‘Corpse of the Phallus,’ Black Latex, and Circus Performers: Meet the Avant-Garde Artists Arrested for Violently Storming Columbia Library
16th May 2025
Before Isaiah Decastro Nash was arrested for storming a Columbia University library, the philosophy undergraduate dabbled in poetry.
“The primordial trauma of existence is the death and rot of God. The corpse of God; the corpse of Death; the corpse of Time; the corpse of the Phallus,” he wrote in “Sociotraumatics,” a 2024 poem published in Gadfly, Columbia’s undergraduate philosophy magazine. “The corpse of God is the corpse of the decaying phallus.”
Much of the screed focused on religion, something Nash evidenced a curious relationship with.