Month: May 2020

Psychoanalysis emphasizes the distinction between understanding something intellectually and “really” understanding it on a feeling level. Slavoj Zizek makes an ironic demonstration of this distinction in his essay on sex and spirituality in the age of coronavirus. For sex to be “spiritual”, it has to be intersubjective, and Zizek is right to stress that we’re…

Spectrum recently published a feature wringing its hands about autism, incels, and autistic incels. You can tell what kind of article it’s going to be from the use of “unsettling” in the first sentence: Last September, a man with the screen name ‘XavierInTheForest’ wrote an unsettling post on the online forum Reddit. In it, he…