Archive for October, 2009
The love of novelty is the modern form of enthusiasm, and the enthusiasm for new technology is its most seductive, numbing form. The old Schwärmer sought to leap into the unconditioned. Religious fanatics in contrast are seldom Schwärmer these days — there outlook is legalistic, fundamentalist. The technological Schwärmer is a dialectician: he starts out from the absurd detour [ READ MORE ]
Watching the Gilmour Girls, I keep on expecting a serial killer to jump out from the bushes. But there is nothing random in this association (it is, I grant, more than an expectation… perhaps even a desire… but a whimsical desire: not the desire for blood, but for a sudden comic denouement): Rory Gilmour’s archetype [ READ MORE ]
The entire argument of After Finitude is built on a subtle, but all the more commonplace misinterpretation of Kant. Kant’s “Copernican Revolution” did not institute ”correlationism.” Rather, it showed the way out of the ”correlationism” that tacitly determined every traditional metaphysics, and that, in fact, rendered vain the pursuit of metaphysical (ontological) truth. The structure of knowledge, [ READ MORE ]
The theme of all television is the tenuous relation of the public and private. Every essential genre of television involves a different relation to liminality: to the threshold that first constitutes the private and public through their reciprocal relations. In police and medical dramas, the gesture is always the same: violation. And the most important [ READ MORE ]
Achieving the feeling of having already read something is indispensable for reading it well. This sounds more paradoxical than it is. The first time you read a text, there is an anxiety that arises from not knowing its parameters, not knowing, in short, how much it will require of you. Every text could be the [ READ MORE ]
On the absurd imperative to be untrue (the demand for difference, or toward a truly historical scholarship): Be untrue! 1. To be untrue to this imperative is to be true to it. In the first intuition, this is correct (since to be true is to be untrue to the imperative); on the second intuition it [ READ MORE ]
