A Little Post About a Few Words

Sung Ming Whang, Shanghai, 2010. CC BY 2.0 image courtesy Wikimedia Commons. All right. Sometimes I have nothing to offer but interesting phrases or words dished out by others. This time, one of those phrases comes from Eugene Thacker’s In the Dust of this Planet. In the book, Thacker has an intriguing way of presenting his case, usually by adapting Scholastic forms of argumentation. At one point, he suggests what follows will be a series of “essays-in-miniature” inspired by the disputatio de quodlibet, a “disputation about any topic, about ‘whatever,’” whether said disputation is carried out with oneself or with others.1 That suggestion left me with a curious sense of vindication. Although this type of dispute would have been conducted by the certifiably well-informed—it’s the topic that wouldn’t have mattered, and wouldn’t have been an invitation to just anyone who had an opinion to participate—the description still filled me with a sense of relief. A failure in the end when it came…