About
Here two authors approach a different space and a different form for thought that has ordinarily been unfolding in less virtual venues. Classroom, library, dorm room, café: four years, and these have been the spaces that have allowed and restricted new attempts at speech, new textual experiences, new relationships to objects, texts, conversation, critique, people. Whatever happens here takes its leave from these interactions, histories and the spaces in which they occurred, at the same time at it tests a new terrain for intellectual labor and collaboration.
This blog – it must be admitted, a weird non-space, all-space, new and yet already too familiar – forces us and hopefully whomever stops (lurks?) by to come to grips with the import of critique and the demands and desires from which it springs. Who is being addressed? What objects or cultural phenomena demand an analysis, and what type and form of analysis is appropriate?
Labyrinths of Belief is both an allusion to a certain philosophical orientation — a claim to a particular trajectory for the discipline that we inscribe ourselves within — as well as an intention to interrogate the locus of that self. The concept of the labyrinth allows both a generous fluidity in terms of methodological orientation at the same time as it posits, in advance, a textured and categorically fraught notion of the object(s) that will be subject to analysis.
The concept of “belief” works for us in two ways: first, as the reassertion of the importance of ideology as an instrumental and unavoidable concept for understanding cultural and political phenomena today; and second, as a nod to and acknowledgement of the thought and thinkers with whom we are working; in other words, we “believe in” the methods and modes of seeing outlined by certain names in the history of criticism. Hence it goes without saying that implicit in any work undertaken here is a certain positioning, a friendship with philosophers such as Nietzsche, Lacan, Zizek, Foucault and Heidegger. A kinship in the aporetic investigation of knowledge. An investigation that seeks not merely to probe areas in which a form of belief is operating which we would seek to uncover through a form of critique that exposes its production and its erotics; rather, an investigation that seeks to embed itself critically and reflexively in the realignment that it subjects knowledge to by the very exercise of that knowledge coming to know itself.
We invite you all to follow us in to this labyrinth as we turn over objects ranging anywhere from episodes of House to congressional hearings to Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason.
