Archive for the ‘ critique ’ Category
The great mistake of the historian of ideas or the intellectual historian is not to be at the same time an historian of words. What a combination that would be! Given: these things are often at odds. Ask an historian what is meant by history in this sentence or that; this should be enough to [ READ MORE ]
Following an unwritten rule critics must take into account their position vis a vis the cultural objects they write about. Today this often means telling a story about a personal interaction with it. “When I first read Huck Fin…” “In Rome I saw Titian’s portrait of…” The first person pronoun is the minimum of reflection [ READ MORE ]
The critical dogma that says, “the shoah is unrepresentable,” immortalized in the word “holocaust”–everything burns up–produces a kind of cheap mysticism that doesn’t understand its theological origins. One intention behind this dogma is to produce an untouchable event that corresponds to the mantra “never forget.” Behind this there are several hazy moral impulses. What gets [ READ MORE ]
Flight from violence reifies violence and gives it its power for the first time, if, that is, violence is seen as the origin and object of the flight. We risk false consciousness, do we not, if we praise flight, as we do if we praise diaspora or displacement or servitude. What does it mean to [ READ MORE ]
Who believes anymore that the problem of representation requires another moment in the theoretical limelight? Or a better question: when do theoretical fashions become threadbare? I mean this in the most practical sense of the word “when.” At what moment does the makeshift construction, pieced together — holes, cracks, misfits and all — out of [ READ MORE ]
1.The magazine rack is the only place left where the entire world is laid bare before one’s eyes. 2.An order operates that is at once epistemological, ontological, sociological, political, temporal, geographic, linguistic, pornographic: here the foreign magazines are stashed away… over there serious magazines about politics… up on this rack magazines for music performers, [ READ MORE ]
What could be more enticing than a new vocabulary? After all, we are trained from the very first word, as children, students, partners, customers, citizens, that those who know better have all the words, and we have none, or else ours are the wrong ones. For this reason, opening a book of “theory” and finding [ READ MORE ]
For Friedrich Schlegel, the aim of Kritik is to actualize Kritisierbarkeit — a potential for infinite, yet immanent and immediate, reflection (indeed: a potential for potential) — that not only belongs to the artwork as a work but is of its very essence. Yet perhaps we at wozu have been remiss: though we have pompously [ READ MORE ]
