Resemblance Is Not Structure
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Historians routinely flatten analogy and homology into near-synonymy, but the two concepts make claims of fundamentally different kinds, and recovering the distinction changes what a historical argument can demonstrate and how far it can travel beyond the case at hand.
Learning to Think Slowly: An Intellectual Memoir of Early Graduate School
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I reconstruct my early graduate training as an uneven education in subordinating theory to evidence.
The Politics of Sartre’s Grabuge
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Sartre’s 1961 anecdote about rejecting Le Grabuge as a title for Les Temps modernes is no incidental aside but a compact demonstration of retotalization, showing how class position crystallizes in an act of naming and how refusing that name remade disposition into disciplined engagement.
Foucault’s Radical Historicism
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Leonard D’Cruz asks whether Foucault’s radical historicism truly escapes transcendental philosophy or smuggles it back in through the historical a priori, omnipresent power, and subjectivation, arguing that naming this tension strengthens historicist critique rather than defeating it.
Power and the Limits of Critique: Engaging Cronin on Foucault and Bourdieu
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Ciaran Cronin argues that Bourdieu offers a more actionable account of power than Foucault, but his critique demands a normative framework neither thinker claims to provide and misreads Foucault as foreclosing resistance; the two are better combined than opposed.
Iranian Neo-Monarchism and the Politics of Diasporic Longing
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Royalist nostalgia in the Iranian diaspora and hawkish U.S. Iran policy operate as mutually reinforcing formations, each lending the other moral warrant and institutional durability; a genealogical reading exposes the contingency and silences that sustain this co-produced longing.