Can one lead a good life in a bad life?
Adorno Prize Lecture Judith Butler butler_adorno_prize Continue reading Can one lead a good life in a bad life?
SEXISTENCE
There is love in its endless applications: love without limits, the love of humanity, of the world, of music, of the sea and the mountains, of poetry. There is the love of philosophy, which is called love of wisdom, which, in turn, seems to consist only in loving what one cannot judge, know, or reject: … Continue reading SEXISTENCE
Maxime Rodinson: Marxist, Orientalist, anti-Zionist, anti-Islamist
Louis Althusser on Wifredo Lam
Here is a translation of a short text by Louis Althusser on the Cuban painter, included in vol. 2 of Écrits philosophiques et politiques (Paris: IMEC, 1995). The text in italics is from the volume’s editors. Lam (1977) This text, entitled “Lam” by Althusser, was commissioned from him by Wifredo Lam in a letter dated 18 … Continue reading Louis Althusser on Wifredo Lam
Junkspace
“If space-junk is the human debris that litters the universe, Junk-Space is the residue mankind leaves on the planet. … Junkspace is what remains after modernization has run its course, or more precisely, what coagulates while modernization is in progress.” rem_koolhaas_junkspace Continue reading Junkspace
Not-Knowing
by Donald Barthelme not-knowing-donald-barthelme Continue reading Not-Knowing
Kitchen Without Kitsch
The lay of the land, in the Seventies film, is that there are two types of structure being practiced: dispersal and shallow-boxed space. Rameau’s Nephew, McCabe and Mrs. Miller, Celine and Jutie Go Boating, Beware of the Holy Whore are films that believe implicitly in the idea of non-solidity, that everything is a mass of energy particles, and the aim, structurally, is a flux-like space to go with the atomized content and the idea of keeping the freshness and energy of a real world within the movie’s frame. Continue reading “Kitchen Without Kitsch”
What Is It Like to be a Bat?
Thomas Nagel's seminal essay about the limits of understanding consciousness from an objective perspective.
Consciousness is what makes the mind-body problem really intractable. Perhaps that is why current discussions of the problem give it little attention or get it obviously wrong. The recent wave of reductionist euphoria has produced several analyses of mental phenomena and mental concepts designed to explain the possibility of some variety of materialism, psychophysical identification, or reduction.
Judgment Day
What quality fascinates and entrances me in the photographs I love? I believe it is this: for me, photography in some way captures the Last Judgment; it represents the world as it appears on the last day, the Day of Wrath. Continue reading “Judgment Day”