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: [email protected]
Justin E. H. Smith I am writing from a motel room somewhere in Indiana. The obese teenage girl who checked me in asked me where I stand in respect of today’s competition between the ‘Bears’ and the ‘Colts’, which, as I know without ever having sought to know, are two nearby cities’ football teams. When…
Justin E. H. Smith Be quick, Isaac! We haven't much time. At Five of the Clock old Doctor Squibb will be dissecting a Porpess at Queen's Lane Caffè-House. That's right, Isaac. A Porpess. A Grampus in miniature. And he's promised to donate the Blubber of it to whomsoever agrees to assist him. That will be…
Justin E. H. Smith * Books consulted for this essay: John Boswell, Christianity, Social Tolerance, and Homosexuality: Gay People in Western Europe from the Beginning of the Christian Era to the Fourteenth Century. 8th Edition. University of Chicago Press, 2005. Robin Fox, Kinship and Marriage: An Anthropological Perspective. Cambridge University Press, 1967. Maurice Godelier, Les…
With Especial Attention to the Americans, the Muscovites, the Magyars, and Various Balkanic Peoples, touching particularly upon their Aspirations to Global Hegemony, and their Use of Air-Conditioning. Justin E. H. Smith Organic nationalism, which emerged towards the end of the 18th century, supposed, or at least implied, that a nation bears some essential relationship to…
Gerald Dworkin and Justin E. H. Smith Jerry and I began this dialogue after he, in the process of preparing an ethics course on the topic of capital punishment, happened upon some pieces I wrote a few years ago at various activist venues (they are archived here, here, here, here, and here). The articles are…
Justin E. H. Smith The last time I went to a poetry reading, I was made to sit patiently as a preening, college-age jack-ass indignantly declaimed, in verse that could only be called 'free', his strong disapproval of Dick Cheney. A serious issue, to be sure, but certainly not serious in a way that gets…
Justin E. H. Smith “We are so presumptuous as to wish to be known by all the world and even by those who will arrive when we are no more. And we are so vain that the esteem of five or six people who surround us amuses us and renders us content.” –Blaise Pascal (tr.…
Part One Justin E. H. Smith I. I used to get very upset at the suggestion that there might be such a thing as 'non-Western philosophy'. Some years ago a German anthropologist friend told me she had heard, out on Broughton Island in Arctic Canada, Inuit elders using their free time, in the dim light…
Justin E. H. Smith I. In his Tristes Tropiques, composed in 1955, Claude Lévi-Strauss writes with characteristic humor of his decision, some years earlier, to study philosophy: When I reached the top or 'philosophy' class in the lycée, I was vaguely in favour of a rationalistic monism, which I was prepared to justify and support;…
Towards a Philosophical History of Dogs Justin E. H. Smith What is it about the dogs? In recent philosophy everyone from John Searle to Donna Haraway has had something to say about them. And recent philosophy, as I never tire of insisting, is nothing new. Now I have also been insisting for some time that…
Justin E. H. Smith The Franco-Romanian aphorist and pessimist Émile Cioran describes his childhood in the Transylvanian village of Răşinari as follows:My childhood was a paradise. Really! The Boacii hill is for me something entirely essential. Everything else seems to be of an incomparable mediocrity… You cannot imagine the extent to which those images are…
Justin E. H. Smith [For Quaeries #'s 1, 2, and 3, go here, here, and here] Good job, Isaac! You've finally done it! We're in. We're in the 'Net! Do you realise what this means? Do you? Don't just stand there and stare at me with your servile grin. Tell me what it means! That's…
Justin E. H. Smith I am not all that fond of natural-law theory, as I tend to think that there are very few things about which nature sends us the loud-and-clear message: don't do it! In fact, I've narrowed the list down to just three: incest, coprophagy, and flying. Now many readers will be surprised…
Justin E. H. Smith A few nights ago I hosted a reception for an old friend, a respected scholar and most recently the author of Citation Techniques in Duns Scotus. We were celebrating the sale of the 100th copy of his book. Now ordinarily this sort of event is attended by only the dustiest of…
Justin E. H. Smith I would like to lead my life, with Spinoza, sub specie aeternitatis. I truly would. But every now and then my fellow men show themselves to be so brutish that I have no choice but to come back down to earthly reality and cry shame. Such a moment was the Israeli…
The Middle Managers Justin E. H. Smith [Please click to read Imaginary Tribes #'s 1, 2, 3, 4, and 5.] It's the 105th annual meeting of the American Society for Anthropology. Dr. Ken Vonderwelt is late to his own talk. He is rushing from door to door in the massive foyer of the Minneapolis Sheraton,…
Justin E. H. Smith We may as well start with a joke: Primatologist to chimpanzee: “Bongo, bring me some food.”(Bongo brings a pile of stones instead of food, and shows a wide, teeth-bearing grin.) Alright, perhaps not a joke, really. More a primate proto-joke. However we classify it, though, I believe this report (based on…
Justin E. H. Smith It is well known among historians of the Soviet Union that, early in his reign, Joseph Stalin rejected Marx and Lenin's strongly internationalist variety of socialism, in favor of the more limited project of building real socialism within one state, while at the same time promoting the distinct national identities of…
Justin E. H. Smith Maureen Dowd is in my bed. I can tell it's her. That shock of red hair spilling across the pillow, those red high heels kicked haphazardly onto the floor. What is she doing in there? I'm going to have to wake her up and ask her to leave. She'll think I'm…
Notes on Hybridity and Diaspora Justin E. H. Smith I. Perhaps it was the flood of reggae and calypso and Afrobeat videos cheering Obama on in the final weeks. Or perhaps it was the Haitian man I saw in October at the Lake Champlain border crossing just north of Plattsburgh, waiting to have his digital…