Paul North teaches literature and critical theory at Yale, and has written two books: The Problem of Distraction and The Yield: Kafka’s Atheological Reformation. Email: p.north@yale.edu
by Paul North Humanities professors are the true conservatives. What is it to be conservative? A professor hunches over a podium and says, "well, … you know…." The lecture begins. Well you know: Chateaubriand's pro-restoration journal Le Conservateur started it all off in 1818, proposing a return to the society of orders after the revolutionary…
by Paul North Santiago-Viñas-Santiago / October 2017 For Willy Thayer, who moved a river in me Theory in the Critical International. Professors travel. They trek their personal penury and their meager intellectual wares over highlands and lowlands, and, because culture is supposed to fly outward without stopping and never—gods forbid—turn around and go home again,…
by Paul North With the previous post I began a new series, cognominated "Reports from an Academy." The reports are pure fiction. Imagine, if you would, a middle-aged professor of literature at an elite institution, call it Nevahwen University. Each month, worrying that it will all be over soon, a slipshod, unsystematic professor still in…
by Paul North An informal talk before first-time college goers, the summer before their first year at an Ivy League university. How does it feel when your group's social practices bring the world to the brink of destruction? How does it feel when no one can legitimately deny this fact any longer? We haven't been…
by Paul North How strange we are! We talk about our friends. We whisper: look, she's doing it again. She acts like that because her mother treated her in such and such a way. And: look at him. He always does this sort of thing. He finally got diagnosed but clearly they have to increase…
by Paul North We're used to thinking of the past as something that already happened. We say it's over, finished. We've moved on. Some go further and say that the past itself has moved…out of reach. It is over and done with, it holds no claim on us, it has not only stopped happening but…
by Paul North What do movies tell us? They tell stories; they tell about exotic places, wealth beyond our imagining, weapons beyond what would ever be necessary; they tell us about the idiosyncrasies of our celebrities. Besides all this, they almost always tell us something about ourselves. Imagine a screenwriter. What is her material? She…
by Paul North At key moments in policy speeches, Margaret Thatcher used to say "there is no alternative." After a few years and too many repetitions, the phrase became a joke. Journalists abbreviated it: TINA. There Is No Alternative. When TINA became a reflex, after it became her signature phrase, it lost its bite. Before…
by Paul North In the tale about the princess and the pea, the pea is more than a tiny little irritant, it is more than an interrupter of a good night's sleep. The pea is the enemy of desert. The princess doesn't deserve such bedding. She is someone who's deservingness is so thorough and so…
by Paul North The Anti-Christ—we know who he is. Thessalonians says: “And then the lawless one will be revealed” (2:8). The end arrives for human beings in the worst imaginable form, a demi-god who tears down the world they have carefully built. Wickedness and destruction overtake goodness and progress. Certainly he doesn't do this openly.…
by Paul North Fate is a conspiracy between past and future, a compact, mostly secret, that forbids us to deviate from what was decided ages ago. Fate is a keyhole through which you glimpse the secret compact. Fate is also a feeling. Out of a series of little glimpses arises an overwhelming sense that there…
by Paul North Wind is low on the list of the awe-inspiring invisible powers. In other eras it ranked among the top forces beyond human control, blowing us this way and that. Today we think of wind as easily harnessed for human uses, as a mild amusement or nuisance, or as a fairy-tale character with…
by Paul North F. Undine in his Brooklyn studio, June 2016 In the third installment of “Current Genres of Fate” I want to think about a mode of fate that has been all the rage for the last 20 years or so. Let's call it “the persistence of the past.” For some time before that,…
—because despite being enlightened, civilized, advanced, and free, we are trapped— by Paul North In the 1930s a Hungarian psychiatrist, Leopold Szondi, began to think that families predetermine the lives of their members, before he was deported to Bergen-Belsen because his family was Jewish. Through a special negotiation he and other intellectuals were released and…
by Paul North In these monthly posts I will survey the landscape of “fateful thinking,” as we glimpse it on the moons orbiting old Europe today. The premise will be that in politics, culture, academia, medicine, economics, and private life, among other regions of experience, we—those in charge and those charged up and those under…