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Travis Holloway
CONTACT: THOLLOW9@PRATT.EDU
Travis Holloway (he/they), M.F.A., Ph.D., is currently Adjunct Associate Professor at the Pratt Institute and the 2023-2024 recipient of Pratt's Research Recognition Award. He has been Assistant Professor of Philosophy at SUNY Farmingdale, Visiting Assistant Professor of Philosophy at Vassar College, a translator, and a poet and former Goldwater Fellow in Creative Writing at NYU, where he studied with the poets Anne Carson, Yusef Komunyakaa, John Ashbery, Charles Simic, and Marie Howe. His unpublished poetry manuscript, It Was Up to Us, was a finalist for two national poetry awards.
Holloway is author of How to Live at the End of the World: Theory, Art, and Politics for the Anthropocene (Stanford, 2022), which received multiple awards in 2023; co-translator of three books and several articles by the French political philosopher Jean-Luc Nancy, including The Possibility of a World (Fordham, 2017), What's These Worlds Coming To? (Fordham, 2014), and Corpus III (Fordham, 2023); and co-author of Occupying Wall Street: The Inside Story of an Action that Changed America (OR Books, 2011). He is currently working on two subsequent monographs: How to Perform a Democracy; and How to Assemble with All of the Living. He is also editing a special issue of Philosophy Today on philosophy in a new era of climate change.
Holloway grew up queer and working-class in a rural factory town affected by free trade and globalization. A first-generation college student, he completed his graduation studies on a Fulbright and a DAAD at the Universität Freiburg in Germany, and as a visiting researcher at the Sorbonne and the EHESS in Paris. Holloway's primary interests are contemporary Continental philosophy, aesthetics, social and political philosophy, queer theory, creative writing, and the environmental humanities. His work has appeared in a variety of outlets from Philosophy Today to The Nation to CSPAN’s Book TV. Some of his recent articles include "Weather" (The Philosopher, 2022), "A Genealogy at the End of the World" (The Philosopher, 2020), "A Strategy for a Democratic Future" (Tropos, 2019), “Neoliberalism and the Future of Democracy" (Philosophy Today, 2018), and “How to Perform a Democracy” (Epoché, 2017).
Holloway has received fellowships from the Fulbright Commission, the DAAD, the Andrew Mellon foundation, and the Max Kade Institute for research in Germany, France, and Italy. He is also active in various community organizations and collectives in the New York City area. During the events of Occupy Wall Street in New York, he organized the weekly "Poetry Assembly" on Friday nights, which introduced the use of the "lot."
Travis Holloway (he/they), M.F.A., Ph.D., is currently Adjunct Associate Professor at the Pratt Institute and the 2023-2024 recipient of Pratt's Research Recognition Award. He has been Assistant Professor of Philosophy at SUNY Farmingdale, Visiting Assistant Professor of Philosophy at Vassar College, a translator, and a poet and former Goldwater Fellow in Creative Writing at NYU, where he studied with the poets Anne Carson, Yusef Komunyakaa, John Ashbery, Charles Simic, and Marie Howe. His unpublished poetry manuscript, It Was Up to Us, was a finalist for two national poetry awards.
Holloway is author of How to Live at the End of the World: Theory, Art, and Politics for the Anthropocene (Stanford, 2022), which received multiple awards in 2023; co-translator of three books and several articles by the French political philosopher Jean-Luc Nancy, including The Possibility of a World (Fordham, 2017), What's These Worlds Coming To? (Fordham, 2014), and Corpus III (Fordham, 2023); and co-author of Occupying Wall Street: The Inside Story of an Action that Changed America (OR Books, 2011). He is currently working on two subsequent monographs: How to Perform a Democracy; and How to Assemble with All of the Living. He is also editing a special issue of Philosophy Today on philosophy in a new era of climate change.
