Greece gathered for Troy, he attempted to escape it. He yoked an ox and a donkey to the same plow and drove them in erratic lines across the field,Continue reading “Odysseus”
Protective Arts 