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nathankhensley.bsky.social
Nathan K. Hensley
@nathankhensley.bsky.social
4.4K followers 2.2K following 3.4K posts
Action without Hope (2025) • Forms of Empire (2016) • Fresno, Silver Spring • https://www.nathankhensley.net/ • he/him/his • Everything here in personal capacity only https://press.uchicago.edu/ucp/books/book/chicago/A/bo242060390.html
www.nathankhensley.net
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nathankhensley.bsky.social
Nathan K. Hensley @nathankhensley.bsky.social · 3h
can't wait to read this!
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Reposted by Nathan K. Hensley
tedmccormick.bsky.social
Ted McCormick @tedmccormick.bsky.social · 4h
Accepting this as an argument means accepting that, as an educator, your primary commitment is not to educating your students, or to propagating knowledge of your subject, but to finding and securing new markets for products in whose success your employers (or their bosses) have some kind of stake.
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Reposted by Nathan K. Hensley
pembrokecenter.bsky.social
The Pembroke Center at Brown University @pembrokecenter.bsky.social · 6h
Out of the Archives: a 1992 letter from Judith Butler in the papers of Hortense J. Spillers. Butler is giving the Pembroke Center Publics Lecture Wednesday, November 5. Tickets have sold out, but the lecture will be recorded and available on our YouTube playlist: www.youtube.com/playlist?lis....
Image shows a typewritten letter to Professor Hortense Spillers, signed by Judith Butler, Professor of Humanities. The letter is on Johns Hopkins University stationary.
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nathankhensley.bsky.social
Nathan K. Hensley @nathankhensley.bsky.social · 6h
I do not think the work of philosophy or thinking is to sustain fantasies. The life of the mind is always lived inside the body, which means the opposite is also true — but nobody owns our minds. Solidarity.
Reposted by Nathan K. Hensley
post45.bsky.social
Post45 Journal @post45.bsky.social · 17h
The 11th annual Post45 Graduate Symposium will be hosted by Duke University's Department of English, February 20-21, 2026! Check out the CFP (post45.org/graduate/202...) and please share with anyone who might be interested.

Abstracts are due November 14.
Abstract submission form QR code for the Post45 graduate symposium at Duke, February 20-21, 2026. The form is also accessible at https://tinyurl.com/2e2dr4wv.
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nathankhensley.bsky.social
Nathan K. Hensley @nathankhensley.bsky.social · 15h
Aha! I see I am out of the RG loop! That sounds amazing
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nathankhensley.bsky.social
Nathan K. Hensley @nathankhensley.bsky.social · 16h
(i find that contact with difficult and real ideas can be weirdly stabilizing in the maelstrom of serially-worsening late-imperial news cycles)
nathankhensley.bsky.social
Nathan K. Hensley @nathankhensley.bsky.social · 16h
Just saw that you can read this for free online and — well, if you haven’t read it before, you should

ctheory.indiana.edu/resources/fa...
From Jameson, Marxism and Form (1974): CHAPTER FIVE TOWARDS DIALECTICAL CRITICISM A PHENOMENOLOGICAL, description of dialectical criticism? The contradiction is not so great as it might at first glance appear. The peculiar difficulty of dialectical writing lies indeed in its holistic, "totalizing" character: as though you could not say any one thing until you had first said every-thing; as though with each new idea you were bound to recapitulate the entire system. So it is that the attempt to do
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nathankhensley.bsky.social
Nathan K. Hensley @nathankhensley.bsky.social · 16h
Wait which reading group???
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nathankhensley.bsky.social
Nathan K. Hensley @nathankhensley.bsky.social · 16h
(2)
inner leverage one floor higher, in which the mind, in a kind of shifting of gears, now finds itself willing to take what had been a question for an answer, standing outside its previous exertions in such a way that it reckons itself into the prob-lem, understanding the dilemma not as a resistance of the object alone, but also as the result of a subject-pole deployed and disposed against it in a strategic fashion-in short, as the function of a determinate subject-object rela-tionship. There is a breathlessness about this shift from the normal object-oriented activity of the mind to such dialectical self-consciousness-something of the sickening shudder we feel in an elevator's fall or in the sudden dip in an airliner. That recalls us to our bodies much as this recalls us to our mental positions as thinkers and observers. The shock indeed is basic, and constitutive of the dialectic as such: without this transformational moment, without this initial conscious transcendence of an older, more naïve position, there can be no question of any genuinely dialectical coming to consciousness.
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nathankhensley.bsky.social
Nathan K. Hensley @nathankhensley.bsky.social · 16h
What is dialectical thinking?

