There is about good writing a visual actuality. It exactly reproduces what we should metaphorically call the contour of our thought. The metaphor is for once exact: thought has a contour or shape. The paragraph is the perception of this contour or shape.

Enfolding and unfolding, implication and explication, implying and explaining, involving and evolving… Two systems of universal folding: Spinoza’s unfolded from the bare “simplicity” of an Infinity into which all things are ultimately folded up, as into a universal map that folds back into a single point; while Leibniz starts from the infin…[Read more]

On any careful reading it’s clear. What is called thinking? Only “thinking” is called “thinking.” A question then, in a speculative, pragmatic key: What might thinking be like, beyond any generality, or even critique? What must thinking be like not to know, demonstrably, what it is?

“I didn’t even know that was a question I could ask.” That remark from a student in an introductory philosophy course points to the primary body of knowledge philosophy produces: a detailed record of what we do not know. When we come to view a philosophical question as well-formed and worthwhile, it is a way of providing as specific a descr…[Read more]

¶ My thinking is related to theology as blotting pad is related to ink. It is saturated with it. Were one to go by the blotter, however, nothing of what is written would remain.—Walter Benjamin

¶ “No longer imminent, the End is immanent.” “Ends are ends,” Frank Kermode goes on to clarify, “only when they are not negative but frankly trans…[Read more]

In a 1917 letter to Gershom Scholem, Walter Benjamin writes, “Theory is like a surging sea.” This small book takes more than its title from that line—it takes that line as a point of departure in Erich Auerbach’s sense, an *Ansatzpunkt,* as a compositional principle so that what follows can be read in its entirety as a gloss on the remaind…[Read more]

The Communism of Thought takes as its point of departure a passage in a letter from Dionys Mascolo to Gilles Deleuze: “I have called this communism of thought in the past. And I placed it under the auspices of Hölderlin, who may have only fled thought because he was unable to live it: ‘The life of the spirit between friends, the thoughts that form…[Read more]

What is a problem? What’s asked in that question, and how does one even begin to take its measure? How else could one begin, except as one does with any other problem—by way of its impulsion.

Of Learned Ignorance is about philosophy because philosophy is about problems: philosophy, in a word, is where problems become a problem.

Of Lea…[Read more]

What is philosophy? That’s a good question—not because there’s no answer, but because what’s involved in posing it points up something essential to philosophy.
In the Treatise on the Emendation of the Intellect, Spinoza sets out what’s required by a definition. A circle, a typical definition might run, is a figure in which all lines drawn fro…[Read more]