Papers by James Haile
The publication of Ta-Nehisi Coates’ “letter to his son”, Between the World and Me (2015), has be... more The publication of Ta-Nehisi Coates’ “letter to his son”, Between the World and Me (2015), has been met with mixed and widespread reviews and reactions. Responses have ranged from a critique for his ‘pessimism’, to the grand celebratory remark announcing him as the next great intellectual and social critic in mold of James Baldwin. Yet, there are few reviews that have acknowledged Coates’ project as a materialist cosmology of the body. What does this mean? In short, it means that while Coates embraces terrestriality over transcendence (the ‘here’ over and against the ‘beyond’), he nevertheless sees great possibilities in the body, the greatest of which is the creation and destruction of ‘galaxies of reality’. More than just examining race and race relations in the midst of one of highest incidence of black death at the hand of white vigilantism and state-sanctioned officers of the law, Coates’ book examines the meaning of this lived-reality at the level of the body and its capacities to both open up and close down material possibilities of life and death (of letting live and making die). This talk will investigate the meaning of the body in Coates’ book, its relationship to ‘race’, and will argue that while Coates does not offer us a solution to the problem of embodiment or the galaxy distances between bodies, black and white, and while he does not even concern himself with the issue of ‘freedom’, what he does offer, to his son, and to his potential readers is the idea that one can and must make peace within the chaos of existence. In this talk I will be fleshing out the meaning of the ‘cosmology of the body’ through a phenomenological reading of not only the body, but of our human worlds as galaxies of realities and existences.
Poetry by James Haile
Blog: Hip Hop Ethics by James Haile
Philosophy Syllabi by James Haile
Jean-Paul Sartre works span over four decades and over numerous subject matter and genre ranging ... more Jean-Paul Sartre works span over four decades and over numerous subject matter and genre ranging from philosophy to literature to politics to newspaper editorials. In this course we will be analyzing these subjects and genres in terms of/through the various ‘selves’ developed throughout his career: The Existential Self; The Political Self; and, The Literary Self.
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Papers by James Haile
Poetry by James Haile
Blog: Hip Hop Ethics by James Haile
Philosophy Syllabi by James Haile