Tessera

University of Minnesota Press@uminnpress.bsky.social · 2mo ago

I got to speak with Cary Wolfe, Giuseppe Longo, and Adam Nocek about our new books - very excited to share this with you all!

🆕🎧▶️ On the pod, a Posthumanities series event: Giuseppe Longo, Adam Nocek, Jonathan Basile, and Cary Wolfe talk theoretical biology, deconstruction, language and interpretation, science and living systems, & much more. share.transistor.fm/s/392c9238 @jonothingeb.bsky.social

Los Angeles Review of Books@lareviewofbooks.bsky.social · 2mo ago

I responded to Mike Fortun's essay about my review of Harden's book. I did not feel that Fortun had responded to any of my substantive criticisms of her work, nor did he evince a careful reading of Harden's book or research.

"Harden claims to accept the most obvious and prevalent criticisms of her field, in order to pretend she has advanced beyond them." Jonathan Basile responds to Mike Fortun’s on "Original Sin": http://lareviewofbooks.org/article/eugenics-nature-nurture-jonathan-basile-responding-mike-fortun

Dez Miller @dezmiller.bsky.social · 2mo ago

Got this in the mail today. Excited to read it @jonothingeb.bsky.social!!

Very excited to share with you a new essay by Nisarg Patel on interpreting silences in the archives of postcolonial theory, comparing Gayatri Spivak and Ranajit Guha! olrsupplement.com/2026/08/27/b...

Between Two Deaths: The Work of Silence in the Thought of Ranajit Guha and Gayatri Spivak - The OLR Supplement

Foundational postcolonial theorists Gayatri Spivak and Ranajit Guha offer contrasting methods for interpreting archival silences

olrsupplement.com

Jonathan Basile @jonothingeb.bsky.social · 3mo ago

Can anyone think of a short-ish (twenty or so) pages text that could introduce students to the history of debates/controversies that have followed from the work of Darwin? A broad overview of things like the Modern Synthesis, eugenics, the Scopes Trial, sociobiology...

We'd love it if you wanted to submit an abstract for the ACLA seminar we're proposing on Science and Ideology! Come think about Marxism, the sciences, and french theory with us: www.acla.org/seminar/bdff...

The prospect of a critique of scientific ideology (or a critique of ideological science) can seem inherently contradictory according to a doctrinaire interpretation of Marx’s conception of science and ideology. In the words of Canguilhem, “Science authenticates itself, [Marx] argued, by tearing the veil that is ideology’s only substance. Hence scientific ideology is a contradiction in terms.” If ideology, for Marx, was contrasted with true (Marxist) economic science, what could it mean to designate certain sciences as ideological?

How can one take account of the historicity of the sciences and critique their contingent, outmoded, and often indeed deluded and deluding forms while leaving room for that true scientificity that Marxism is meant to represent? Many of Althusser’s writings presented a confrontation with these questions, in part by building upon Bachelard’s concept of “epistemological break,” and his formulation of the science/ideology dichotomy informed the work of Georges Canguilhem, Michel Foucault, Dominique Lecourt, and remains influential in continental science studies, for example on the work of Hans-Jörg Rheinberger. This tradition also informed the work of certain Marxist scientists, such as dialectical biologists Richard Levins and Richard Lewontin. At the same time, Jacques Derrida, in his seminars of the 1970s (two of which have been published since his death), deconstructed this opposition by asking how the entire system oriented by the progress from ideology to science must be changed if models or metaphors cannot ultimately be replaced by true and literal concepts.

We are interested both in papers that interpret and build upon this tradition by making use of its guiding concepts to intervene in present debates in Marxist theory, French theory, and science studies, as well as contributions that would think the limits of this framework and how subsequent developments of science and its economic and political contexts may ask us to reconfigure these concepts and the analyses this tradition put them to. To give just one example, both Althusser and Canguilhem turn to the genetics of their day as the primary representative of a true, nonideological science—a representation of genetics that is increasingly placed in question by biologists today, and which could well be understood as the fetishizing attribution of social and economic relations to things themselves.

What does a Marxist critique of scientific theory and practice look like today? As Marx and Engels often pointed out, the concepts they left us with responded to the conditions in which they wrote, and would need to be renovated with every passing generation. It is in this spirit that we invite contributors to think with and against this tradition, reawakening its spirit of radical critique.

Jonathan Basile @jonothingeb.bsky.social · 4mo ago

Our roundtable on Geoffrey Bennington's Scatter project continues with Peggy Kamuf's reflection on translating and inheriting from Specters of Marx: olrsupplement.com/2026/06/25/o...

