Timothy Stanley

This book provides a novel reevaluation of Jacques Derrida’s deconstructive account of writing. Derrida’s various essays on writing's materiality in books, scrolls, typewriters and digital displays, briefly touched on the question of religion. At times he directed his attention to the mediatic nature of Christianity. However, such comments have rarely been applied to formal aspects of religious texts. In response, this book investigates the rise of the Christian codex in its second-to-fifth-century-CE Jewish and Greco-Roman contexts. By better understanding the religious nature of this technical development, it becomes possible to reframe writing's coincidence with faith.

Urban centers are being transformed into consumer tourist playgrounds made possible by dense networks of surveillance. The safety and entertainment however, come at an unseen price. One of the historical roots of surveillance can be connected to the modern information base of tracking individuals for economic and political reasons. Though its antecedents can be traced via Foucault's account of panoptic discipline which walled in society's outcasts for rehabilitation, the following essay explores the shift to the urban panopticism of today where society's outcasts are subtly filtered out of "public" view. Juxtaposing a sociological account of the concentration camp with urban Disneyization fosters a greater understanding of how surveillance creates certain categories of citizenship. In particular, how urban surveillance intensifies Walter Benjamin's description of the flâneur who often experiences the brunt of the new urban panopticon's filtering power.