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It is, of course, thought to the second power: an intensification of the normal thought processes such that a renewal of light washes over the object of their exasperation, as though in the midst of its immediate perplexities the mind had attempted, by willpower, by fat, to lift itself mightily up by its own bootstraps. Faced with the operative procedures of the nonreflective thinking mind (whether grappling with philosophical or artistic, political or scientific problems and objects), dialectical thought tries not so much to complete and perfect the application of such procedures as to widen its own attention to include them in its awareness as well: it aims, in other words, not so much at solving the particular dilemmas in question, as at converting those problems into their own solutions on a higher level, and making the fact and the existence of the problem itself the starting point for new research. This is indeed the most sensitive moment in the dialectical process: that in which an entire complex of thought is hoisted through a kind of…
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nathankhensley.bsky.social
Nathan K. Hensley @nathankhensley.bsky.social · 16h
Just saw that you can read this for free online and — well, if you haven’t read it before, you should

ctheory.indiana.edu/resources/fa...
From Jameson, Marxism and Form (1974): CHAPTER FIVE TOWARDS DIALECTICAL CRITICISM A PHENOMENOLOGICAL, description of dialectical criticism? The contradiction is not so great as it might at first glance appear. The peculiar difficulty of dialectical writing lies indeed in its holistic, "totalizing" character: as though you could not say any one thing until you had first said every-thing; as though with each new idea you were bound to recapitulate the entire system. So it is that the attempt to do
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nathankhensley.bsky.social
Nathan K. Hensley @nathankhensley.bsky.social · 23h
full spectrum capture. pls everyone try to get your parents, relatives, and friends to seek out reliable sources of information beyond the functionally propagandist mainstream press
passantino.bsky.social
Jon Passantino @passantino.bsky.social · 23h
CNN is now using the Trump preferred “Department of War” name in its official statements
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nathankhensley.bsky.social
Nathan K. Hensley @nathankhensley.bsky.social · 1d
We could hear them laughing
jackjenkins.me
Jack Jenkins @jackjenkins.me · 1d
Gonna be thinking about this lede for a minute.
(RNS) — Last month, the Rev. David Black stood in front of a Chicago-area U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement facility and spread his arms wide. Adorned in all black and wearing a clerical collar, the pastor looked up at a group of masked, heavily armed ICE agents on the roof and began to pray. “I invited them to repentance,” Black, a minister in the Presbyterian Church (USA), said in an interview. “I basically offered an altar call. I invited them to come and receive that salvation, and be part of the kingdom that is coming.” But when Black began to lower his arms a few seconds later, the agents responded to his spiritual plea by firing pepper balls, or chemical agents that cause eye irritation and respiratory distress, video footage shows. One struck Black in the head, exploding into a puff of white pepper smoke and forcing him to his knees. Fellow demonstrators rushed to his aid, and as the pastor rubbed his face in pain, the agents continued to fire. “We could hear them laughing,” Black said.
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Reposted by Nathan K. Hensley
miriamposner.com
Miriam Posner @miriamposner.com · 2d
Obviously signing Trump’s compact is the death knell for a university, but the fact that any of them are even *considering* it exposes something deeply rotten at the heart of their leadership. It should disqualify them forever.
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Reposted by Nathan K. Hensley
johannawinant.bsky.social
Johanna Winant @johannawinant.bsky.social · 2d
I’m shilling CLOSE READING FOR THE TWENTY-FIRST CENTURY hard because I’m so proud of it —specifically because it, like every close reading, is the product of a community and an offering to a community.
@dan-sinnamon.bsky.social
and I collaborated with each other and also 22 brilliant contributors.
stack of copies of CLOSE READING FOR THE TWENTY-FIRST CENTURY
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nathankhensley.bsky.social
Nathan K. Hensley @nathankhensley.bsky.social · 2d
i love his writing (CL's) so much!! 💫 [comet not coming back]
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Reposted by Nathan K. Hensley
kristinmahoney.bsky.social
kristinmahoney.bsky.social @kristinmahoney.bsky.social · 3d
I loved collaborating with my academic sibling @nathankhensley.bsky.social (along with some of my very favorite Victorianists) to recognize the work of our fantastic advisor and mentor Kathy Psomiades. Read her book!
nathankhensley.bsky.social
Nathan K. Hensley @nathankhensley.bsky.social · 3d
"Caring about thought in time means caring about scholarship."

