Absolute Disruption is a Professional Blog by Jason Ānanda Josephson Storm.

The Name of the Blog?

“Absolute Disruption” is the tentative title for a monograph I am working on about the future of the Human Sciences after Postmodernism (more can be found here LINK). (EDIT: the book came out in 2021 but by then its title had changed to Metamodernism: The Future of Theory)

The title of the blog was inspired by a quote from Hegel, The Phenomenology of Spirit: “[Spirit] obtains its truth only when, in its absolute disruption (absoluten Zerrissenheit), it finds itself.” 

The blog, however, is less about the material covered in that book (which is more rigorous and academic in its argumentation). The blog is mostly an excuse for me to write stuff that I think is fun and perhaps more accessible.

Who am I?

I have at one time or another: worked for a private investigator, been a Buddhist monk, been shot at, hiked a volcano off the coast of Africa, dined with a British lord, been jumped by a gang in Amsterdam, snowboarded in the Pyrenees, piloted a boat down the canals of Bourgogne, played bass guitar in a punk band, and once I almost died from scarlet fever.

Along the way I have lived and studied in five countries (England, France, Germany, Japan & the USA), and attended some of the most pretentious universities in the world (Oxford, Harvard, Stanford) all, I hope, without losing my sense of perspective.

I am a currently faculty member at Williams College. I am currently Francis Christopher Oakley Third Century Professor of Religion, and Chair of Science & Technology Studies.

You can find my official departmental webpage here. Contact info is there as well.

I teach about half my courses on East Asian religion/philosophy and the other half on “theory” (including courses on Critical theory, francophone philosophy, Foucault, Nietzsche, Max Weber, the dialectical tradition culminating in the Frankfurt School, and new materialism/realism).

Also, as a former rocker, I’m obsessed with music. So perhaps expect some posts on that as well.

But mainly expect stuff on theory.

Theory?

For a long time, I have become completely obsessed with that nebulous genre we call “Theory.” I started reading Continental philosophy in middle school and wrote my very first research paper as a precautious teen on Nietzsche and Antisemitism (seriously! I was a total geek). Starting in graduate school both at Stanford, Oxford, and during my time in Paris at the École Française d’Extrême-Orient, I had the opportunity to study with significant theorists such as Jean-Pierre Dupuy, Bernard Faure, Thomas Sheehan, as well as to attend lectures by such luminaries as Jacques Derrida, Giorgio Agamben, Richard Rorty, Rene Girard, Bruno Latour, Michel Serres, Cornel West, and Slavoj Žižek among others.

During the dissertation, however, this interest in Continental philosophy became partially submerged under the demands of philological rigor and historical, archival research in Japan. When I took the job at Williams one of the things that particularly excited me about the position was the Religion department’s reputation as a theory powerhouse. I have not been disappointed in this regard; and I have gotten as much from those outside the department as within. As my scholarship has begun to attract an international reputation, this circle has widened further. A leave at Ruhr University in Germany hashing it out with Hegelians, Luhmannians, and scholars of Begriffsgeschichte further intensified this interest. In the humanities at large, lacking as we do common areas of analysis, it seems it is in this imprecise terrain of abstractions that we have our most productive conversations with each other.

Why Blog?

I’ve decided to try blogging because I have a tendency to re-write forever, e.g. the years it took me to turn my dissertation into a book and the fact that the book only preserves one of the dissertation’s original chapters.

I am fantasizing that I can use blogging to shortcut perfectionism and to write things for a broader audience.

It is going to be hard for me but I am basically going to just post whatever ideas are sparked as I work on manuscript projects on the past and future of the human sciences respectively [update: the first of those is finished and now out]. My hope is that it’ll let people react to my thoughts in embryonic form. I know I’ll benefit from feedback and hope I’ll inspire some interesting conversations elsewhere.

Hopefully too this will have faster turnaround time than articles or books, which often take forever to see the light of day.