About
My creative efforts are driven by a desire to think-feel the world differently than before, and to open up new spaces for intimacy, friendship, and political solidarities. I call this mode of thinking-feeling thought collage.
“What was scattered gathers; what was gathered blows apart.” These words from Heraclitus capture the ethos of my work as an artist-philosopher with a passion for fragments. I have published six books and numerous shorter publications, and am widely known for my writings on queer theory and Foucault. You can find descriptions of my first five books and some of my latest essays here.
My sixth and most recent book, These Survivals: Autobiography of an Extinction, brings together my philosophical interests with experimental writing and collage. See a description of These Survivals here. Working with fragments allows me to articulate an ethics of living in the face of ecological crisis and a devastated planet.
Collaboration with others is central to my artistic-philosophical practice. As the Samuel Candler Dobbs Professor of Philosophy at Emory University, I bring my passion for thought collage into the classroom in courses on Foucault, feminist and queer theory, philosophy and literature, and more. You can find information about my teaching here.
It all began by accident late in the fall of 2022. On leave for a year, I was living in an apartment at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, New Jersey, writing a book about ethics in the Anthropocene. I started cutting and tearing up printed-out pages, scribbled notes, numbered lists, quotes, images, drawings, dress patterns. As if in a dream, I started fragmenting the fragments, printing out more pages and cutting them up, gluing them to index cards, stringing together feathers with dried leaves and scraps of scribbled paper. Unspooling skeins of twine, I started zigzagging lines across the room—eye level, above my head, at the hips—and affixing bits and pieces of myself to them. The lines grew, sprouting more fragments. Friends stopped by. “It’s an art installation, a living collage!” they said.
Inspired by my Princeton apartment installation, I now offer day-long and multi-day workshops that introduce participants to the kinds of interdisciplinary, experimental, collaborative practices in immersive collage that have been so generative for me. I call them “Installations for Survival.” You can find information about my workshops and installations here. The child-like aesthetic practice of analog collage—cutting things up and pasting them back together—allows participants to re-experience the self-undoing synergies of mind and body engaged in messy, playful practices of making. Our fingers sticky with glue, collaging transforms familiar ways of being in the world. Working together, participants find, again and again, that the fragments we create and hang from lines generate new ways of thinking and feeling. Taken together, these collaged lines—fragments installed and just as quickly disassembled—also express an aesthetic of impermanence, dissipation, and fugitivity.
What was scattered gathers; what was gathered blows apart.
