Papers by Gabriel N Brahm
Indiana University Press eBooks, Apr 29, 2018
Last year, the British scholar Alan Johnson spoke up against a resolution to boycott Israel at th... more Last year, the British scholar Alan Johnson spoke up against a resolution to boycott Israel at the National University of Ireland, Galway. As he recounts the experience, "Anti-Israel student activists tried to break up the meeting by banging on the tables, using the Israeli flag as a toilet wipe, and screaming at me, again and again, 'Fuck off our fucking campus you fucking Zionist!'" This outburst came from students "whose heads were filled with the common sense of intellectual circles in Europe-Zionism is racism, the Zionists 'ethnically cleansed' the natives from the land in 1948, Israel is an 'Apartheid State,' Israel is committing a slow genocide against the remaining Palestinians, and so on." Johnson recognizes that students who recite this litany of angry accusations are "in thrall to anAnti-Zionist Ideology" that turns them into dedicated "Anti-Zionist Subjects." Most probably know little if anything about the history of Zionism or have any first-hand experience of Israel, but this ignorance does not keep them from eagerly participating in the BDS (boycott, divestment, sanctions) movement or from putting forward resolutions such as the one to which Johnson objected. Johnson's essay appears in Cary Nelson and Gabriel Noah Brahm's impressively comprehensive collection The Case Against Academic Boycotts of Israel.
The Encyclopedia of Literary and Cultural Theory, 2010
American Literature, 1992
Society, 2017
Decades of mind-numbing political correctness on the academic far-left robbed the humanities and ... more Decades of mind-numbing political correctness on the academic far-left robbed the humanities and social sciences of their legitimacy, generated the alt-right as its very own dialectial alter-ego, and provided an essential catalyzing ingredient in Donald Trump's electoral victory-understood as the clearest expression of a weary nation's revulsion at p. c.'s intolerable moralizing. The illiberal, antisemitic, white nationalist alt-right and the illiberal, antisemitic, anti-American alt-left mirror one another perfectly! Faced with competing totalitarianisms at both extremes, the liberal center should defend itself first of all by forthrightly reclaiming the univeristy as a space for education and not indoctrination. Yet the politically correct professoriate do not want to hear this-and their over-the-top hostile overreactions to the news that they are to blame for what they hate most prove that it's so. Time to repeal and replace political correctness.
Telos, 2021
From Heidegger’s portentous “Letter on Humanism” (written in 1946 and published in France the nex... more From Heidegger’s portentous “Letter on Humanism” (written in 1946 and published in France the next year) to Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe and Jean-Luc Nancy’s trend-surfing 1980 conference “The Ends of Man” (inspired by Jacques Derrida’s celebrated 1969 essay of the same name), the dereified human subject was over and again cast by leading thinkers of mid-century Europe as a relic of Western metaphysics in decline—on its way out with logocentrism, late capitalism, and liberal democracy. In between, there was Michel Foucault’s “Death of Man,” Roland Barthes’s “Death of the Author,” and, in a similar spirit, Louis Althusser’s “anti-humanist” interrogation of the constitutively benighted “subject of ideology.”
Telos, 2021
“An academic boycott of Israeli institutions should be called out for what it is,” Cary Nelson de... more “An academic boycott of Israeli institutions should be called out for what it is,” Cary Nelson declares in the first in-depth, full-length study of the scholactivism behind the BDS movement to disinvite Israel from the family of nations. And what his research reveals, he concludes, is nothing less than “a selective anti-faculty, anti-research, and anti-student agenda,” with consequences not only for Jewish faculty and students but for the academy at large (80). In other words, while the Jewish state is the stated target, the university as a whole is collateral damage. While so selective a boycott in theory would appear …
dissentmagazine.org
... [W]hat desires, other than freedom, do people live by? What do we mean by freedom, from what,... more ... [W]hat desires, other than freedom, do people live by? What do we mean by freedom, from what, and toward what end?' (Saba Mahmood, interviewed by Nermeen Shaikh, The Present As History: Critical Perspectives on Global Power, New York: Columbia UP, pp. 150-1).
Arthur Melzer's tremendous accomplishment is even greater than he may realize. The tradition of e... more Arthur Melzer's tremendous accomplishment is even greater than he may realize. The tradition of esoteric writing in political philosophy exists, as he convincingly demonstrates, and the consequences of this discovery are as significant as he claims. But the method of esoteric reading that he recommends applies more broadly than he seems to suggest. Applied liberally, moreover, as a corrective to nearly everything that's gone wrong with education in the humanities and social sciences over the last forty years, his humble heuristic-Melzer's Maxim, I call it-has the potential to reorient and renew the whole concept of Liberal Education for an age whose pedagogy is foundering. A boon to the sub-discipline of Political Theory in particular, Philosophy Between the Lines has even more to offer to classroom instruction in general. Read between the lines, Melzer's specialized work of scholarship promises nothing less than the opening of the American mind. It is the antidote to the poison of politically correct multiculturalism.
Rethinking History, 2007
The self-described "fabulist," Mike Davis (who once posed as an historian) paints a bleak picture... more The self-described "fabulist," Mike Davis (who once posed as an historian) paints a bleak picture of Los Angeles. Orhan Pamuk, the novelist, poses more genuine historical questions when Middle East meets American West.
Poetics Today, 1993
... California); Louis Marin (Paris) CA Patrides (Ann Arbor, Michigan); Paul Ricoeur (Chicago and... more ... California); Louis Marin (Paris) CA Patrides (Ann Arbor, Michigan); Paul Ricoeur (Chicago and Paris) Brian Sutton-Smith (Philadelphia ... James Hans (Winston-Salem, North Carolina) Andre Helbo (Bruxelles); Dominick LaCapra (Ithaca, New York) Virgil Nemoianu (Washington ...
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Papers by Gabriel N Brahm