David Faes

“The only historian capable of fanning the spark of hope in the past is the one who is firmly convinced that even the dead will not be safe from the enemy if he is victorious. And this enemy has never ceased to be victorious…” — Walter Benjamin, “Theses on the Philosophy of History” “[T]here are moments in which theory is pushed on further by practice. But such a situation neither exists objectively today, nor does the barren and brutal practicism that confronts us here have the slightest thing to do with theory anyhow. [Read More]

TRANSGENDER ACTIVIST LESLIE FEINBERG PROCLAIMED in a 1992 political pamphlet that the time for transgender liberation had come. Over twenty years later, popular media described the increasing visibility of transgender lifestyles as a “trans tipping point” or “trans moment.” However, upon further inspection, one discovers luminaries of the Enlightenment already expressed whatever “new” ideas have come to the fore, and better the first time around. While the number of writings grows beyond count, the new insights fall below the potential characterized by the moment of their conception. [Read More]

IT IS BY NOW WELL ESTABLISHED that millennials are not having sex. Indeed, recent studies have revealed that millennials derogate the emotions evoked in love and lust, which they refer to disparagingly as “catching feelings.”1 The widespread paranoia surrounding consent presumably only deepens such sentiments. Because victimhood has become the visa stamp of critical insight and political solidarity, women are encouraged to conform their experiences to those of a victim while sympathetic men are encouraged to counter-identify with perpetrators through the burden of a collective guilt. [Read More]