You use the expression “antinomies of fanaticism”, which we might rephrase as the paradoxes or inherent contradictions of fanaticism: on the one hand, fanaticism as the opposite of reason and, on the other, fanaticism as an excess of reason.
Read MoreIn 1970, Robert Filliou offers Bengt Adlers the drawing Meditation Bound, representing three men with closed eyes; after Filliou’s death, the central figure mysteriously disappears from the drawing.
Read MoreEwald Brandner by George Eliot “Nothing,” says Goethe, “is more significant of men’s character than what they find laughable.” The truth of this observation would perhaps have been more apparent if he had said culture instead of character. The last thing in which the cultivated man can have community with the vulgar is their jocularity;…
Read MoreAmbystomas, Regina Kolyanovska, 2013 by Stephen T. Asma In his 1790 Critique of Judgment, Kant famously predicted that there would never be a “Newton for a blade of grass.” Biology, he thought, would never be unified and reduced down to a handful of mechanical laws, as in the case of physics. This, he argued, is…
Read Moreby Henry James CHAPTER I FROM MISS MIRANDA MOPE, IN PARIS, TO MRS. ABRAHAM C. MOPE, AT BANGOR, MAINE. September 5th, 1879. My dear mother—I have kept you posted as far as Tuesday week last, and, although my letter will not have reached you yet, I will begin another before my news accumulates too much. …
Read MoreThe Worker, Heinrich Hoerle, 1922-23 The most salient feature of our world is that God is dead. Or at least he appears to be dead. Perhaps he is on life support. Or maybe he has become an embalmed version of what he once was, appearing lifelike, but really dead. Nietzsche, formally and most famously, pronounced…
Read MoreFrontispiece of Über den Menschen und seine Verhältnisse, by Carl Wilhelm Frölich, 1792. Engraving by Carl Christian Glaßbach From Eurozine: Professor of Modern European History at the Institute for Advanced Study located in Princeton, New Jersey, Israel built his reputation as a historian of the Spanish and Dutch empires. Over the past decade, however, he…
Read MoreThe only advice that one person can give another about reading is to take no advice, to follow your own instincts, to use your own reason, to come to your own conclusions…
Read MoreDeath mask of Immanuel Kant, Johann Gottfried Schadow, 1804 by Thomas De Quincey I take it for granted that every person of education will acknowledge some interest in the personal history of Immanuel Kant. A great man, though in an unpopular path, must always be an object of liberal curiosity. To suppose a reader thoroughly…
Read MorePhotograph by Oliver Farry by Tammy Ho Lai-Ming I don’t want to be like a fruit that is small, round and has a bland taste. I like being written into poems but when someone does that I feel shy but also ridiculously euphoric. I have been using the same perfume since I was sixteen years…
Read MoreThe Centurion’s Servant, Stanley Spencer, 1914 by Joanna Walsh La Boutique Obscure: 124 Dreams, by Georges Perec, translated by Daniel Levin Becker, Melville House, 272 pp. Along with a poorly identified person (maybe my aunt), I am visiting a sort of colonial trading post. At the very back of one room we come upon a…
Read MoreThe Yellow Flowers, Vincent Van Gogh, 1887 by Rick Honings and Arnold Lubbers In the small town of Steenbergen, situated in the Dutch province of North Brabant, near the Belgian border, a book club was set up in 1797, with Voor Wetenschap en Deugd (For Scholarship and Virtue) as its motto. Its members bought their…
Read MoreJorge Luis Borges From The American Scholar: The sweet-tempered octogenarian I knew needed in his blindness to be helped gently across carpeted floors. His preoccupations, notably Anglo-Saxon and Old Norse, were above all philological. His father had taught in English, which Borges used to say was the first language he ever spoke, though you would…
Read MoreTristan Garcia by Graham Harman The French philosopher and novelist Tristan Garcia was born in Toulouse in 1981. This makes him rather young to have written such an imaginative work of systematic philosophy as Forme et objet,1 the latest entry in the MétaphysiqueS series at Presses universitaires de France. But this reference to Garcia’s youthfulness…
Read MoreKing Louis Napoléon by Lotte Jensen To what extent can literature be used as a source for gaining historical knowledge?[1] This question has challenged historians and literary historians ever since the development of ‘history’ as a scholarly discipline. The answer tends to be moderately positive: literature may reveal specific information that can increase our historical…
Read MoreSlave Market with the Disappearing Bust of Voltaire, Salvador Dalí, 1940 by Jay Slosar “Don’t look back something might be gaining on you,” said Satchel Paige, a legendary baseball pitcher in the 1930s and 40s who couldn’t pitch in the major leagues because he was black. After Jackie Robinson broke the color barrier in baseball,…
Read MoreSoviet invasion of Prague, Czechoslovakia, 1968 by James Warner A recurring idea in the work of Milan Kundera is that the spirit of totalitarianism lives on in our mass media. In a world without privacy, will we all be perpetually on trial? In his 1994 essay “Blacklists, or Divertimento in Homage to Anatole France,” Kundera…
Read Moreby Patrick Riley I: Iustitia Caritas Sapientis It is worthwhile to try to recover a tradition of thinking about justice which, since the eighteenth century, has largely disappeared from view: the tradition which defines justice as positive love and benevolence and “charity” and generosity, not as merely following authoritative sovereign law (as in Hobbes’ “legal…
Read Moreby Stephen Gaukroger The core question dealt with in The Collapse of Mechanism and the Rise of Sensibility concerns the way in which, and the extent to which, natural philosophy comes to occupy the position of the paradigm bearer of cognitive values in the period between the 1680s and the middle of the eighteenth century,…
Read MoreLiberty Leading The People, Eugene Delacroix, 1830 by Nancy Mattoon Crossposted with BOOKTRYST: On November 9, 2010 the National Library of France opened a major new exhibit on Paris’s most notorious prison, The Bastille. A jail may not be the first subject that springs to mind as the basis for a national library exhibit, but…
Read More
