William Paris
@whitherutopia
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Philosopher in search of black utopia. Assistant Professor of Philosophy @UofT He/Him Co-host @leftofphil
Toronto, Ontario
Joined November 2019
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Du Bois has this phrase, "the fascism of despair," from 1938 where you see him wrestling with the problem of what type of political activity emerges from the growing foreclosure of emancipatory possibilities. 1/7
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Someone should tell Joe Manchin that he's getting absolutely ROASTED on twitter rn. Maybe it'll make him think twice
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Well now that the papers are signed and sent in I can announce that I will be joining University of Toronto as an Assistant Professor this Fall. I am enormously excited for this next step!
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I think this is why I focus on utopia. Not because I think a naive optimism is what we need, but because I worry about what will emerge without any vision or real possibility of an alternate set of social relations. I worry about our profound disempowerment 5/7
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Amílcar Cabral on whether he is a "socialist": "We are not preoccupied with labels you see. We are occupied in the content of the thing, what we are doing, how we are I doing it, what changes we are creating for realizing this aim." I love this
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RIP Socrates you would have loved being a reply guy on Twitter
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No matter how annoying you find Derrida/Butler/whomever has a “hard” writing anti-intellectualism will advance no political project of the left
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No offense to Deleuzians but the single funniest thing I've ever read in the history of Western philosophy was one and the same man saying his philosophy is not a metaphor and then writing the line, "God is a lobster." Undefeated.
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Starting philosophy with the Platonic dialogues really primes you for more "It is as you say" than you actually get in this field
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I may seem like an academic but unlike other academics I know what the working class thinks. And they think all of your work is annoying (me too). My work however-
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evidence for his position. I think about our current moment and our fraught social relations especially through the endless "culture warring" and wonder how much of it can be explained through a social despair at the dim prospects of a sustainable, flourishing world 4/7
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When the 1619 Project said we couldn't know the "thing-in-itself" I immediately picked up the Science of Logic and marched to the nearest school board. Enough was enough
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Du Bois thinks that under the weight of despair one should expect the emergence of reactionary politics, mass demobilization, and a lack of direction. And keep in mind he hadn't even seen World War II yet! But WWI, the Red Summer of 1919, and the Great Depression served as...3/7
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I just don't understand how a society that made The Green Book, The Help, and Training Day can still be racist! What more will it take??
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My favorite tweet genre will always be the precocious young child who says something deep like, "Daddy I feel like capitalism alienates us from our species being" and we all react with "Yes king the children have such wisdom"
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It got me thinking about the difference between philosophical conceptions of despair (e.g., Adorno) and the honest appraisal of what real, social despair generates politically 2/7
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Anyway this isn't a response to anything in particular. Just some thoughts on the distinction between despair as a philosophical concept and social despair that I think are important. 7/7
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What I’ve learned from this site is that anything is bourgeois if you hate it enough
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Marx, before finishing Capital Vol. 1: You know, comrade, money is the necessary form of appearance of friendship.
Engels: ...
Marx: Can I get twenty bucks or...
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Maybe I am wrong. Maybe a coherent and generative progressive politics can emerge from despair as Du Bois understands it. I wouldn't bet on it. And the historical evidence seems scant. 6/7
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The Jordan Neely murder has really brought together the most miserable, unserious, and codescendingly pious people alive to say, "We're not saying extrajudicial murder is right...only that it's necessary for social life." Close to the worst this site has ever been honestly
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I actually worry about MC Hammer getting pulled deeper into philosophy twitter. Imagine when he finds out we're all just subtweeting each other because of 2+2 or an esoteric disagreement over whether Hegel ended history. He'll never talk to us again
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Finally have all my books unpacked and I have just one question: why are there so many?
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Theodor Adorno: The Man Who Hated Jazz
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Just want y'all to know I saw the thing-in-itself the other day. It looks weird.
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CRT, Critical Philosophy of Race, and Black Studies are not synonyms as research programs. A little annoying seeing people in profession of Philosophy call anything dealing with race and Philosophy "CRT." These are distinct fields with their own traditions and questions
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Academics looking at Russia: Thankfully, what I happen to study is directly relevant to what’s happening…so in Hegel’s Science of Logic…🧵1/???
