Ontological Captivity

Departing from where Jacques Derrida’s deconstruction of Martin Heidegger’s gender-neutral Dasein left off, this article argues for “ontological captivity” as a critical analytic for questioning Being under conditions of racial capitalism. Based on a broad understanding of the Black Radical tradition, the author argues for the importance of connecting the analysis of ontological difference with the political critique of concrete historical and material conditions that structurally link what it means to be human to overlapping and mutually reinforcing technologies of capture. From the slave ship, the plantation, the reservation, the prison, the detention center, the penal colony, and the concentration camp to the ways in which injurious signifiers fix the body and arrest its mobility, ontological difference should be unthinkable outside a confrontation with its material conditions of possibility and impossibility. These are the material conditions that, from W. E. B. Du Bois’s analysis of the “color-line” to Calvin Warren’s analytic of “onticide,” from Lewis Gordon’s “antiblackness” to Nelson Maldonado-Torres’s “coloniality of being,” and from Hortense Spillers’s “being for the captor” to Zakiyyah Iman Jackson’s “ontological plasticization,” call for a political rather than an ethical interrogation of Being.

The Art of Navalny and the History of Corruption

Alexei Navalny has been the most prominent campaigner against Russia’s massive oil-fueled corruption, reaching millions of viewers with witty video exposés. Now imprisoned in a penal colony after returning to Moscow following his recovery from a poisoning, he has made his own bodily suffering a potent symbol of protest, tapping into a deep Russian tradition of dissent.

The Novel "Poor Folk" in the Context of Dostoevsky's Letters from the time of the Kuznetsk Events

The article shows the connection between the epistolary novel "Poor Folk", the events of the biography of F. M. Dostoevsky and his epistolary legacy of the Kuznetsk period (1855-1857). The novel "Poor Folk" created in after -penal colony time is considered as a high standard for the author, as a self-reflection. The letters of F. M. Dostoevsky from the time of the Kuznetsk events, where there are several excerpts about "Poor Folk", are presented as a workbook, a creative laboratory, where the writer develops a new quality of artistic expression characteristic of his mature works. For Dostoevsky, the novel "Poor Folk" is not just a brilliant debut that opened the way to "great literature", but also a text that has prophetic and life-creating modes, and has connections with the events of his life in Kuznetsk. Repeated reference to it, the presence of several versions of the novel, speaks about the peculiarities of the author's creative thinking and the significance of this work for the writer.

H’arut: A Jewish Reading of Kafka’s In the Penal Colony

This article offers a close reading of Kafka’s In the Penal Colony, exploring the text as a radical reflection on the nature of modernity in general, and Jewish modernity in particular. The article posits that In the Penal Colony is a meditation on the relation between suffering, transgression and law. For Kafka, where modernity is understood as the incapacity of linking suffering and transgression (sin), the old order is one where the relationship between suffering and transgression is understood as fundamental, and functions as a principle of readability of reality. For the ancients, it is this readability that endows the law with meaning and validity. By integrating parts of Foucault’s thesis’ on modernity as elaborated in Discipline and Punish with this analysis of In the Penal Colony, this article situates Kafka’s text in the context of his literature in general, positing that it is the key text to understanding his oeuvre. In addition, this article offers an original reflection on one of the hidden themes of Kafka’s work: the crisis of the modern Jew.

H’arut: A Jewish Reading of Kafka’s In the Penal Colony

This article offers a close reading of Kafka’s In the Penal Colony, exploring the text as a radical reflection on the nature of modernity in general, and Jewish modernity in particular. The article posits that In the Penal Colony is a meditation on the relation between suffering, transgression and law. For Kafka, where modernity is understood as the incapacity of linking suffering and transgression (sin), the old order is one where the relationship between suffering and transgression is understood as fundamental, and functions as a principle of readability of reality. For the ancients, it is this readability that endows the law with meaning and validity. By integrating parts of Foucault’s thesis’ on modernity as elaborated in Discipline and Punish with this analysis of In the Penal Colony, this article situates Kafka’s text in the context of his literature in general, positing that it is the key text to understanding his oeuvre. In addition, this article offers an original reflection on one of the hidden themes of Kafka’s work: the crisis of the modern Jew.