ABSTRACT Learning to move slowly and attentively offers alternatives to how a fast-paced world induces us to act. The Feldenkrais Method’s® awareness-through-movement (ATM)® lessons encourage students to notice what they actually do and how, rather than cathecting on what they should accomplish and how well. Within the constraint of a lesson, one shifts focus from “movement” as noun to “moving” as verb. Students learn that options about how to move—slowly, quickly, lightly, jerkily, smoothly, delicately, precisely, roughly, loosely, energetically, lazily, and more—correspond to choices. Such freedom of choice entangles us in grand philosophical matters as well as in mundane grammatical rules. Insofar as freedom within constraints characterizes how we move and act, including how we write and speak, the seemingly adverbial choices we make reveal who we are: not only in what we do, but in the manner in which as subjects we relate to predicates.

ABSTRACTIn the midst of the 2020 pandemic produced by an invisible virus, words bring the world near. Words come in from a threatening outside, even as their use turns those who are inside outward. Speech practices reconfigure work and non-work, while politics, like language, turns inside-out.

ABSTRACT The disregard of language and the breakdown of the distinction between reality and appearance that characterize the Trump era not only are symptomatic of a loss of language and of politics, but also reveal an extreme nihilism that is worthy of question and thought. No less a philosopher-rhetorician than Friedrich Nietzsche offers us a diagnosis of this condition, most pithily in the six-moment history of Western philosophy that he presents in Twilight of the Idols. For Nietzsche, after the end of the history of the error of reason comes a joyous overcoming of nihilism. Nietzsche's critics, however, are not so sure.