Theme: Derrida

I remember when I was a pre-teen and they moved into a loft across the street from me in Tribeca, where I lived. And an older neighbor friend told me they were living in her building, on the top floor. I saw him at my corner deli, and on the street smoking, but never her. At night, I sometimes looked up at their windows and saw their lights on. He was not very impressive in person. Cute, but no big deal. Read more

My title assumes that the reader knows what “the Nancy School” is. In fact, there is more than one. I will mention at least three. There is the school, celebrated at the Museum of the Nancy School, that we associate with Art Nouveau, with vases of fluid lines, with organic decorations, and with a handful of emblematic names from the turn of the last century: Gallé, Majorelle, Prouvé, Daum. Read more

Howard Caygill on philosophy and resistance movements. Read more

Today, having gone through more than two hundred years and multiple technological developments, this motto Sapere aude could be turned into Dare to edit! As Wikipedia screams from the screen: ‘Don't be afraid to edit — anyone can edit almost any page, and we encourage you to be bold!’ It is within the Wikipedia project that traces of Diderot´s and d´Alembert´s Encyclopédie return. With a network that spans the whole globe the ideal of the Encyclopédie seems within reach. However, it is not just the great minds that create this new encyclopedia, but anyone that feels the need to contribute. The authority of the big authors has begun to vanish, and a new form of authorship has come into existence. In Wikipedia anyone can be an author. As I will argue in this essay, this change in authorship has led to a new form of politics in which the author has not disappeared, but on the contrary can be found everywhere. Wikipedia cannot be called a democracy, but constitutes what I propose to call an authocracy. From now on authors govern the community.Read more