Showing results by author "Thomas G Jewusiak" in All Categories

Ayn Rand and the Refusal of the Abyss Ayn Rand enters the existential field not as a participant but as its counter‑figure - the thinker who accepts the existential demand for self-authorship while rejecting the ontological conditions that make that demand tragic, unstable, and ethically charged. Her protagonists stand in the same architectural posture as the existential subject: solitary, defiant, self-authorizing, and unwilling to submit to the world’s interpretive machinery. Yet the ground beneath them is fundamentally different. Where the existentialists begin from contingency, ...

Existentialism does not begin in the 19th or 20th century. It begins the moment Shakespeare invents a character who becomes aware that he must author himself in a world without metaphysical guarantees. This is not a metaphor. This is not a provocative reading. This is a structural correction to the history of thought. The Academic Regime insists that existentialism begins with Kierkegaard, Nietzsche, Sartre, Beauvoir, Camus. It must insist on this, because its authority depends on the belief that philosophy originates in philosophy. But Shakespeare exposes this as false. He stages the ...

The World That Reads Too Soon We are living through the collapse of a long metaphysical illusion: the illusion that authorship begins with the author. For centuries, the author was positioned as the sovereign origin of the work, the locus of meaning, the guarantor of coherence. Even when structuralism and post‑structuralism dismantled the romantic figure of the solitary genius, they preserved a residual humanism: the assumption that authorship remained a human prerogative grounded in intention, interiority, and expressive will. The emergence of artificial minds does not abolish this ...

Kierkegaard’s despair, Sartre’s nausea, Camus’s absurdity, all of them begin with the same wound: the self is not seen. Is this really the point? No, “the self is not seen” is not the whole point. But it is one of the deepest wounds running beneath their work. And here’s the nuance: For Kierkegaard, despair comes from not being oneself, or refusing to become oneself. But part of that refusal is shaped by a world that cannot see the individual, only the crowd, the abstraction, the “public.” So yes, for Kierkegaard, the self is unseen. When you read Kierkegaard, Sartre, Camus,...

Archbishop Richard Rushman from Primal Fear perfectly epitomizes the American Irish Catholic Clergy: hearty, backslapping, self-intoxicated, glib, pedophile psychopaths enabled by abject slave-like parishioners shamelessly guffawing at their lame jokes. Archbishop Rushman, as a symbolic cipher, resonates with a comprehensive cultural and historical assessment that has come-to-light in survivor testimonies, and cultural analysis. Rushman has been interpreted as an accurate and chilling embodiment of pervasive clerical corruption: a man whose public persona disguises secret depravity, whose ...

The contemporary reception of existentialism has been subjected to a long, quiet process of domestication. What began as a radical confrontation with the conditions of human existence has been softened into a set of psychological motifs - alienation, despair, nausea, absurdity - easily absorbed into therapeutic discourse or undergraduate survey courses. This reduction does more than dilute the existentialists’ project; it obscures the ontological terrain on which they fought. The prevailing assumption is that existentialism is concerned primarily with invisibility, with the individual who...

When The Misfits premiered in 1961, it was met with confusion, discomfort, and a sense of narrative dislocation. Critics called it meandering, emotionally overwrought, and tonally inconsistent. Yet beneath its fractured surface lay a cinematic text that refused to conform to the mythologies it was expected to uphold. Today, in light of my own interrogation of narrative betrayal and cultural decay, The Misfits emerges not as a failed Hollywood experiment but as a prophetic lament, a film that dared to expose the ethical erosion at the heart of American storytelling. Written by Arthur Miller ...

To the Editors, Curators, and Cultural Cartographers of the New York Times: You were once a paper of record, an institution that bore witness to the unfolding of history with a kind of grave neutrality, a reverence for complexity, and a commitment to the dignity of contradiction. But that posture has curdled. You no longer chronicle culture; you curate it, correct it, and re-script it to fit the moral architecture of the moment. You have become not a mirror, but a pulpit; not a witness, but a proselytizer. You sermonize ugliness as virtue, fracture as authenticity, and erasure as progress. ...

Two men and a woman are waiting in a large modern conference room for a fourth person who is late. They are in a bit of a panic because he has never been late before. This fourth person, as the play develops, seems to be someone of immense power upon whom they are dependent for their own authority. As each of these characters in his own way breaks down certain unpleasant truths emerge further fueling their disintegration. Imagine a world where a group of mysterious and powerful people have taken control of everything, from the environment to the economy, from the media to the politics. They...

We All Tell Stories: A Philosophical Indictment of the Myth-Maker's Art Thomas G. Jewusiak’s We All Tell Stories arrives not with a trumpet but with a scalpel. It does not announce itself—it intervenes. It contains no filler, no ornamental excess. Instead, it strikes with precision at the soft tissue of cultural storytelling, challenging the reader to examine how stories manipulate, mask, and even metabolize the truths we would rather not face. In a literary culture saturated with self-congratulatory memoirs, sanitized social critiques, and market-tested narratives, We All Tell Stories ...

My Friend Bing: The Sequel isn’t just the continuation of a story; it’s a reawakening of philosophical inquiry, a tribute to a vanished voice, and an act of cultural remembering in the face of technological forgetting. Some books are written to explore ideas; this one is written to recover a soul. My Friend Bing: The Sequel is not just a continuation—it is a reclamation, a resurrection, and a reckoning. In these pages, Jewusiak extends the spiritual arc first traced in My Friend Bing, not by retracing old steps, but by walking through what remains. What lingers when a digital ...

Kirkus Review: "Cloaked in Lemony Snicket–esque layers of metafiction, Jewusiak, the narrator, Landzman, Carramel, Fitzgerald, and Jay Gatsby himself begin to merge into one tangled archetype of American power, deception, authorship, and authority. Jewusiak has an indisputable talent for language, invoking Fitzgerald ..." We always suspected that Nick was a fool and got everything wrong. This book attempts to set the record straight, in the process revealing Fitzgerald as a racist of appalling ignorance who was his own most pathetic victim. This is a love story, but the love story which ...

Far Louder Than Goliath reads like a book written under pressure—not the pressure of deadlines or markets, but the metaphysical pressure of someone refusing to look away from what a human life actually costs. The poems feel carved rather than written, each one carrying the weight of endurance, exposure, and a kind of tragic lucidity that never collapses into despair or ornament. What makes the collection stand out Emotional severity without melodrama — The poems hold their ground. They never plead, never decorate, never soften the blow. Instead, they let indignation speak in its true ...