One doesn’t need a metaphysics of history to sense when a form of life with its attendant rituals, pieties, and practices has grown old. Theory’s reign in literature departments has long been past the point when its claims arrived with salutary shock in the profession.

Through the writings of Adorno, finding echoes of Hegel in the music of Beethoven.

...this is part of a talk I'm going to do at Queen Mary University in London in a few weeks, at the conference Emerging Critical Environments with Kate Soper and Tim Clark (and others). I already posted the opening on my blog.

My talk at MLA in January will be about my book project Buddhaphobia. I'm focusing on why on Earth Slavoj Zizek has to savage Buddhism at almost every opportunity. Especially when his mentor Lacan did such a nice job on it in the Tenth Seminar.