“Losing the Center: The Emergent Metaphysics of Positive and Negative Distance in Troubadour and Flamenco Lyric” – an essay in which I undertake a ‘recombinant reading’ of traditional flamenco lyrics and troubadour poetry from the the first half of the twelfth century in order to demonstrate how subjectivity, insofar as it is formed, compelled, lured, distended and severed by distance, functions as a spatiotemporal complex shaped by physical flows of mixture and separation. In doing so, I critique the discourses emerging from speculative realism, object-oriented ontology and new materialism, claiming that their attempt to epistemically circumvent subjective mediation in their desire for direct access to things-in-themselves (or noumena, in Kantian parlance) constitutes a refusal to acknowledge that subjective mediation is itself a material situation that expresses flows and processes in the noumenal world whose dynamics undergird and arrange both subjects and things-in-themselves. Published in Comparative Literature Studies, vol. 61, issue 1, pp. 123-155 (Winter 2024)
“Clearing Up Correlationism: Goldschmidt, Meillassoux, and the Problem of Finitude” – an essay in which I grapple with the ways in which Quentin Meillassoux defines the problem of the subject’s finitude within the Kantian ‘correlationist’ epistemic model and his use of the principle of non-contradiction as a way of short-circuiting the bounded internalism of a priori thinking and circumventing the limitations of that finitude. As an alternative to Meillassoux’s solution, I turn to Hermann Levin Goldschmidt’s philosophy of contradiction, according to which the epistemic incommensurability between finitude and infinitude would be reconfigured as a contradictory ‘Either-And-Or’ by which the two terms negotiate with one another and, in doing so, become mutually permeable. Published in Philosophy Today, vol. 67, issue 3, pp. 605-622 (Summer 2023).
“Over-Abundance and Ineffability: Flamenco, Mysticism and the Joyful Language-Game” – a essay on the ideological, aesthetic and ecstatic experiential structure of “duende” in flamenco culture, with a particular emphasis on its resonance with the social history of the Gitano (Romani) community of southern Spain. Included is a playlist of flamenco cante that was curated with special attention to recordings featuring the archetypal “voz afillada” that is so often associated with the presence of “duende.” Published in Liminalities, vol. 17, issue 1, pp. 1-26 (Autumn 2021).
“El viaje de la poesía de Javier Egea al inglés: la traducción como crítica de la ideología” – an essay on the complications of translating the revolutionary poetics of the Andalusian writer Javier Egea into English in El Mundo Obrero, which is the official periodical of the Communist Party of Spain (June 2021)
“Geoffrey Hill’s Last Word” – a review of Geoffrey Hill’s posthumous collection The Book of Baruch by the Gnostic Justin, in Issue 66 of the Great River Review (Autumn 2019)
Ben Meyerson 