Archive for the 'Uncategorized' Category

The enthusiast is carried away by an unrealizabe ideal; the fanatic by that which is most real, and yet does not yet seem real, since it remains a fragment — unintegrated into the world as the seamless context of meaning.
The extreme intention of the enthusiast is political and utopian: he seeks to realize the ideal [...]


the iv drip

04Mar10

There are three rites of initiation. You are given a wrist band with a number. You change into the patient’s uniform, a shirt and pants of crude, loose-fitting fabric. And finally, the most intimate rite: the needle is pressed into a vein. This has its own little ceremony. The nurse, looking carefully at my arm, [...]


figure skating

26Feb10

The summer Olympics always seemed like a travesty of classicism. But the winter Olympics (thanks to Yu-na, and Benjamin, I see this now)  is something else: the nightmare, and dreams, of modernity; a fragment of the future. In the summer sports, the energy comes from within the body alone. With no gliding, no slick surfaces [...]


Yu-na came to me in a dream, and I awaken with a strange feeling of unrest. I know this will stay with me for many years. When I was younger this was the unrest of sexual awakening, but now sexual pleasure seems nothing but a veil thrown disingenously over a much more intoxicating, unsettling, [...]


the mall rat

18Feb10

The shopping mall has a special relation to time. Even if the individual retail spaces change hands countless times, and are constantly refurnished and updated, they cannot escape the obsolescence of the whole.  From the start, they become marked by the ruination peculiar to the suburbs: nothing will break off or fall apart, nothing will turn derelict and dilapidated, everything  will remain in working order. No dust will accumulate. [...]


The secret of our present-day existence is contained in this odd expression, which in a few decades has lost all of its mystique, its shock-value, its rapture. How is it that this commodity, which has long since become so completely everyday, has not yet shed an adjective that, for every other commodity produced within [...]


What if every conversation added a chapter to the descriptive grammar of the language. What if instead of deep or high structure, each utterance provided a model of structure for the next, so that only by listening and responding, imitating and distorting–not by learning or habit–language became speakable and hearable. “I hear you” would then [...]


30 rock

09Jan10

The utopia of high school is the musical; of adult life (marriage, work), humor.
The essence of the high school musical is transformation constrained within a logic of the typical. (Sandy in Grease is exemplary in this regard)
College, like philosophy, is its own utopia: hence only the cinematic representation of college life is possible, whereas on [...]


There is something slightly paradoxical about the gentle warmth that radiates out from electronic devices.  Electronics is supposed to be cool: The heat — a byproduct of other operations, a sign of an irreducible inefficiency — betrays this coolness.
Can a semiconductor be a superconductor? This is a question for physicists. But this much, at least, [...]


growing up

18Dec09

The problem of living, and of growing up, always comes down to this: how can we remain true to our youth. Or rather: how can youth remain true to itself.
With each new generation the problem assumes a new form, and sometimes history involves tectonic shifts of a greater order. Every past answer is a preemptive strike [...]


According to the Weekly World News, Dr. Hugo Childs, the Swiss anthropologist said, “There must be 200 bodies buried there and not a single one of them is human.”
What is so curious here is the idea  of the body that is not human.  The ET is characterized by just this peculiarity: unlike animals, it leaves [...]


“She guards the treasures of daily life, but also of the night, the highest good. This is why the prostitute is a listener. She rescues the conversation from triviality; greatness has no claim upon her, for greatness comes to an end when confronted by her. She has seen every man’s desire fail and now the [...]


The internet grants an unusual  insight into abstract pleasures: pleasures that are neither physical and sensual, spiritual, or even intellectual — that are not related to the experience of a given faculty of the mind or the body; that have neither the duration of sensation or contemplation, and yet also have no relation to the [...]


The Gilmour Girls is the Hesiod of modern television.  It is all about genealogy: the generations have proliferated with a wonton, incestuous power. The present moment barely exists in itself, but is inscribed into the history of birth: a novelty that has already been written over by what it has become. New children are born, [...]


pinball

26Nov09

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 [...]


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… [...]


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…


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 [...]


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 [...]


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 [...]


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, [...]


house

06Oct09

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 violations [...]


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 [...]


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 is the [...]


fugue III

24Sep09

Granted that violence follows upon flight, that violence is a flight from flight: this only suggests the absolute, dire necessity of a critique of flight — of thinking a prospect of flight that does not simply reproduce violence, that does not produce violence as the flight from flight. We may even concede that no actual [...]


