Archive for November, 2009
The traditional role of the game, once deprived of a pedagogic, let alone sacral, function, has been to waste time. Having to gamble is the fate imposed on those who do not labor: when all time is measured as labor time, then true leisure (rather than the recreation time of the laborer) is possible only [ READ MORE ]
It is the serial killer’s responsibility to exceed in beauty every attempt by the cops or the psychologists to apprehend him, and it is always a him. He is an aesthete who, whether his victims are skinned, decapitated, defenestrated, dismembered, skewered, raped, or stewed, always admires them for their appearance, with an utterly uncultured, almost [ READ MORE ]
The critique of the critique of critique, like the old man in the sphynx’s riddle, is left, in the end, with only one leg on which to stand. Still kritizierbar is this alone — the myth of a heroic beginnings, of grand gestures, of new vistas, new worlds of thought, that might appear (ah… Baltimore… [ READ MORE ]
Agamben wrote of the doctor who, terminally ill with leukemia, turns his body into a laboratory. This marks a certain extreme point in the production of the biopolitical body. But what are we to make of the plastic surgeons who operates on the mere surface of bodies, and even their own — or, rather, who [ READ MORE ]
One is reminded of a fraudulent magician who uses the magic box of language to smuggle in contraband arguments. It would be so much more honest to dazzle, or whisk away&#[ READ MORE ]
The essence of popular culture is wit: that startling conjunction of things that do not seem to belong together. The dialectic of popular culture would be a dialectics to the second power: the reason of the phenomenal is not its hidden reason, but its manifest unreason. There is no moment of dissolution inherent to the structures [ READ MORE ]
