Authenticity
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There Will Always Be Boxes Beside the Door
Maturity sometimes looks more like making room. We keep what has formed us without allowing it to occupy all the available space. That applies to ideas. It applies to traditions. It applies to the judgments of parents and teachers whose voices we may still hear years after they are gone. It applies even to our… Continue reading
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Truthful Belonging: How Can a Life Become Our Own?
Sometimes belonging provided the conditions in which a life could flourish. Sometimes it narrowed what could be spoken or pursued. Sometimes individual aspiration opened a life; sometimes it damaged relationships whose value became visible only after they were strained. Continue reading
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Two Meanings of Sovereignty
My freedom matters precisely because fidelity cannot be coerced. A promise made under compulsion is not much of a promise. Love extracted by force is not love. A life that can genuinely be given must first, in some meaningful sense, belong to the giver. Continue reading
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Beyond the Product: Standing Behind Our Work
Work becomes one way of caring for what we have received. We develop inherited capacities and return them, altered by attention and judgment, to the common world. None of us begins from nothing, and none of us can truthfully claim complete ownership of the conditions that made our contribution possible. Continue reading
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A Renewed Account of Authorship
{Developments in AI} do not immediately threaten authorship as such. They challenge a view of authorship formed under particular economic and market conditions. Continue reading
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Writing Without a Guarantee: The Risk of Work That Matters
I still do not know whether writing this book is professionally prudent. Perhaps it will strengthen future work; perhaps it will remain largely separate from my employment. It may find a modest readership, or its public life may take a form I cannot presently imagine. Continue reading
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Three Threats of AI to Human Agency
A letter can have presence. A phone call can have presence. A Zoom conversation can have presence. Even AI-assisted writing may preserve presence if the person remains genuinely involved, accountable, and responsive. Mediation is not the enemy. Substitution is. AI threatens presence when my words arrive but I have remained safely elsewhere. Continue reading
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Well-formed Small Groups Form Their Members
New one out today: “A well-formed group asks students to practise attention. They must listen closely enough to understand what another person means, not merely wait for their turn to speak. It asks them to practise articulation. They must put a thought into words that others can hear, question, and use. It asks them to… Continue reading
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Known Enough to Become Yourself
The self that comes back is never simply the self that left. Continue reading
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The Political Stakes of Authenticity
Quebec sovereignty in the 1990s drew much of its force from language, culture, historical memory, and the desire for collective recognition. Even at the point of possible rupture, the language still carried the question of relationship. Alberta separatism, by contrast, often speaks in the register of release. Continue reading