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Lord come get your children they're making a gritty Fresh Prince of Bel-Air
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It'd be a real bummer if there were signs that our society was at risk of a really dangerous racial revanchism impelled by the crises of capitalism and ecological devastation and we spent most of our time dunking on "wokeness." Real missed opportunity imho
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Me, watching analytic philosophy discourse while not being an analytic philosopher:
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You say you hate cancel culture yet love Hegel's Phenomenology curious
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Just look at what Marxism and CRT did. If only we taught history the right way 😔
The Gulf of Mexico is literally on fire because a pipeline ruptured
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A classic “you will never guess what this is in response to”
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Hayek lives on the cusp of getting it lmao
Lol Hayek trying to own English socialists with racism - "oh so you think English workers deserve a share of the profit? Well if you think that then you should also support Indians in the Empire having both profits and proportional share"
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A man named Cotton saying we need more people in chains
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Whoever wrote “woke” in the margins of the library copy of Horkheimer’s Eclipse of Reason next to “progressive rationalization tends…to obliterate that very substance of reason” is about to cook something special
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Opened my first Critcal Race Theory article today and all it said was, "2+2=Black." Now I get why anti-woke have been warning of the fall of Western civilization
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Twitter is the agora where everyone is Socrates, but the powerful don't ever answer our questions. We're all just gadflying each other into oblivion.
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The American public will be bombarded with Harvard until morale improves…
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Me, writing for the American Conservative: Was the Freedmen's Bureau the beginning of woke DEI?
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I am convinced that *historically* antiutopianism in the 20th century was really a form of anticommunism. The philosophical problem of utopianism lay not in alleged consequences, but in the premises it challenges. Utopias attack the presumed legitimacy of our social arrangements
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"And while I am all for diversifying reading lists...if people want to talk about decolonising this and that why don't we start by decolonising Africa. Amidst all our cultural squabbles let's not forget who still owns what and why on the African continent."
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Teaching my first class at UoT today starting with David Walker and eventually getting to Fanon, CLR James, Claudia Jones, Marcus Garvey, A. Philip Rabdolp, Amilcar Cabral, and Hubert Harrison. Really excited and nervous!
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Sartre really was like "New me just dropped" every moment of his life
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The impulse I find most confusing in philosophy is the assumption that reading "charitably" often means excluding analyses of race/racism unless absolutely avoidable. What justifies this assumption if not a moralism that has not been argued for?
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Fanon's optimistic humanism at the end of Blk Skin is primarily epistemic rather than political. The whole book operates under the premise that the limits on human reason imposed by colonialism are contingent rather than definitive. Race does not modulate the principles of reason
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Tucker Carlson wants cameras in every classroom to make sure teachers arent teaching whatever it is he's defining as "critical race theory"
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About to step into the classroom with my baseball cap backwards, turn the chair around and with my framed picture of Steven Pinker say, "You need to spend less time 'chilling with the homies' and more time kickin it with rationality. For real, for real." Western culture healed.
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Starting to learn that Hegel was really smart. Absolutely devastated.
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How can y’all think a racist can’t be smart? You read Kant 😏
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How would a reading of Black Skin, White Masks change if we took Fanon to be primarily concerned with the fetishism of race? Following Marx, Fanon could be read as describing race as a necessary and distortive form of appearance within the economic relations of colonialism 1/4
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If we had collectively decided not to read Robin DiAngelo
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Actually, I like seeing people express joy in the streets together. Our critical tools can do much better than dunking on people experiencing a brief moment of catharsis.
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Putting the finishing touches on my writing sample to apply to the University of Austin: "Phrenology Revisited: Social Policy and 'I'm Just Asking Questions'"
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"I just hope that people come to see that corporate diversity trainings, which seem largely to turn white people into insufferably anxious sycophants that I wouldn't want anything to do with, are not going to do much for black people."
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Sometimes I remember that infographic which identified a core tenet of whiteness as "cause and effect relationships" and think about Brother Hume and all he did for Black struggle
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Race, Time and Utopia: Critical Theory and the Process of Emancipation is finally with the press in its finished form. Looking forward to the next stages and the book coming closer to existing in the world
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Every centrist blue check on Twitter: Wokeness is weird, alienating, and just morally dangerous
The American Right:
Paul Gosar says he will arm wrestle Matt Gaetz to decide who gets Kyle Rittenhouse as an intern
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The world and philosophy lost a great and generous spirit in Charles Mills.
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Tired of pretending we won’t all be reading this under communism
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Had a dream last night where I concluded only Kantians should post. Imagine a website of only universalizable tweets. Heaven
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If I were Kant I would have thought ahead and not been racist to save us all this grief
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Oh no we're really about to go through a deluge of Susan Collins "the moderate" aren't we? Eternal recurrence, truly.
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Just because you're vaccinated doesn't mean you get to go around promising to "finish German idealism" it's just not feasible
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Just sent in the course description and I'm really excited to be teaching my first grad seminar in the Spring titled "W.E.B. Du Bois and the Prospects of Black Critical Theory"!
