An ethic that is averse to instrumentality animates the thought of contemporary Italian philosopher Giorgio Agamben, and can be seen in Iranian director Jafar Panahi’s It Was Just an Accident, released in 2025.

Kyle Sossamon on an ethics of gesture

In most areas, Machiavelli and Erasmus disagree, but both adamantly warn princes against flatterers. Though medieval princes are rare in the present, warnings against flatterers may be more widely applicable than ever before because of AI.

Elizabeth Stice on genealogies of flattery

Monsters show that our critiques should target not only the process that turned nature into a mute object at the disposal of the human, but also the correlative process that reduced divine and supernatural forces to superstitions of the past.

Emre Keser on monsters and history

The seal of the Massachusetts Bay Colony is filled with the paradoxes and tensions that are required to define and depict modernity: Latin encircling King James English, the indigenous name Massachusetts subsumed by Nova Anglia, and the Native man always simultaneously noble and savage, inviting and threatening.

Julian Sieber on colonial modernity

The Massachusetts Bay Colony Seal is in and of itself a rather compact genealogy of modernity. The image is a discursive moment that actively constructs a sense of what it means to be modern, and it neatly highlights several important phenomena that cohere to underpin Western colonial modernity: seals/logos, the Bible, and the construction of “the Indian.”

Julian Sieber on colonial modernity

Two films of the past fifteen years, The Book of Eli (2010) and Mad Max: Fury Road (2015), dramatize this confluence of grifter capitalism and religious demagoguery in the years immediately prior to Trump’s real-life rise to power. 

J. Laurence Cohen on the fusion of religion and politics in the US

The past cannot confirm what we say of it; there are always details left in silence, despite our best efforts; whispers that are barely legible; haunting echoes that quietly ripple through time.

Zaccary A. Haney on identity and history

Schmitt’s interpretation of politics as fundamentally being a fight between friends and enemies may well, at its core, be correct. Yet, Schmitt’s trying to tie this claim to space is a failure which cannot be ignored.

Sam Mace on Carl Schmitt’s friend-enemy dichotomy

The chain of being began in ancient philosophy, but it reached its fullest and most systematic expression in medieval Christendom. In the hands of medieval scholastics, the chain of being was personified.

Julia Powell’s genealogy of the Great Chain of Being

“All the past incarnations of the katechon have resulted culturally in a progressive, step-by-step demystification of the nature of violence itself, bringing to the surface its mimetic and cyclic nature. Are we not at the point where the very discussion of the katechon involves an understanding of this nature and the actual unsustainability of violent solutions?”

Anthony Bartlett offers a genealogy of the katechon

“The most significant recent embrace of the katechon comes from tech-billionaire student of Girard and Trump/Vance backer, Peter Thiel. The connection with Girard makes this latest iteration doubly provocative and in need of serious examination.”

Anthony Bartlett offers a genealogy of the katechon

What earlier ages described as communion or participation reappears in a new vocabulary of entanglement and interdependence… The underlying insight is familiar: the world is not a collection of discrete objects but a web of relationships, a reality that becomes understandable only through forms of participation.

Brian M. Ross on the compatibility of religion and science

Either the mysterious structures underpinning our rationality are arbitrary and misleading, or—somehow—they broadly work… We are forced to wager that there is something somehow connecting our thoughts with reality. 

Kit Wilson on science, skepticism, and subjective experience

“As the great phenomenologists and theoretical physicists of the mid-twentieth century saw it, then, science simply cannot deny ordinary human experience without ultimately undermining itself.”

Kit Wilson on science and reality

“Girardian revelation is a necessary addition to the genealogies of the modern, not in any sense of religion making a comeback to contest the secular, but in a sense internal to the secular itself. ”

Anthony Bartlett on René Girard

“Girard’s generative anthropology rises from a discovery of foundational violence, and constantly illustrates a desperate contemporary need to somehow free ourselves from this violence.”

Anthony Bartlett on René Girard

“We must recognize that the post-Cartesian reductive-materialist frameworks will never be sufficient to support a robust and expansive human flourishing.”
M. G. Scott on re-accessing metastructure

“The truly strange thing about quantum mechanics is not the content of the theory: it’s the way that quantum mechanics threatens to upend our fundamental relationship to reality itself.”

M. G. Scott on quantum mechanics and truth.

Does the agonistic ritual of the potlatch—identified as “primitive” by some—only belong to the past or does it appear in the so-called modern world?

Carl Friesenhahn looks at three ways of answering this question.

Genealogies of Modernity remembers Alasdair MacIntyre