Holloway grew up queer and working-class in a rural factory town affected by free trade and globalization. A first-generation college student, he completed his graduation studies on a Fulbright and a DAAD at the Universität Freiburg in Germany, and as a visiting researcher at the Sorbonne and the EHESS in Paris. Holloway's primary interests are contemporary Continental philosophy, aesthetics, social and political philosophy, queer theory, creative writing, and the environmental humanities. His work has appeared in a variety of outlets from Philosophy Today to The Nation to CSPAN’s Book TV. Some of his recent articles include "Weather" (The Philosopher, 2022), "A Genealogy at the End of the World" (The Philosopher, 2020), "A Strategy for a Democratic Future" (Tropos, 2019), “Neoliberalism and the Future of Democracy" (Philosophy Today, 2018), and “How to Perform a Democracy” (Epoché, 2017).
Holloway has received fellowships from the Fulbright Commission, the DAAD, the Andrew Mellon foundation, and the Max Kade Institute for research in Germany, France, and Italy. He is also active in various community organizations and collectives in the New York City area. During the events of Occupy Wall Street in New York, he organized the weekly "Poetry Assembly" on Friday nights, which introduced the use of the "lot."
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A beautiful, profound series of reflections on the body by one of the most prominent and consequential philosophers of continental Europe.
This landmark volume brings into English Jean-Luc Nancy’s last completed work and concludes his remarkable philosophical reflections on the body, a project he began almost thirty years ago. Taking the body as an intersection of pulsing life and destructive cruelty on a global scale, Nancy’s account becomes more vivid, more physical, than ever, even as it ventures into language that is as lyrical as it is profound. This vividness is manifest in blood: as it flows, in all its pulsing and forceful circulation, and as it spills, in the cruelty of existences confronted daily by countless destructions. This can be described as sanguis and cruor, the two Latin words for blood’s intermingled but distinct aspects. This distinction allows Nancy to highlight an almost mystical sense of the body (yet one that remains soberly on this side of its manifest insistence), alongside the cruelty that pervades our world—a world whose very existence is threatened by its reduction to mere objects.
The exceptional writings brought together in Corpus III comprise a masterful work of philosophy that marries rigorous erudition—on Freud, Nietzsche, and others—with rich poetic language and an actual poem. Nancy’s thought opens the body onto its own unaccountable origins, its plural singularities, its enmeshed instantiations, and its excessive irreducibles, which are also the elusive excesses of language. Whereas in earlier texts Nancy has referred to this excess as poetry, here he performs it in the form of a poem, in the extraordinary hymn entitled Stoma. While the publication of a poem by Nancy is a notable event, equally noteworthy is a remarkable essay entitled “Scandalous Death,” in which Nancy meditated on a subject that was to come to him too soon after. Above all, the book is crucial for bringing into English Cruor, the very last book Nancy completed before his death, an evocative meditation offered by a great thinker on the complex conditions of his own—and our—singular survival.
Jean-Luc Nancy (1940–2021) was Distinguished Professor of Philosophy at the Université Marc Bloch, Strasbourg. His wide-ranging thought runs through many books, including Being Singular Plural, The Ground of the Image, Corpus, The Disavowed Community, and Sexistence. His “The Intruder” was adapted into a film by Claire Denis.
This journey through Nancy’s thought is interspersed with accounts of places and events and deeply personal details. The result is at once unpretentious and encyclopedic: Concepts are described with remarkable nuance and specificity, but in a language that comes close to that of everyday life.
As Nancy surveys his work, he thinks anew about democracy, community, jouissance, love, Christianity, and the arts. In the end, this is a book about the possibility of a world—a world that must be greeted because it is, as Nancy says, already here.
Nancy and Barrau invite us on an uncharted walk into barely known worlds when an everyday French idiom, “What’s this world coming to?" is used to question our conventional thinking about the world. We soon find ourselves living among heaps of odd bits and pieces that are amassing without any unifying force or center, living not only in a time of ruin and fragmentation but also of rebuilding. Astrophysicist Aurelien Barrau articulates a major shift in the paradigm of contemporary physics from a universe to a multiverse. Meanwhile, Jean-Luc Nancy’s essay “Of Struction” is a contemporary comment on the project of deconstruction and French poststructuralist thought. Together Barrau and Nancy argue that contemporary thought has shifted from deconstruction to what they carefully call the struction of dis-order.
In the early hours of Tuesday, November 15, the occupiers' camp was destroyed when police swept suddenly into the square. But if the occupation at Zuccotti was destroyed that night, the movement it spawned across America has only just begun.