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Losing my mind here. The elevation of plagiarism as the political fault line in all of this…what are we even doing? Days debating the definition of plagiarism. Academics truly trapped in gazing at their own reflection
"Rufo won this round of the academic culture war because he exposed so many progressive scholars and journalists to be hypocrites and political actors who were willing to throw their ideals overboard,"
@Tyler_A_Harper
writes:
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You're on a date. They never show. What book you reading in the bar to console yourself?
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It must have been wild being Spinoza. Just being right about everything while refusing to go all Nietzsche with a chapter called "Why I Write Such Good Books."
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This is a great time to be a philosopher imo. We're at the center of culture once again. Now let's build a modern day Athens
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Lmao anti-woke coming out as anti-Western philosophical tradition must be a big L for everyone who thought they were lining up to defend western civilization. Sorry to you!
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The bill is literally just all three volumes of Capital, with the Grundrisse thrown in, stacked on top of one another. Hard to believe this would pass constitutional muster.
The $3.5 trillion Biden plan isn’t socialism, it’s marxism
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There’s actually nothing very complicated here. An atrocity is being committed against the Palestinian people
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Taught Kant's Groundwork and my students ended up as Black Panthers wtf
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All of Western Political philosophy culminating in three words:
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Legit had a student in my intro class ask me if there was a philosopher who was all about not having to do philosophy anymore and I thought, "Bold Wittgensteinian flex my dude"
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Once had a philosopher try to explain to me that colonialism in Africa was not bad in itself but it was just *how* some of it happened that wasn't ideal. Because after all there were no billionaires in Africa before colonialism. Really let me know where some of phil is at.
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For those of you interested in my Africana Political Philosophy, 1800s-1970 syllabus here is a link:
But if you would prefer not going to a website just message me and I can send it along to you!
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I am going to teach a mid-level contemporary continental philosophy course next semester on the theme of "Time and Justice." What are some readings you think would be great for students to dig into?
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Incredible and really admirable
WATCH: Among those arrested today were Noelle McAfee, Chair of the Philosophy Department at Emory University.
I’ve asked for a comment from Emory on this arrest, no word yet.
This video provided to us by an
#Emory
PHD student. You can hear him in this video.
@ATLNewsFirst
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I rag on the whole woke/antiwoke thing bc its just a classic example of identifying a real problem but getting the causality all wrong. It's dunking with no social theory. And hanging out on Kendi's twitter page ain't what I'd call rigorous research 1/6
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Leaving the US tomorrow morning. Farewell Culture War 😌
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Lots of philosophy really dislikes Derrida but that shady deconstruction of Searle looks better everyday, huh?
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Last thing:
@lastpositivist
's gave what I think is the most even-handed and non-polemical approach to the so-called "woke wars." Can't capture it all in a tweet but see below for two excellent quotes.
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Here I was assuming that every college course was just Cedric Robinson’s Black Marxism 😡😡
"A study of 5.6mn courses at nearly 4,000 higher education institutions shows just 0.08% mention critical race theory, structural racism, systemic racism or diversity, equity and inclusion."
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Did Heidegger like technology or not? Sometimes I feel he's playing games and being coy
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About to cook spaghetti. Will become the main character of Twitter for 1.3 days 😏
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Philosophy is so much easier when you assume everyone you're reading is a bad person and then be pleasantly surprised when you find out they did something nice once!
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Watching Charles Murray fight the Sisphyean battle of proving he's not racist by screaming, "But black really are statistically deficient!!" I remind myself, "We must imagine Murray happy" and I find peace.
Doesn't it make a difference to
@davidafrench
's argument that two of the core problems typically ascribed to centuries of American racism--elevated black violent crime and depressed mean cognitive ability--are found wherever sub-Saharan African populations live?
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This is what an empire in decline looks like
James Corden, Camila Cabello, Billy Porter and Idina Menzel stopped traffic in LA for a flash mob with a cover of Jennifer Lopez’s “Let’s Get Loud” to promote
#CinderellaMovie
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If I were Rawls I would have avoided all those critiques by just completing German Idealism
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The hardest philosophical struggle of abolition is to change the conversation from "Did the police/state kill in the right way?" to "Ought the police/state have the right to kill?" And then building solutions that make saying "no" to the latter practical and reasonable 1/4
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Knowing what the police are like in the US and calling them on your own students…why would the student body *ever* trust these people again?
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Happy to announce that "Socialism or Barbarism?: C. L. R. James and the Politics of Hope and Utopia" will be coming out in the Hannah Arendt Center Journal. I will let you when it's available to read or feel free to message me to have a look at it before it's published
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Sometimes Thomas Jefferson discourse sounds like, "Imagine how hard it was for him not to be able to live up to his own ideals 😭😭😭. (By owning slaves). What a tortured antihero!"
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Sometimes I wonder if everything is ok in the UK...because the view from Twitter is...yikes
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