On the Scattered Legacy of Specters of Marx - The OLR Supplement

Peggy Kamuf on the thought of legacy in Derrida's Specters of Marx and Geoffrey Bennington's Scatter project

olrsupplement.com

Jonathan Basile @jonothingeb.bsky.social · 4mo ago

Very excited for this!

Sarah Brouillette@sarahbrouillette.bsky.social · 4mo ago

Now available for preorder, arriving in warehouse 10/02/2026: dukeupress.edu/content-mach... Duke UP gave me a discount code for 30% off paperback preorders: it's E26CNTNT ♥️👍

Jonathan Basile @jonothingeb.bsky.social · 4mo ago

I wrote this essay to correct recent obituaries of Craig Venter, which overstate the significance of his human genome sequencing work, repeating the hype and exaggerated promises of his own self-promotion, which was designed to fuel speculative investment in his biotech companies

Disjunctions Magazine@disjunctionsmag.bsky.social · 4mo ago

@jonothingeb.bsky.social, on Craig Venter's life and science under neoliberalism.

I forgot to mention this discount code: MN95970 - valid until August 1: www.upress.umn.edu/978151791998...

Natural Lection

A radical deconstructive approach to evolutionary theoryFor as long as there has been evolutionary science, thinkers in the natural sciences, social sciences...

upress.umn.edu

I'm very excited to share my book, Natural Lection, with you all! A deconstruction of "cultural evolution" and notions of nature/culture that circulate in the sciences and the humanities:

These are the more practical conclusions: I argue that we arrive at a more robust critique of 'AI', and a more thorough understanding of artistic and linguistic production (from human and machine), when it is not based on intentionalist theories of meaning

The LLM is no more a self-conscious subject than we are, but this removes one commonplace stopgap for critiques of ‘AI’. Its statements can no longer be claimed as meaningless, or its artworks as devoid of aesthetic quality, simply because it lacks the intentions of a subject. Our own language has never depended on our intentions for its meaning (as we can see, machine writing remains legible—so much so that at times it is difficult to distinguish or prove its provenance—even if we may tend to read it differently than human writing, when we know or think we know its origin). A structuralist view might conclude that language, as a system unto itself, not only does not depend on such intentions but is the matrix in which they are generated, that all the effects we attribute to our own subjectivity or initiative are effects of language, misrecognized. Derrida was never satisfied by such notions of the ‘death of the author’:

Rather than oppose citation or iteration to the noniteration of an event, one ought to construct a differential typology of forms of iteration, assuming that such a project is tenable and can result in an exhaustive program, a question I hold in abeyance here. In such a typology, the category of intention will not disappear; it will have its place, but from that place it will no longer be able to govern the entire scene and system of utterance.

In other words, intention does not disappear from the scene once it is deconstructed—it is just that it, like everything else, is written and read. It cannot govern the meaning of a statement (we argue over presumed intentions or can dispute explicit intention-claims, can dissimulate intentions and even be at odds with ourselves over them, and can see further possibilities of interpretation or reading beyond a given intention, etc.). It follows from deconstruction not that intentions and statements of them are meaningless and not that language or writing univocally masters the scene, creating a meaning of and unto itself that forecloses all others, but that intentions are textual. In other words, we know them by that relay described above, understanding our own through language, the world, and the other. They exist for us or an interlocutor or witness only to the extent that they can be inscribed (implicitly or explicitly), which means that they are not the origin of language or action, but rather a participant in the scene of writing.

Then, our own ‘intentions’ can be transformed by inserting a novel writing machine into our circuits, and that machine may produce intention-effects just as we do, by displacing those relays, by taking part in the self-exteriority of textuality. That certainly does not mean that we ought to treat the writing of LLMs just as we do writing from other sources (except in the sense that both must be read, one way or another), it only means that the linkage we try to form between text and context is insecure in both cases.

Nor do we need to seek out our inner light to dismiss the artistic productions of ‘AI’. While it is often said that some form of genius, sympathy, or suffering sets apart human artistry, we should recognize that whatever self-relation we accomplish through art-making (a) necessarily subjects itself to established and iterable art-forms, genres, etc., even or especially when it attempts to exceed their limits, and (b) first comes to itself in a relay with such formulaic art (life imitates art, etc.). Again, it is what we have in common with writing machines that allows us to read them otherwise. Context plays a nonprogrammable role in how we read anything, including an artwork. The stories we can tell about a work and its author, the history and tradition within which we contextualize it, and the environing scene in which we situate it all play some role in how we interpret and relate to the work. This context does not determine or constitute reading any more than intention does (nor is it a simple given what counts as context); context participates in the scene. So, anyone is free to imagine that the products of ‘AI’ emerge from a thinking and feeling computer consciousness that they then relate to in an identificatory fashion (as they would any other artist—but perhaps not exactly so), or to see such works as the lazy detritus of a human machine-user or prompt writer, worthy of no more of the reader’s effort than was put into their creation.

