April 2014
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April 2014 Highlights
What is philosophy still excluding?
What is wrong with philosophy? This question has been tearing the community, such as it is, of professional Anglophone philosophers apart over the past few years.
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April 2014 Highlights
Suzanne Ruta: Raubkunst
In 1914, my husband’s uncle Gustav Kirstein bought a lovely painting from the German impressionist master, Max Liebermann – a cheerful summer scene, clearly influenced by Renoir, of rowboats on Hamburg’s Alster River. In 1943 the Nazis stole the painting, along with the rest of Kirstein’s estate.
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April 2014 Highlights
Giorgio Fontana: Invisible Agony
Jean Améry titled his renowned book on voluntary death, Hand an Sich Legen – To lay Hands on Oneself. Beyond the argument of Amery (who killed himself in 1978), I’ve always found this image very appropriate. It describes with precision and grace a terrible gesture.
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April 2014 Highlights
Daniel Tobin on John Donne
Today because I am sufficiently connected here in my book-glutted home in Boston I have decided to make my little room an everywhere. As it so happens, I am hovering now above an area of greater London known as Mitcham that four-hundred years ago was an outlying village backwater away from the teeming intrigue and bustle of King James’ city and his court.
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April 2014 Highlights
Death and Derrida by Peter Gratton
In a move that might strike readers as odd, Derrida spends most of these lectures not on the case made by death penalty proponents, with whom he clearly disagrees, but on demonstrating that abolitionists borrow from the same language and historical sources as their avowed enemies.
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Vincent W.J. van Gerven Oei: European Love

Albania is inching forward to the third attempt to gain EU candidate status in June. After the country was denied this status for the second time last December owing to a Dutch veto, it is making considerable efforts to meet the “standards” yet again. This is a slightly perverse...
Read MoreThe Rime of the 450 Year Old Bard

"Hamlet" was the play, or rather Hamlet himself was the character, in the intuition and exposition of which I first made my turn for philosophical criticism, and especially for insight into the genius of Shakspere, noticed.
Read MoreOccupybook

Rather than creating an alternative internet, that is free, self-managed and non-commercial, contemporary tech activists seem much more concerned with harnessing the potential of the corporate internet, making use of the capabilities of gigantic corporate social networking sites such as Facebook and Twitter.
Read MoreAgrume

The Lemon Grove in Bordighera, Claude Monet, 1864 From Literary Review: Goethe’s ‘The Apprenticeship of Wilhelm Meister’, a neglected masterpiece if ever there was, is known nowadays for a single line from a ballad sung by Mignon, the daughter of a wandering musician. ‘Know’st thou the land where the...
Read MoreRad NGOs

I call myself an anarchist. You might not use that word. But if you are skeptical of hierarchies, and are used to organising politically in more autonomous or horizontal groups, you too may have struggled with one of the most glaring contradictions we face in a capitalist society: Jobs....
Read MoreVirginia Woolf on George Eliot

To read George Eliot attentively is to become aware how little one knows about her. It is also to become aware of the credulity, not very creditable to one's insight, with which, half consciously and partly maliciously, one had accepted the late Victorian version of a deluded woman who...
Read MoreFrom the Fog

A Philosopher, Jacopo Tintoretto, 1570 From 3:AM: ‘Point to the fog. Now point away from it. Now brush your teeth. (Philosophy as a type of activity) ‘Seduction is the premature ejaculation of the future. It works best after brushing your teeth.’ ‘Always attach yourself...
Read More‘The deep-freeze was full for years to come’

Herb and Harry were the names of our two steers, the one a Hereford, the other a Holstein. They did not do much but stand, bovine and stoic, from one day to the next. They sculpted strange rolling shapes into the salt lick with their fat blue tongues, and...
Read MoreA Second Belle Époque

From The New York Review of Books: Thomas Piketty, professor at the Paris School of Economics, isn’t a household name, although that may change with the English-language publication of his magnificent, sweeping meditation on inequality, Capital in the Twenty-First Century. Yet his influence runs deep. It has become a...
Read MoreRemembrance of Translations Past