Occupying Wall Street draws on extensive interviews with those who took part in the action to bring an inside-the-square history to life. In a vivid narrative, the key events of the occupation are described, and woven throughout are stories of daily life in the square focusing on how the kitchen, library, media center, clean-up, hospital, and General Assembly functioned, all in the words of the people who were there.
Writers for the 99% is a group of writers and researchers active in supporting Occupy Wall Street who came together to create this book.
"I'm awfully glad these writers were taking notes and recording this history as it happened—OWS is one of the most important developments in this country in many a year, and we need to understand how it happened and where it might go. This volume goes a long way toward filling that need!" —Bill McKibben
"An essential and galvanizing on-the-ground account of how oxygen suddenly and miraculously flooded back into the American brain." —Jonathan Lethem
"The last thirty years belonged to Wall Street. If Occupy gets it right, the next thirty should belong to us. This indispensable book is the first chapter in the story about the long revolution to come." —Andrew Ross
“The emphasis will be on everyday details of the occupation—a recreation of texture, in all its unfiltered smells and brain-bursting sounds.” —The Daily Beast
A beautiful, profound series of reflections on the body by one of the most prominent and consequential philosophers of continental Europe.
This landmark volume brings into English Jean-Luc Nancy’s last completed work and concludes his remarkable philosophical reflections on the body, a project he began almost thirty years ago. Taking the body as an intersection of pulsing life and destructive cruelty on a global scale, Nancy’s account becomes more vivid, more physical, than ever, even as it ventures into language that is as lyrical as it is profound. This vividness is manifest in blood: as it flows, in all its pulsing and forceful circulation, and as it spills, in the cruelty of existences confronted daily by countless destructions. This can be described as sanguis and cruor, the two Latin words for blood’s intermingled but distinct aspects. This distinction allows Nancy to highlight an almost mystical sense of the body (yet one that remains soberly on this side of its manifest insistence), alongside the cruelty that pervades our world—a world whose very existence is threatened by its reduction to mere objects.
The exceptional writings brought together in Corpus III comprise a masterful work of philosophy that marries rigorous erudition—on Freud, Nietzsche, and others—with rich poetic language and an actual poem. Nancy’s thought opens the body onto its own unaccountable origins, its plural singularities, its enmeshed instantiations, and its excessive irreducibles, which are also the elusive excesses of language. Whereas in earlier texts Nancy has referred to this excess as poetry, here he performs it in the form of a poem, in the extraordinary hymn entitled Stoma. While the publication of a poem by Nancy is a notable event, equally noteworthy is a remarkable essay entitled “Scandalous Death,” in which Nancy meditated on a subject that was to come to him too soon after. Above all, the book is crucial for bringing into English Cruor, the very last book Nancy completed before his death, an evocative meditation offered by a great thinker on the complex conditions of his own—and our—singular survival.
Jean-Luc Nancy (1940–2021) was Distinguished Professor of Philosophy at the Université Marc Bloch, Strasbourg. His wide-ranging thought runs through many books, including Being Singular Plural, The Ground of the Image, Corpus, The Disavowed Community, and Sexistence. His “The Intruder” was adapted into a film by Claire Denis.
This journey through Nancy’s thought is interspersed with accounts of places and events and deeply personal details. The result is at once unpretentious and encyclopedic: Concepts are described with remarkable nuance and specificity, but in a language that comes close to that of everyday life.
As Nancy surveys his work, he thinks anew about democracy, community, jouissance, love, Christianity, and the arts. In the end, this is a book about the possibility of a world—a world that must be greeted because it is, as Nancy says, already here.
Nancy and Barrau invite us on an uncharted walk into barely known worlds when an everyday French idiom, “What’s this world coming to?" is used to question our conventional thinking about the world. We soon find ourselves living among heaps of odd bits and pieces that are amassing without any unifying force or center, living not only in a time of ruin and fragmentation but also of rebuilding. Astrophysicist Aurelien Barrau articulates a major shift in the paradigm of contemporary physics from a universe to a multiverse. Meanwhile, Jean-Luc Nancy’s essay “Of Struction” is a contemporary comment on the project of deconstruction and French poststructuralist thought. Together Barrau and Nancy argue that contemporary thought has shifted from deconstruction to what they carefully call the struction of dis-order.
