Argonaut Folly

It's very flattering that you want to know what my forthcoming Argonaut Folly essay is about, Chris. But I can't spill the beans before n+1 hits the stands. Let's just say that it's an exercise in outsider-intellectual history, examining a particular fantasy that many of my favorite thinkers and artists of the past have entertained.

I wrote a similar outsider-intellectual history essay for the first issue of n+1. The earlier essay, titled "The Black Iron Prison," looked at the 19th-century origins of the widespread conviction (which is mistakenly considered to be the invention of Adorno, Foucault, and other midcentury European thinkers) that a democratic-capitalist society only appears to be a free social order, when it's actually a prison.

Both of these essays draw upon the massive collection of notes I took, several years ago, when I tried and failed to write a book about outsider intellectuals, from Baudelaire to Bruce Lee. As I wallowed in the debt-ridden aftermath of my failure, Alex Star and The Boston Globe approached me about lending a hand with a new Sunday section, to be called Ideas. Hallelujah! I was rescued from bankruptcy.

Other posts about n+1: 1 | 2 | 3 |