Monetarily Woke

These days, whenever a rising academic in the humanities sets out to deconstruct a seemingly unpolitical object by highlighting the oft-ignored features of conflict and domination that object is shot through with, I feel tempted to react the way the German playwright Hanns Johst did when hearing the word “culture” — by “reaching for my gun” (the quote has been variously misattributed to Nazi officials but is in fact a line from Johst’s 1930 play Schlageter).