After taking an eternity to finish my last book project, I realized the next one, given my advanced years, must needs be one that requires a mere half of an eternity to finish. Echoes of a Queer Messianic was in some ways a love letter to the hundred or so friends who died of AIDS. By that I mean the book attempted to rethink the time that remains from the perspective of one who has for all intents and purposes been pronounced dead.
This has lead me to think of what societies of caring, as opposed to ones based on credit and interest-yielding guilt (Schuld), might look like or how they might function to address the needs of the dispossessed. Films like Moonlight and the Florida Project envision spaces that come to celebrate a new way of relating and co-existing with others and the other living systems of the planet. The necessary stodginess expected of a professor comes with working through a notion of care (Sorge) as presented in Goethe's Faust and Heidegger's Being and Time, which leads to the uneasily nervous but necessary question: Who (really) cares?