One of the points I want to bring forward today is that any reputably “global” system is open to being incorporated into uncommon usage, and that by repurposing, its own claims become examinable in a new light…
Read MoreStuart Hall has died. The enormity of the loss cannot be exaggerated. There is little point trying to measure Hall’s importance against other significant figures: he himself would have abhorred the macho individualism of such a gesture. But it has been a long time since the intellectual Left in the UK has experienced such a loss, or one more keenly feared by those who may have anticipated it.
Read MorePhotograph by Globovisión by Andrea Teti and Gennaro Gervasio The ‘Arab Spring’ is dead. The uprisings that began in Tunisia in December 2010 and spread throughout most of the Arab world were a dream, a beautiful dream, but a dream that has crashed onto the hard rocks of reality. The ‘leaderless revolutions’ were successful in…
Read MorePhotograph by Oisin Prendiville by Massimo Pigliucci I used to have the “meta” itch, but I learned to live with it and stop scratching it. It only irritates anyway, without doing much good work. Let me explain. If you are a regular (or even occasional) reader of Rationally Speaking you know that we often publish…
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 Nadia Sels Mythology and Psychoanalysis: Uncanny Doubles “It may perhaps seem to you as though our theories are a kind of mythology and, in the present case, not even an agreeable one. But does not every science come in the end to a kind of mythology?”[1] These words, addressed to Albert Einstein,[2] were written…
Read MoreFor most of recorded history, poverty reflected God’s will. The poor were always with us. They were not inherently immoral, dangerous, or different. They were not to be shunned, feared, or avoided. In the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, a harsh new idea of poverty and poor people as different and inferior began to replace this ancient biblical view.
Read MoreAi Weiwei, Gao Yuan, 2009 by En Liang Khong While China prepared for the 2008 Olympics, the artist Ai Weiwei was busy collaborating with the Swiss architectural firm, Herzog & de Meuron, on the Bird’s Nest stadium. Gradually, Ai began to experience a deep sense of disgust: “I was so involved in architecture that it…
Read Moreby Joe Linker One year, living near the ocean in South Bay, we got a fake Christmas tree. The metallic silver needles, like tiny confetti mirrors, reflected shades of yellow, blue, and red, emitted from a rotating electric color wheel placed beneath the tree. The colors turned almost as slow as a sunset. At night,…
Read MoreAlbrecht Dürer’s series of woodcuts for The Ship of Fools, by Sebastian Brant, 1494. Not Providing for Death Of Old Fools Of Insolence toward God Fools on a Cart and a Boatload of Fools Of the Antichrist Of Bad Marksmen Master of Haintz Narr Via Public Domain Review |
Read MoreIt’s been striking me how many parties there are in Shakespeare, how (as in Proust) they seem to occur mid-play…
Read MoreAldous Huxley by Emily Petermann Though Aldous Huxley is primarily remembered for his novels and to a lesser extent his essays, he began his writing career as a poet. While a student at Balliol College at Oxford, having been exempted from military service due to extremely poor eyesight, he was involved in several student poetry…
Read MoreOn a solo road trip this summer I took along the ten-disk set of Mark Twain’s The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn for the ride…
Read MoreGeorg Simmel is known primarily as a sociologist, but his works roam and lurch between academic disciplines, blurring sociology into social psychology, anthropology and philosophy…
Read MorePhotograph by Paolo Gerbaudo by Paolo Gerbaudo In current protest culture the estranged ideologies of anarchism and progressive populism are coming together around a critique of the neoliberal “corporate state” and a new imaginary of mass insurgency. “GTFO: Get the Fuck Out!” This request directed at the hated political elites through a number of videos…
Read MoreJames Joyce. Photograph by C. Ruf, Zurich, c. 1918 by Eike Kronshage Gerhart Hauptmann’s Vor Sonnenaufgang The German dramatist Gerhart Hauptmann (1862-1946) wrote his first drama Vor Sonnenaufgang at the age of 27. Hauptmann, though living in the small town of Erkner, a couple of miles southeast from Berlin, was in lively exchange with the…
Read Moreby R. H. Jackson This piece, included in the drift special issue of continent., was created as one step in a thread of inquiry. While each of the contributions to drift stand on their own, the project was an attempt to follow a line of theoretical inquiry as it passed through time and the postal…
Read MoreAnother One Bites The Dust, Cory Arcangel, 2007 Thanking You Thanks to our incredibly generous 132 funders, Berfrois will continue publication. We have even raised enough to spruce things up around here. Cheers! Introducing Our New Editorial Team Our new senior editors are: Daniel Bosch Nicholas Rombes Legacy Russell Masha Tupitsyn Our new associate editors…
Read MoreNaomi entreating Ruth and Orpah to return to the land of Moab, William Blake, 1795 by Emily McAvan In this paper I read the Book of Ruth from the Hebrew Bible in relation to modern Jewish feminist and queer theories. I trace the movement in the narrative between mourning and melancholia, suggesting that the mourning…
Read Moreby Ato Quayson Readers of Things Fall Apart will recall the moment in the penultimate chapter of the novel when the gathering of the people of Umuofia is rudely interrupted by messengers from the white man. The messengers are confronted by Okonkwo, who happens to have taken a position at the very edge of the…
Read More
