“IT DOESN’T TAKE ME LONG TO REALIZE that no one wants to read this pathemata,” writes Maggie Nelson in her new book, Pathemata. Nelson is not speaking of the book itself, but rather about a document that provides much of its source material: a record she has made of her jaw pain, for the benefit […]
WHEN HOMER SIMPSON wakes up gray in the face one morning, poisoned by a long-spoiled sandwich, it’s not because the ten-foot hoagie was never nourishing. It is Homer’s pathological reluctance to let go that pits him against his own stomach. Cradling the sandwich’s putrefied remains in the sickbed to which it has condemned him, Homer “can’t stay mad” at the snack so large it once seemed it would just keep giving. The emotional life of the political left, according to many of its theorists, can often, in this sense, feel Homeric. From Benjamin, Adorno, and Marx to Wendy Brown, Enzo Traverso,