One of the classic problems in modern philosophy is that of free will, usually contrasted with its opposite of determinism. When engaging in any field of philosophy from ethics to metaphysics, one inevitably encounters the concept of the free will and the question of whether or not humans possess it…

Note: wrote this for my school newspaper Earlier this month, the DeSantis administration made the decision to ban College Board’s AP African American Studies course from being offered in Florida schools. …

Note: I’ve previously discussed the centrality of nonbelonging in an emancipatory project but have yet to connect this to anything outside of McGowan’s regular spheres of cultural studies and politics. This writing is an attempt to conceptualize a unique application of Derrida’s concept of hauntology in border and migration studies…

Since Slavoj Žižek’s affirmation of jouissance (enjoyment) as a political factor, psychoanalysis has taken a decisively political turn. …

Exoticism is dead. The radical exoticism described by Segalen in Essay On Exoticism: An Aesthetics of Diversity is no longer present in contemporary society. It has been replaced by a weaker version of exoticism, a soft exoticism. To be clear, I am not making the argument that exoticism no longer…

In the last year, online social media platforms have witnessed a mass resurgence of toxic masculinity. This masculinity has taken on various forms from phallic figures such as Andrew Tate to phallic phrases that have become commonplace in the adolescent male imagination. An example of such a phrase is “he’s…

Commonly understood as simply the decline of the church’s cultural influence, the death of god is so much more. It represents a larger psychic phenomenon that one can interpret as the death of a defense. Over centuries, humans have constructed defensive barriers, walls. These walls are defenses against the chaos…

Note: I first started reading the works of Slavoj Žižek about a year ago and was fascinated by his analysis of racism. The link between psychoanalysis and race studies was left unexplained for a large part of the 20th century unlike the relationship between psychoanalysis and feminism. However, Žižek was…

“Love shook my heart, Like the wind on the mountain Troubling the oak trees.“ — Sappho In such few poetic words, the Greek poet Sappho beautifully captures the transformational potential of human love. Love as an encounter occurs unpredictably, and much like the wind, it shakes, disturbs, troubles, and disrupts…