Ben Robinson has been busy indeed:
“I have been monotasking for the past year or so on my book manuscript, “On the Unit of the Present: A Theory and History of Indexicality.” I don’t like to think of myself as having spent the summer taking care of #1, but I did spend it thinking about Frege’s Foundations of Arithmetic and what the number 1 is, and under what circumstances it might make sense to speak of (or better, to point out) such a thing as an actual, spontaneous unit. Besides that monotasking, I’ve willy-nilly branched out to other tasks and have been teaching a course on contemporary German writing related to themes of Islam, Judaism, minority identity, migration, and, most generally, secularity and revelation (what used to be figured as Athens and Jerusalem). I’m also teaching a new class on German neoliberalism that juxtaposes it both to German social democracy and to American neoliberalism. It is stunning to me how much the debates between people like Karl Polanyi and Friedrich Hayek still echo in the discussion of the 2008 financial crash and its continuing effects after 10 years, which I’m reading about in Adam Tooze’s big tome of a book, Crashed.”
The College of Arts