Justin E. H. Smith is an American essayist, journalist, and satirist based in Montreal. He doesn't want to write satire, but, as Juvenal said, the world leaves him no choice. He is a regular contributor to Counterpunch, and has written for numerous other online publications, including N+1. His work has been linked or cited in the online editions of the Guardian, the Atlantic Monthly, the Stranger, the Washington Post, and (probably a mistake) the National Review. His archive, www.jehsmith.com, brings together writing of his available on the Internet. Quite apart from all this, Smith is also a professor of philosophy and a specialist on the life and work of G. W. Leibniz. To see his academic profile, please visit www.jehsmith.com/philosophy. Email: jehsmith@gmail.com
by Justin E. H. Smith Carmen Giménez Smith & Steph Burt Photos by Evan Lavender-Smith & Jessica Bennett On August 7, The Nation announced the appointment of Steph Burt and Carmen Giménez Smith as its new poetry editors. Beginning in the Fall, they will be soliciting and commissioning a wide range of American and international…
by Justin E. H. Smith [I have a long essay on the Roma communities of Paris appearing later this year in print. The essay's focus changed radically in the middle of my research for it, in part due to editorial decisions, in part as a result of changes in the world that seemed to demand…
by Justin E. H. Smith I tend towards a fairly hardcore social constructionism about most mental-health diagnoses. I've read Michel Foucault and Ian Hacking, and I'm well aware of the historicity of ways of classifying and enacting whatever it is that's eating at our souls. World War I ends and young men stop fuguing; no…
by Justin E. H. Smith Imagine that the French chapter of some international organization decided to give a prize of some sort to the New Yorker. Imagine a dissident faction of this French chapter, plus some Québécois, some Belgians, some Malians, protested this decision, pointing to New Yorker covers such as the one below, and…
by Justin E. H. Smith Marina Abramović (with the Austrian Decoration for Science and Art she recieved in 2008) at the screening of Marina Abramović: The Artist Is Present during the Vienna International Film Festival 2012, Gartenbaukino. [Image from Wikipedia.] 1. Marina Abramović is seeking to found an institute that will bear her name, in…
Dear Abbas, I'm sorry for disappearing so suddenly a few years back. One day I'm still there on the East Coast busily discharging the duties of my profession, while also, I'm sure you remember, circulating in something pretty close to what you could straight-facedly call a 'demimonde': publishing, blogging, tweeting and getting retweeted like a…
by Justin E. H. Smith One of the most controversial scenes in Shohei Imamura's 1966 film, The Pornographers, depicts three veteran directors from the Japanese porn industry in conversation, casually questioning the legitimacy of the prohibition on sex between fathers and daughters. To be willing to ask this question at all is meant to signal…
by Justin E. H. Smith I enjoy spending time in those countries that are not big enough or important enough to have their own product packaging, and instead must share surface space with information in the sundry native tongues of neighboring countries. I remember standing in front of a microwave in Sarajevo, waiting for some…
by Justin E. H. Smith [For the first installment in this series, go here.] The idea that there is a hierarchy or ladder of world cultures, with European culture at the top (often promoted to the status of 'civilization'), was a cornerstone of most Enlightenment philosophy. It was rejected in the era by a handful…
Justin E. H. Smith [This is a short excerpt from my current book project, Language and Animals, about which you will be hearing more soon. –JEHS] Some decades after M. F. K. Fisher, following Jean-Anthelme Brillat-Savarin, implored us to 'consider the oyster', David Foster Wallace asked us do the very same thing with a lobster.…
by Justin E. H. Smith The first thing you need to understand about the BDSM community is that we are committed to one thing above all: mutual respect. We respect each other's kinks, and we seek to help one another to realize our fantasies. Some people have fantasies of being dominated, and those of us…
by Justin E. H. Smith “A plain historical account of some of our most fashionable duellists, gamblers, and adulterers (to name no more) would exhibit specimens of brute barbarity, and sottish infatuation, such as might vie with any that ever appeared in Kamschatka, California, or the land of the Hottentots.” —James Beattie, An Essay on…
by Justin E. H. Smith I get some of my best writing done at Charles de Gaulle International Airport, where I now sit. I could use my time here otherwise; I could learn the layout of the place, something that after countless visits remains entirely mysterious to me. I've made out at least a vague…
by Justin E. H. Smith Going through a difficult separation? Feeling lonely? Well I've got just the book for you. It's called After Kinship, and it's by Janet Carsten. She says that the focus on the affine pair as the basic unit of anthropological theory was really only a projection of mid-twentieth-century Euro-American ideology into…
To the Members of the Royal Society: 'Tis with much Relish Regret that we announce the final and utmost Demise, yea, the certain and irreversible Decline, which the Latins call corruptio and which, being English'd, is the Corruption or Passing-Away of the corporeall Substance; the throwing off of the Mortal Coil, the giving up of…
Justin E. H. Smith O Isaac? Isaac! Come forthwith! The clamp 'round my gouty ankle must needs be tighten'd. That's right, Isaac. The left ankle. Yes, my loyal Clampsman. Just like that. Do you know what I've been doing, Isaac? I've been reading about comic sections. Do you know what those are? They are the…
Justin E. H. Smith The Internet, it seems, is destroying everything. In the aftermath of its Shiva-like arrival, the rest of the world now appears shabby, neglected, left over. It has destroyed or is in the process of destroying long-familiar objects: TVs, stereos, telephones, newspapers, musical instruments, clocks, books. It is also destroying institutions: stores,…
Justin E. H. Smith Some readers will recall the exposé I wrote a few months ago on the life and work of the American poet Jason Boone. What might not have been obvious in that piece, as I would urgently like to clear up now, is that it was all entirely made up: every last…
Justin E. H. Smith Among the many distortions arising from the conceptualization of the human social world in terms of 'race' is the false belief this instills among lower status, historically disadvantaged 'white' people that they have something innate in common with all other 'white' people, and thus that their current disadvantage is the result…
Justin E. H. Smith I. To speak of a 'cheap whore' is, among other things, to utter a bisyllabic dysphemism. Orthophemized, the phrase lengthens to 'inexpensive prostitute', and from there it can be launched into the tortured register of euphemistic speech –where no one who means what he says ever goes– that gives us phrases…