The Queer Art of Failure (a John Hope Franklin Center Book)

For Moten and Hanley, the critical academic is not the answer to encroaching professionalisation but an extension of it, using the very same tools and legitimating strategies to become ‘an ally of professional education’. Moten and Hanley prefer to pitch their tent with the ‘subversive intellectuals’, a maroon community of outcast thinkers who refuse, resist, and renege on the demands of ‘rigour’, ‘excellence’, and ‘productivity’. They tell us to ‘steal from the university’, ‘to steal the enlightenment for others’ [...]

This book joins forces with their ‘subversive intellectual’ and agrees to steal from the university, to, as they say, ‘abuse its hospitality’ and to be ‘in it but not of it’. Moten and Harney’s these exhort the subversive intellectual to, among other things, worry about the university, refuse professionalisation, forge a collectivity, and retreat to the external world beyond the ivied walls of the campus. I would add to their these the following. First, Resist mastery.

In order to capture the complexity of these shifting relations we cannot afford to settle on linear connections between radical desires and radical politics; instead we have to be prepared to be unsettled by the politically problematic connections history throws our way.

Chicken Run is different from Toy Story in that the Oedipal falls away as a point of reference in favour of a Gramscian structure of counterhegemony engineered by organic (chicken) intellectuals.

My quick summary of Dude does not immediately suggest that the film offers much in the way of redemptive narratives for a lost generation. And yet if we must live with the logic of white male stupidity, and it seems we must, then understanding its form, its seductions, and its power are mandatory. Dude offers a surprisingly complete allegorical map of what Raymond Williams calls ‘a lived hegemony’.