Archive for the ‘ death ’ Category
Evolution and computing can be described as counter-poles in contemporary American culture, as though that which transforms very fast required, to maintain some cosmic balance, a partner that changed correspondingly slowly. This is not just a felicitous figure: there are deeper grounds. Homo faber, in realizing the power to shape the experience of fellow producers [ 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 ]
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 ]
Whoever next writes a dictionary of critical theory should remember to worry a little in print about distance, and how it is used. Marcel Gauchet writes convincingly about it. Religion is, for Gauchet, that which places its founding moment far away, so that no one will realize it was originally a decision and get the [ READ MORE ]
