Beautiful Losers

Welcome to Beautiful Losers by Seth and Alex. Friends and former English Literature PhD students attempt to understand the value of the humanities in the 21st century. This show is for anyone interested in a deep and nuanced discussion of culture, politics, economics, and art. In 2010 we began a PhD program in English literature. We studied literature, poetry, film, culture, economics, systems theory, political science, economics, empire, power, biopolitics, gender and sexuality, psychoanalysis, anthropology, linguistics, semiotics, and the entire history of philosophy. We published work in peer reviewed journals and traveled the world on research grants and to present our ideas to other scholars at the Humboldt University in Berlin, the University of Freiburg, the Amsterdam School for Cultural Analysis, The University of Louisville, and many others. We’ve worked in archives and research institutions and served as directors of research in fields as far flung as private equity and finance, venture capital, empire studies, political cynicism, and media studies. This sounds impressive, but it is also the story of scores of young people who followed their intellectual curiosities to the absolute limit.Our careers have taken different directions. Alex forged ahead into the professoriate, while Seth pivoted into the world of investment banking and finance.Ideas and intellectual curiosity have buoyed our friendship for a decade, but these times raise real and pressing questions about the value of a 20th century tradition of the humanities for a 21st century world. Beautiful Losers is our attempt to understand the 21st century in the context of our academic background as well as in the context of the wider-world that we now live in. We hope to find like-minded thinkers. People who are interested in the world and miss the excitement of participating in an excellent seminar discussion. We call ourselves Beautiful Losers, our own interpretation of Hegel’s famous ethical subject “the beautiful soul.” For us, a beautiful loser is an idealist that is motivated by a feeling, but those feelings can blind one to the intricacies and complexities of a situation. Today’s world is complex, and it is our belief that much of the political and cultural discourse is motivated by feelings, for better and worse. Although we are beautiful losers, we hope that our work will develop a more robust accounting for the world than one based solely on feeling. Our methodology is principally humanistic. For us that means it is a blend of historical knowledge and rational thinking. We seek to situate ideas within their context and approach them from as many sides as possible.

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