even if we share a disdain for the type of poetic or artistic work thus far created with ‘AI’, we should not try to theorize its deficiency by claiming that all automated or programmatic processes are inimical to creativity. As Derrida often wrote, it is necessary to think ‘the event with the machine’. Invention or the unanticipatable is not only possible as a repetition that changes contexts, but every invention takes place this way. Long before LLMs, we had poets and artists making use of much simpler algorithms, and even before the computer, combinatoric processes were used to bypass the censors of consciousness; moreover, processes of recontextualization (such as found art or poetry) demonstrate the interrelation of invention and iterability. Even if such artistic practices remain matters of taste, I would argue against dismissing them on the grounds that art ought to emanate from the mystical font of pure creativity; if ‘AI’ art disgusts us today, if there is a truly visceral reaction against it, that is perhaps not because of its reliance on machine or iterability (always already the case), nor because of its uniquely bad aesthetic quality (the average and majority of human composition has been similarly slop-like, but may evoke a different reaction); rather, the context and story surrounding this technology is part of our aesthetic experience. That it is dismantling the economic possibilities for human artists and many others, forced upon us by a capitalist system fundamentally hostile to life and nature, serving as the fun-and-innocent front of an ideological campaign building infrastructure and ideological support for ever more totalitarian forms of surveillance, warfare, and governance, all for the benefit of eminently mediocre man-children (too lacking in taste to even appreciate what they are destroying, except for perhaps a barely conscious resentment), this shapes aesthetic experience in a manner that a theory of intentionalism can only obscure.

Felicity Callard @felicitycallard.bsky.social · 5mo ago

I wrote an essay exploring how structuralism and deconstruction have informed recent theory around 'AI' and 'LLMs' including @leifw.bsky.social's Language Machines: olrsupplement.com/2026/06/01/w...

Really looking forward to reading this

I wrote an essay exploring how structuralism and deconstruction have informed recent theory around 'AI' and 'LLMs' including @leifw.bsky.social's Language Machines: olrsupplement.com/2026/06/01/w...

University of Minnesota Press @uminnpress.bsky.social · 5mo ago

Is Firefox suddenly acting really buggy for anyone else? Anyone found a way to fix this?

Two new books out in the world! #PubDay The Home of the Drowned, a novel by int'l prize-winner Elin Anna Labba, translated by Elizabeth Clark Wessel. Natural Lection: Cultures of Evolution by @jonothingeb.bsky.social opens a novel terrain of scientific and political possibility.

Book cover for The Home of the Drowned: A Novel by Elin Anna Labba, translated by Elizabeth Clark Wessel. An illustration of a blue lake surrounded by mountains under a red sky and yellow sun. A white hare jumps in the foreground. Text in black and gold.

Book cover for Natural Lection: Cultures of Evolution by Jonathan Basile. White background with a drawing of a macaque reading a book in its hands while sitting on top of the large black title letters.

Will Beaman @greenbackbetter.bsky.social · 5mo ago

Finally something smart written about AI from a humanistic perspective that isn’t just a diatribe about plagiarism and five million other things condensed into one master sign. Highly recommend these excellent reflections!!

I wrote an essay exploring how structuralism and deconstruction have informed recent theory around 'AI' and 'LLMs' including @leifw.bsky.social's Language Machines: olrsupplement.com/2026/06/01/w...

Leah Pennywark@lpennywark.bsky.social · 5mo ago

I'm very excited to share my book, Natural Lection, with you all! A deconstruction of "cultural evolution" and notions of nature/culture that circulate in the sciences and the humanities:

Out today: Jonathan Basile's @jonothingeb.bsky.social radical deconstructive approach to evolutionary theory, Natural Lection: Cultures of Evolution! www.upress.umn.edu/978151791998...

I wrote an essay exploring how structuralism and deconstruction have informed recent theory around 'AI' and 'LLMs' including @leifw.bsky.social's Language Machines: olrsupplement.com/2026/06/01/w...

olrsupplement.com

Simon Glendinning considers the role of moralism in academic political theory and politics more broadly, in dialogue with Geoffrey Bennington's Scatter project: olrsupplement.com/2026/05/26/o...

On the Genealogy of Moralism - The OLR Supplement

Simon Glendinning reads with and against Geoffrey Bennington's Scatter project, reflecting on political theory and contemporary politics

olrsupplement.com