The inorganic intellectual and the reinvention of the communal

a provocation

Christian Moraru

pp. 63-77

in: Peter Hitchcock (ed), The new public intellectual, Basingstoke, Palgrave Macmillan, 2016

Abstract

There was, apparently, no Purgatory for arch-anti-intellectualist Spiro Agnew. Or, if there was one—better still, if there is one, in perpetuity—that would be Futurama's ontologically ambiguous digital limbo. In it, the former Vice President stumbles around headless; no privacy up there, either, courtesy of YouTube or, if you prefer, theinfosphere.org, a website also known as "The Futurama Wiki." If you have not watched the TV cartoon—I almost said "animated series," but I would have been so wrong—if, as I say, you are not a fan of the cartoon, then you can educate yourself here about Agnew's anticli-mactic departure. Rest assured, it was not a contract Richard Nixon took out on him posthumously, something Agnew did worry about while alive, but a golf cart accident in which ecofeminists were also involved and which seems to have occasioned Agnew's decapitation.