Although Charles Kenneth Scott Moncrieff’s translation of À la recherche du temps perdu is considered by many journalists and writers to be the best translation of any foreign work into the English language, his choice of Remembrance of Things Past as the general title alarmed the seriously ill Proust...
Read MoreMario Carpo: Voice, Words, Memory

It all started with cellphones, a long time ago. No student, and few teachers, would make voice calls from class, but in the early 2000s GSM phones started to offer nearly free text messaging, and students (and faculty) started to text during lectures and seminars. Before long students were...
Read MoreHindu Nationalism’s Poster Boy

Photograph from Narendra Modi on Flickr. by Nikita Sub India’s Hindu Right is associated with the colour saffron. The saffron flag, or bhagwa dhwaj adorns the offices of the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS or Sangh for short), which is at the core of the Hindu nationalist movement. The Sangh...
Read MoreIs Kate Bush a Rosicrucian?

From The London Review of Books: We know all the essential passport application stuff about Bush, and down the years she’s dutifully done the odd unrevealingly bland Q&A, but there’s an immense amount we don’t know. Has she ever taken psychedelic drugs? Has she had therapy? (Reichian, Jungian, marriage?)...
Read MoreLike many ugly controversies, the beginnings of #gamergate are linked to the end of love — well, the end of a relationship, at least....
Read MoreA response — Bartleby’s response — foregrounding the fact that it is the “I” that “prefers not to”: not that ‘I cannot’ nor ‘I...
Read MoreAs a poet, you are your grandmother; you are browsing the obituaries with a red pen and an address book in your hand. The...
Read MoreEric Weisbard wrote twenty years ago, introducing the voluminous, era-summarizing, contrarian and contradictory Spin Alternative Record Guide.
Read MoreWhat, then, is sociocide? Sociocide resonates with the term demodernization formulated by A. V. Tishkov to account for the consequences of the war in...
Read MorePoet Fiona Sampson is a former career violinist, and, perhaps unsurprisingly, overt references to music appear in her work.
Read MoreIn May, in the garden of the elevated house at the bottom of the hill, four shrubs of stunning azaleas come into full blossom....
Read MoreFlorence showed me what she called the most famous of Chinese poems. She had made her own translation from a Chinese language newspaper clipping....
Read MoreTo begin at the end: After nearly two hours exploring facets of exploitation in the globalized food system, Luc Moullet closes Genèse d’un repas/Origins...
Read MoreNow it seems the state’s radical conservatives are degrading the historic, populist-provincial mentality of Iowa; they are revising the state’s legacy within the broader...
Read MoreA few years ago all I had was a certain ambition and an understanding, more or less, of how things work in this world....
Read MoreThe persistence and proliferation of pseudoscientific thinking in contemporary culture demands explanation. Clearly there are some pragmatic reasons for its expanded existence, and people...
Read MoreThe memories are like stutters. Sometimes I inhale for air, and exhale a shaking chain of memories. A choking hazard. I for the ghost....
Read MoreAs many former Eastern Block countries in the EU display a hardly dissimulated form of racism and religious hatred, Albania, always a little behind...
Read MoreThe memories are like stutters. Sometimes I inhale for air, and exhale a shaking chain of memories. A choking hazard. I for the ghost. The ghost for me.
Read MoreIf duende, the source of inspiration that Lorca sets out to champion in his essay at the expense of the Muse, is “in sum, the spirit of the earth”, a force linking body and soil through a struggle akin to death, then the Muse is a force that speaks to the head and inspires art that is, in the words’ most negative senses, cerebral and high-minded.
Read MoreBurton was born in Kentucky. He moved itinerantly before settling in Oakland. Temperatures rise, so does the suicide rate.
Read MoreI’ve been writing a more or less monthly memoir of my life in the sixties and seventies when I lived with Doris Lessing, and my continuing relationship with her until her death last year at 94. It is also an ongoing portrait of my incurable cancer.
Read MoreThe cars came scudding in towards Dublin, running evenly like pellets in the groove of the Naas Road. At the crest of the hill at Inchicore sightseers...
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