In the early hours of Tuesday, November 15, the occupiers' camp was destroyed when police swept suddenly into the square. But if the occupation at Zuccotti was destroyed that night, the movement it spawned across America has only just begun.
Occupying Wall Street draws on extensive interviews with those who took part in the action to bring an inside-the-square history to life. In a vivid narrative, the key events of the occupation are described, and woven throughout are stories of daily life in the square focusing on how the kitchen, library, media center, clean-up, hospital, and General Assembly functioned, all in the words of the people who were there.
Writers for the 99% is a group of writers and researchers active in supporting Occupy Wall Street who came together to create this book.
"I'm awfully glad these writers were taking notes and recording this history as it happened—OWS is one of the most important developments in this country in many a year, and we need to understand how it happened and where it might go. This volume goes a long way toward filling that need!" —Bill McKibben
"An essential and galvanizing on-the-ground account of how oxygen suddenly and miraculously flooded back into the American brain." —Jonathan Lethem
"The last thirty years belonged to Wall Street. If Occupy gets it right, the next thirty should belong to us. This indispensable book is the first chapter in the story about the long revolution to come." —Andrew Ross
“The emphasis will be on everyday details of the occupation—a recreation of texture, in all its unfiltered smells and brain-bursting sounds.” —The Daily Beast
• institutional (local, national, geopolitical government institutions; climate accords)
• liberal-legal (climate justice; proving harm; “natural contracts”; carbon tax; utilitarianism)
• neoliberal (subsidies; entrepreneurship; divestment; corporations and private industry)
• socialist (dismantling capitalism; ecosocialism; green economics; parties and strategies)
• anarchic (climate movements; NGOs; constituent power; mutual aid; social ecology)
• indigenous and postcolonial (Traditional Ecological Knowledge; anticolonialism)
• social (ecofeminism; queer ecology; environmental racism; posthuman kinship; religion)
• cultural (art; narrative; architecture; ecodesign and sustainability; biomimicry; clifi; etc.)
But what does it really mean to exist here and now, and only for a while? Why do we create "worlds" or networks of relationships that seem to offer us great personal, social, and political well-being but also anxiety and discontent? In this course, we will try to avoid the kind of clichés, posturing, or facades—intellectual pretention, religiosity, scientism, consumerism, etc.—that, as Heidegger said, "cover over " and obfuscate questions about human existence instead of encountering them. Rather, we will mine the most basic of these questions with persistent attention: What sustains or underpins authentic life with others?
We will begin our course by tracing the origins of phenomenology and existential thought from the 4th Century BCE Greeks to today. After exploring the basic problems of these movements in the first half of our course, we will put these methods to work as others have done to discuss issues like gender, sexuality, race, colonialism, politics, and community. Finally, we will consider a few of the most serious critiques of phenomenology in recent thought. Our readings will include works by Plato, Aristotle, Edmund Husserl, Martin Heidegger, Jean-Paul Sartre, Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Simone de Beauvoir, Frantz Fanon, Emmanuel Levinas, Sara Ahmed, and Jean-Luc Nancy.
In conversation with philosopher and poet Travis Holloway, Chakrabarty discusses his wonderful new book "The Climate of History in a Planetary Age", exploring what it means to think from a planetary perspective, and why such a perspective is necessary for thinking and acting through our highly uncertain and disoriented times.
Dipesh Chakrabarty is the Lawrence A. Kimpton Distinguished Service Professor of History and South Asian Languages and Civilizations at the University of Chicago. He is the recipient of the 2014 Toynbee Prize, which is given to a distinguished practitioner of global history. One of the world’s foremost thinkers of the Anthropocene, Chakrabarty’s new book, "The Climate of History in a Planetary Ag", was published this year by Chicago University Press.
Travis Holloway is Assistant Professor of Philosophy at the State University of New York at Farmingdale and currently a visiting faculty member at the Pratt Institute. He is also a translator, a poet, and former Goldwater Fellow in Creative Writing at NYU. His primary interests are Contemporary European Philosophy, Aesthetics, Social and Political Philosophy, Queer Theory, and the Environmental Humanities. He is currently writing a book about genealogy and the Anthropocene.