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Arthur Bradley

Arthur Bradley is Professor of Comparative Literature at Lancaster University. He works at the intersection of comparative literature, political theory and modern European philosophy. His most recent book is Unbearable Life: A Genealogy of Political Erasure (Columbia University Press, 2019). In 2024, his new book Staging Sovereignty: Theory, Theater, Thaumaturgy is published by Columbia University Press.

Symposia

Philip K. Dick’s half-lives

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Essays

I Am the Brand Name

If the translator’s mistake appears to grotesquely reverse the great metaphysical reveal of Dick’s work, which is to say that it reduces the mysterious and omnipotent Ubik to nothing more than a commercial trademark like Apple, Google or Nike, it is typical that the author himself finds something perversely right – indeed wonderful — in its essential wrongness: Dick already knew very well, after all, that capitalism can quite literally change your life.