Adam Kotsko

The Oxford Literary Review Supplement has now published all the papers from the session on my work at the Association for Philosophy and Literature conference in Frankfurt this fall.

• Peter Gratton: “Adam Kotsko’s Political Theology: An Introduction”
• Nils Richber: “Left Over: Towards a Post-Apocalyptic Reading of Political Theology”
• Peter Gratton: “A Hell Without End? Neoliberalism and the Grift Society”
• Jay Martin: “‘Every God Has a Devil for a Father’: The Disappearing of the Devil in Hegel”
• Adam Kotsko: “What Have I Been Doing All My Life? A Response”

Thanks again to Peter for arranging the session and publication (and serving as both presider/introducer and presenter) and to Jonathan Basile at the Oxford Literary Review Supplement for hosting the published roundtable.

Los Angeles Review of Books has published a review of mine on Star Trek: Strange New Worlds, season 3. Thank you to Sean Guynes for inviting me to do this!

Readers can stay caught up on my reviews of all recent Star Trek material at my Late Star Trek blog.

I have a new piece out on entertainment franchises and their effects on artistic production at Asia Art Archive, entitled “The Franchise Problem.” Here is a preview:

There is a curious contradiction at the heart of contemporary American popular culture: the most popular and commercially successful framework for artistic production is at the same time the most resented and even reviled. I am speaking of the role of franchises such as Star Wars or the Marvel Cinematic Universe, which take pre-existing characters and storyworlds and generate an open-ended chain of new stories across multiple media (usually some combination of television, film, video games, novels, comic books, and toys, supplemented by branded merchandise). Typically, these new stories are not one-off or self-contained, but purport to take place in the “same” narrative space as all the others, so that they should all not only make sense together but actually clarify and enhance each other. This attempt to flesh out the respective fictional worlds has led to a proliferation of prequels (which are sequels to an existing story but set at an earlier time) that purport to give crucial background for previously published stories and therefore recontextualise them. Once limited to “nerdy” genres like science fiction and superhero comic books, franchise storytelling is now the dominant format for film and television.

Thanks to Paul Fermin for commissioning the piece and to him and his colleagues for their perceptive comments and suggestion, which pushed me to make the piece better!

I have added this semester’s syllabi to my teaching page. This semester is a rare case where I am doing all repeats: Ethics and Logic and Critical Thinking in the Philosophy Department and What is Life? in the Shimer Great Books School. The latter is the only one that I have significantly changed since last year, by increasing the focus on Darwin’s Origin of Species (as our indisputable “Great Book”) and adding more material on human evolution.

This summer I am participating in two conferences. The first is the European Academy of Religion in July, which is hosted by the University of Vienna. I will be giving a paper entitled “Agamben Between Pauline Messianism and Institutional Christianity,” in the context of the session called “Agamben’s Theological-Political Horizons: Reimaging Judaism, Christianity, and Messianic Potentiality.”

Then in August, I will be heading to Frankfurt for the Association for Philosophy and Literature, where Peter Gratton has generously organized a special session about my body of work. Thank you to Nils Richber, Jay Martin, and Erica Robles-Anderson for agreeing to be on the panel and to Peter for both organizing and presenting. This will be a real honor and career milestone for me!

This is a reminder that I will be discussing Late Star Trek at the Seminary Co-op in Hyde Park at 4:00pm on Thursday, May 8. In a slight change of plans, Mass Markets series editor Gerry Canavan will be joining me as interlocutor. I have also received some reviews and appeared on several podcasts since the book’s release, which you can find in a series of link posts from my Star Trek newsletter.

I have added this semester’s syllabi to my teaching history page. All three are repeats, making this the first semester in many years when I have not had a fresh prep.

Ethics (philosophy department): This course is my showcase for translating the primary text-based format of the Shimer Great Books School into a large lecture class. My biggest innovation here was to hold them accountable for the reading by requiring them to upload images of their annotated pages. I further motivate them to engage with the text by making all exams open-book, but only for print books (except in case of an accomodation, which has not occurred so far). Last year’s iteration was very successful, so I am not changing much this time around.

Gaming the System: Alternatives in Math and Logic (Shimer): Last fall I taught this course for the first time, which put me on the home stretch toward my goal of teaching the entire Shimer Great Books curriculum. After teaching a new class for the first time, I always like to teach it again the following year so that my mistakes are fresh in my mind. This is probably my most significant revision this semester, drawing on a great deal of reading and research in the year and a half since I last taught it.

Deals With the Devil (Shimer): A version of this course, centered on the Faust legend, was a staple offering for me for several years when we first arrived at North Central. Last year I offered it for the first time in the Shimer program after a period of dormancy, and I realized that I was spending too much time trying to replicate my argument in The Prince of This World and delving far too much into the enigmatic Part 2 of Goethe’s Faust. This time around, I have trimmed those aspects and taken advantage of the additional time gained to transition into more of a film class format in the second half of the semester, when they will be working on their research papers.