Deconfabulation: Agamben's Italian Categories and the Impossibility of Experience

Agamben’s self-professed epigonism underwrites his entire project, serving as an even more fundamental methodological concept than the signature, paradigm, and archeology. In Infancy and History, Agamben maintains that transcendental experience is no longer a viable source of philosophical insight; philosophers go astray referring their thinking back to an authentic yet esoteric experience that, itself unspeakable, grounds positive philosophical assertions. Neither mysterious nor ineffable, the experience founding philosophy is the completely patent, non-latent, experience of language's pure exteriority. Rather than “deconstructing” metaphysics by exposing its hidden contradictions, philosophy must "deconfabulate," telling fables about philosophy to undo its enchantments, since it is through the fable that the spell of silence, which itself originates in fable, can be broken. This "epigonal" method, which follows after the tradition rather than seeking a new grounding, is itself justified through Agamben’s account, in The End of the Poem, of the Italian, as opposed to Germanic, physiognomy and of a specifically Italian relation to language going back to Dante. To be Italian is to embrace the “deadness” of one’s own language, rejecting the myth of the resurrection of the original potencies of a dead classical language through a living, modern language

The Abject Life of Things h.c. andersen's sentimentality

The following paper attempts a philosophically rigorous interpretation of H.C. Andersen’s tales. Through a radically conceived sentimentality --- the unmediated juxtaposition of the abjection of things, conceived as a paradoxical “desire for desire” having no place in the world, with a cruel, apathetic gaze --- Andersen challenges the existence of the soul or subjectivity as what, by combining the theoretical gaze with contemplative pleasure, grants coherence to experience. Thus undermining not only Romantic self-reflection, and its suturing of philosophy to criticism, but Plato’s erotic psychology, Andersen inaugurates a new philosophical literature: a writing for children cultivating an opennes

A Friendship of Words: Philology and Prophesy in Hölderlin’s “Rousseau”

Taking its departure from Norbert von Hellingrath’s interpretation of the significance of Rousseau for Friedrich Hölderlin, the following paper argues, through a close reading of the poem “Rousseau,” that Hölderlin, contra Hellingrath, conceives of his relation to Rousseau in philological rather than prophetic terms. Looking closely at the complexities of Hölderlin’s manuscript while contrasting the philological approaches of Freidrich Beißner’s Grosse Stuttgarter Ausgabe and D. E. Sattler’s Frankfurter Ausgabe, I demonstrate that an explicitly philological moment is inscribed into the text of the poem itself, and that it addresses its reader as a specifically philological reader, while at the same time seeking to establish a “friendship of words” with Rousseau’s prophetic utterance

What's the Deal?: Fichte's Closed Commercial State, Trump, and Economic Nationalism

Starting out from an analysis of the "Art of the Deal," this paper seeks to understand Trump's "deal-making" as a form of life under capitalism organized around the paradoxical desire to simultaneously "be the game" and be the "biggest winner"--- In this way, Trump exemplifies a modern pathological form of existence whose proximate roots can be found in German idealism, and perhaps most clearly in Fichte's Closed Commercial State. Here Fichte proposes a wage to end all wagers; a monetary operation that would put the entire world on the path to world peace and economic justice. Fichte's economic nationalism---- world peace is only possible by the complete closure of the state as commercial entity--- is the very opposite of what is now spoken under that name; and yet the desire to "play the game" and "master it" at the same time offers a point of commonality. Beyond the scope of this paper lies the questions: is this paradoxical desire ultimately theology in origin? Is another relation to contingency possible

Exuded Sap

Draft of book project written circa 2000

Agamben’s Comic Messianism: Giorgio Agamben: Beyond the Threshold of Deconstruction; Agamben and Politics: A Critical Introduction

The publication of Giorgio Agamben’s The Use of Bodies in 2014, followed the next year by Adam Kotsko’s English translation, marked a momentous event in the history of more recent continental thought, bringing to a close one of the most far reaching and ambitious scholarly and philosophical labors of the twentieth century. Initiated in 1995 with Homo Sacer: Sovereign Power and Bare Life, Agamben’s project, named after the first volume, would come to comprise nine separate books, published at fairly regular intervals over the course of twenty years. While neither Kevin Attell’s Giorgio Agamben: Beyond the Threshold of Deconstruction (BTD) nor Sergei Prozorov’s Agamben and Politics: A Critical Introduction (AP) were able to take advantage of the appearance of the last volume of Homo Sacer, they both benefit from an understanding of the scope of Agamben’s work and thought that has only recently become possible. Indeed, these books represent two of the most compelling attempts to offer a comprehensive account of Agamben’s work that is sensitive to its range and subtlety, recognizing the complex interactions between political, philosophical, theological, linguistic and poetological lines of inquiry

Addressing current challenges in cancer immunotherapy with mathematical and computational modeling

The goal of cancer immunotherapy is to boost a patient's immune response to a tumor. Yet, the design of an effective immunotherapy is complicated by various factors, including a potentially immunosuppressive tumor microenvironment, immune-modulating effects of conventional treatments, and therapy-related toxicities. These complexities can be incorporated into mathematical and computational models of cancer immunotherapy that can then be used to aid in rational therapy design. In this review, we survey modeling approaches under the umbrella of the major challenges facing immunotherapy development, which encompass tumor classification, optimal treatment scheduling, and combination therapy design. Although overlapping, each challenge has presented unique opportunities for modelers to make contributions using analytical and numerical analysis of model outcomes, as well as optimization algorithms. We discuss several examples of models that have grown in complexity as more biological information has become available, showcasing how model development is a dynamic process interlinked with the rapid advances in tumor-immune biology. We conclude the review with recommendations for modelers both with respect to methodology and biological direction that might help keep modelers at the forefront of cancer immunotherapy development.Comment: Accepted for publication in the Journal of the Royal Society Interfac

A Conversation With a New York Television Writer (Edward Adler)

On the evening of March 18, Edward Adler met with film students at Columbia College. Adler began his career during the golden age of television, authoring scripts, and recently complete drama aired on CBS Playhouse.The discussion was moderated by Anthony Loeb, chair of the Film Department. Photographer: David Morenz. 24 pages.https://digitalcommons.colum.edu/conversations/1002/thumbnail.jp

Dynamics of the Landau-Pomeranchuk-Migdal Effect in Au+Au Collisions at 200 AGeV

We study the role played by the Landau-Pomeranchuk-Midgal (LPM) effect in relativistic collisions of hadrons and heavy nuclei, within a parton cascade model. We find that the LPM effect strongly affects the gluon multiplication due to radiation and considerably alters the space-time evolution of the dynamics of the collision. It ensures a multiplicity distribution of hadrons in aggreement with the experimental proton-proton data. We study the production of single photons in relativistic heavy ion collisions and find that the inclusion of LPM suppression leads to a reduction in the single photon yield at small and intermediate transverse momenta. The parton cascade calculation of the single photon yield including the LPM effect is shown to be in good agreement with the recent PHENIX data taken at the Relativistic Heavy-Ion Collider.Comment: 12 pages, 4 figure