Theme: Philosophy
-
The problem with fame, or any unanimous praise, is twofold: 1. You are saying exactly what everyone is ready to hear and you are doing exactly what everyone is ready to see. There is almost no tension between yes-no. Ready not ready.Read more
-
There is a cat that sits on the sidewalk in front of the bistro Chez Bébert near the Gare Montparnasse in Paris (I snapped his picture just yesterday). He does not greet visitors, but he does give them to know, in his silent occupation of that crucial space before the door, that this is his bistro, and that, whatever the surrounding humans may call him, he is Bébert. Read more
-
In 1946 Albert Camus traveled to South America. During this journey, he took random notes published posthumously, in which he produced irregular (and sometimes brutal) remarks on both cities visited and on persons he met. In São Paulo had dinner with Oswald de Andrade, already well known for his polemical thesis concerning the supposed civilizational driving force supporting anthropophagy.Read more
-
When King Pyrrhus invaded Italy, having viewed and considered the order of the army the Romans sent out to meet him; “I know not,” said he, “what kind of barbarians” (for so the Greeks called all other nations) “these may be; but the disposition of this army that I see has nothing of barbarism in it.”Read more
-
In the everyday use of the concept, saying that something is grotesque rarely implies anything other than saying that something is a bit outside of the normal structure of language or meaning – that something is a peculiarity. But in its historical use the concept has often had more far reaching connotations.Read more
-
One of the strengths of BioShock Infinite, acknowledged less often than its expansive and detailed historical-revisionist steampunk setting, is the way its narrative is punctuated. The extended forays down cobblestone streets – and the intermittent murderous rampages – are connective tissue, linking a series of scenes that are genuinely, jarringly emotional.Read more
-
I go with a friend Jennifer to the exhibition ‘Genius of Place’ at the Museum of Contemporary Art in Sydney. Kathleen Petyarre’s canvasses are ravishing, and enormous. Their rhythmic repetition is arresting, and we sit for an uncounted moment of lost time to absorb this. Then, we go to the café, asking ourselves: why do we feel we ‘get’ those paintings?Read more
-
The political philosopher Charles Taylor made an excellent observation recently when he pointed out that Islam is usually the culture that multiculturalism fails to adequately encompass in its pretensions towards universalism. By excluding Islam on the basis of the very values that multiculturalism stands for, Islam presents to liberal multiculturalism, especially in Europe, the hidden Orwellian side of its so called "neutral" values: tolerance, pluralism and equality.Read more
-
Vladimir Nabokov has done pretty much all a human can do, from within the pouch of corporeal experience and the tunnel of time, to trace out the boundaries of the absolute. He has done so entirely without positive beliefs, but armed only with a love of the names of things, and a superhuman power to combine these names according to the rules — which are his own rules — of the art of description.Read more
-
The chance entrance to the city before it disappeared. Thoughts hanging like bodies from ropes. The image seems to have been taken from inside a moving car, but this is staged. The windshield wipers are props. The highway is front-projection.Read more
-
At first glance, the problem of privacy on social networking sites seems to be nothing short of a tragic comedy, for what was once designed to replicate, or remediate human relationships has evolved into a surveillance tool deployed to entrap one within the gaze of others. While we give in to our nostalgic impulse and reminisce on how the more primitive blog afforded us anonymity in the face of the masses, we are at present, still compelled to confer the stamp of authenticity upon every single utterance made online. Read more
-
What happens when one names another, when one draws them into language— is that the moment in which they disappear?; when they begin slipping away, into nothingness.Read more
-
Over the past several years, I have written a number of articles, in Lapham's Quarterly, the Chronicle of Higher Education, and elsewhere, in which I have questioned some of the features of the emerging mainstream consensus about gay marriage. I have consistently affirmed my support for it, and have at the same time insisted that in the fight to achieve marriage equality, internal critique should be welcomed as having a strengthening effect.Read more
-
Two summers ago, my family and I decided to spend an afternoon at Lisbon's Jardim Zoológico. Or perhaps it's more accurate to say that our eldest daughter made the decision to go and wouldn't relent until we took her there. She was six years old at the time, and even then she possessed the seemingly limitless rogatory stamina and precocious mastery of the rhetorical device the Greeks called diacope that have made her a nearly unbeatable eight year-old.Read more
-
So this is the thing. I’ve been breathing a long time but, driven by the objective of writing a book, only recently started deliberately thinking about it. We commonly view breathing as a pedestrian automatism, but I try to imagine how this simple physiological function was once perceived as miraculousRead more