Please allow yourself the pleasure of reading Kathy Psomiades, reading a bunch of other people, reading her award-winning book, *Primitive Marriage* (cluster of response-essays now out in VLC)

www.cambridge.org/core/journal...
Article header: THINKING IN TIME Kathy Alexis Psomiades, Duke University Caring about thought in time means caring about scholarship as well—it has always seemed strange to me that the call to deepen and enrich our readings of the literature of the past so often goes hand in hand with a shallow and impoverished reading of the texts of our more recent critical past, as if we could throw away the past fifty years of reading practice to encounter the text in all its purity. This is not so much an ethics for me—though I think we might inquire about what it means if you have different ethics for reading one kind of text than another—but a problem of misrecognition of our own thinking and reading.
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nathankhensley.bsky.social
Nathan K. Hensley @nathankhensley.bsky.social · 3d
amazing that acls can write in a single straightforward paragraph what not a single university or group of them together can find the juice to say out loud
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nathankhensley.bsky.social
Nathan K. Hensley @nathankhensley.bsky.social · 3d
you will absolutely *love* this book TWB, i guarantee it 💜
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nathankhensley.bsky.social
Nathan K. Hensley @nathankhensley.bsky.social · 3d
Thinking in Time (Response), by Kathy Alexis Psomiades

www.cambridge.org/core/service...
Thinking in Time KATHY ALEXIS PSOMIADES Duke University, North Carolina, United States I T is an extraordinary pleasure to be read so carefully by people whose work has shaped your own. The people I read are always the imaginary audience in my head—so to have some of them as a real audience is amazing. And they have made me see my own work in a new way, particularly the things about it that are odd, things I’ve lived with for so long that I don’t really notice them.
nathankhensley.bsky.social
Nathan K. Hensley @nathankhensley.bsky.social · 3d
A World Without Fathers, by me

www.cambridge.org/core/service...
A World Without Fathers NATHAN K. HENSLEY Georgetown University, Washington, DC, United States “CAN ideas transcend their spatial and temporal origins”? This question opens the most recent book by Martin Jay, the seminal historian of the Frankfurt School.1 You perked up when I wrote “seminal,” and I chose that word because the fraught distinction between genesis and validity, in Jay’s language, or history and theory, in Kathy Psomiades’s, is common to these two projects. But the fatherly aspiration to confirm proper conceptual patrimony—to secure the origin of ideas—is precisely the impulse Primitive Marriage thinks against.
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nathankhensley.bsky.social
Nathan K. Hensley @nathankhensley.bsky.social · 3d
Time for Sex, by Talia Schaffer (not open access, alas; @taliaschaffer.bsky.social)

www.cambridge.org/core/journal...
Kathy Psomiades’s Primitive Marriage argues that Victorian thinkers used consent as the turning point of history, changing our reading of the marriage plot.
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nathankhensley.bsky.social
Nathan K. Hensley @nathankhensley.bsky.social · 3d
Primal Scenes, by Zach Samalin (@zachsamalin.bsky.social)

www.cambridge.org/core/service...
Primal Scenes ZACHARY SAMALIN New York University, United States A MONG its many achievements, Kathy Psomiades’s Primitive Marriage complicates and enriches our understanding of the theoretical inheritance of the nineteenth century. The book’s central claim is that the Victorian anthropology of marriage had an outsized effect on the development not only of later cultural and structuralist anthropology but of Freudian and Lacanian psychoanalysis, the Foucauldian historiography of sexuality, feminist theory (including Marxist feminist theory), and queer theory as well.
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nathankhensley.bsky.social
Nathan K. Hensley @nathankhensley.bsky.social · 3d
Modernity Stories II, by Ian Duncan (not open access, alas)

www.cambridge.org/core/journal...
Abstract Primitive Marriage analyzes the conjectural history installed in Victorian anthropology and taken up by novelists, in which sex drives a civilizational progress from domination and force to liberal relations of exchange, contract, and consent. Kathy Psomiades’s act of critical reflection doubles fin-de-siècle anthropology’s reflexive turn upon its own investments in symbol and representation. Her argument models an ethically and politically responsible criticism that restores the difference of past cultural formations, viewed as unfinished, potential, and manifold in their bearing on our present.
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nathankhensley.bsky.social
Nathan K. Hensley @nathankhensley.bsky.social · 3d
Modernity Stories, by Mary Jean Corbett

www.cambridge.org/core/service...
Modernity Stories MARY JEAN CORBETT Miami University, Ohio, United States I T goes almost without saying that Primitive Marriage is a considerable achievement, long in the making and well worth the wait—but I’ll say it anyway. For the deep dive it makes into the emergence of an anthropology of marriage around 1860; for its brilliant revisioning of the marriage plot in both anthropological and fictional registers; and for its ambitious rethinking of key terms in fiction, anthropology, and feminist theory, important terms such as “consent” and “contract,” Primitive Marriage warrants our close attention.
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