On Staying Put

23Sep09

Traditionally, a metaphysics of morals manifested itself in the concept of flight, if not in every actual flight. Flight was flight from God and flight from the self — fugere se ipsum, whose remedy for Augustine was carried out in his confession: “retorquebas me ad me ipsum” — I turned myself back to myself, which [...]


Just as the critique of violence seeks to articulate the interior structure of violence, ultimately seeking to think violence (which has always been understood by reason in the only way reason can understand things: as the relation of means to end) in terms of the relation, no longer thinkable by reason, between a pure, non-violent [...]


At least one addendum to the critique of violence is necessary: a critique of fleeing. For it would be a mistake to think that history (or evolution) has only to do with modalities of violence (law-creating, law-preserving, and law-destroying), or, for that matter, with law. It is only from the perspective of law-creating violence that [...]


The most difficult thing is to find the point at which the impossibility of individual and historical existence converge.  Very few have found this. Most have retreated to a terrain where thinking is still easy, or at least possible.  But it is with this double impossibility — the impossible thinking of the impossibility of existence [...]


experiences

12Sep09

The idea is not the ground or measure of experience, but its illumination. There is, however, no simple correspondence between experience and the illumination of experience.  The illumination of experience is a decision that at once belongs to experience, and transcends it.   Every experience awaits illumination, and yet what it awaits is not absent, but [...]


Part of the charm of music  is its “occasionality”: a song, composition, style, or artist can show up in our lives anonymously.  We can hear it many times over without knowing what it is.  And thus, at the same time, we can enjoy the names of groups and composers without the slightest idea of “what [...]


When you give an infant a pacifier for the first time, it seems like a miracle. Suddenly there is nothing to worry about, for parent or child. The mystery of its cries, the ineptitude of the parent, the existential terror of mortality reflected in natality, the political terror of an as yet totally undominated life–all [...]


If the psychic has suddenly become such an important television personality, it is not only because of the rise of a vague “new age” spirituality.  Nor is it that the psychic is essentially, radically telegenic: that the psychic’s vision is nothing but a form of tele-vision, and thus coincides perfectly with the medium that would [...]


The reality show is the Fordism of Post-Fordism: the attempt to impose the factory model of production, with its gestures of surveillance and control brought to a perverse refinement (the contestants are given only alcohol and no food, and are deprived of sleep for the sake of making them work badly) , on precisely those [...]


Most celebrities are relatively simple. If the location of celebrity of is the triune relationship between the divine, the heroic, and the universal, the ordinary celebrity involves a simple connection with an aspect of this relationship.  We, in turn, connect with the celebrity through this connection.  The celebrity type involves a certain conflation of an [...]


Watching an American detective show with Korean subtitles, set in the Korea town of Las Vegas, I became witness to a most remarkable sleight of hand: the name 박 (Pak), anglicized into “Park,” became “바크” (pak’ŭ).  A slight difference shatters the propriety of the proper name: a most remarkable property theft.   Having passed through [...]


songdo

06Jul09

The city (with all that belongs to it— art, literature, culture, philosophy — these are all its appurtenances, apparatuses, excrescences) is perhaps the greatest work of humankind. But the planned city, tailor-made to the reason of the times, only reveals the stupidity of the times: the stupidity that is the innermost, inertial kernel of its [...]


I was reading J.M.G. le Clézio’s extraordinary novel, and I began to wonder whether the place named in the title was real. And so I did what people do these days. I meant to type Onitsha, but my fingers, or was it my mind, slipped: I typed Onishta instead. Only a few hits came up. [...]


“Finally, it’s time to write and think this body across the infinite distance that makes it ours, that brings it to come from a site more remote than any of our thoughts: the exposed body of the world’s population. (Whence a necessity still completely indecipherable: this body calls for popular writing, popular thinking.)” [Jean-Luc Nancy, [...]


A philosophy can be defined as a singular set of aporiai, plus the methodological question how to remove them. Literary theory can be defined as the demonstration of the moral question how to live if we do not remove them.


It is a favor bestowed on very few realms of contemporary life to have added to its name the suffix “world” — permanently and without qualification, not even demurring with a hyphen! The world-like quality of the artworld is supposed to derive more from the sense of its sphericity, its closedness, than from the usual [...]


the visionary

11Jun09

If the Virgilian gesture of constituting imperial time as remembered memory is now only possible through the uncanny synthesis of archetypal (which is to say originally productive, imaginary) memory and fantasy, it is above all because the memory had been transformed into pure imagination. The memory of memory gave way to the imagination of imagination. [...]


Lest we forget, the roman heritage of this word brings with it a republican politics of the throng, the crowd, the multitude, envisioned as as unruly, politically potentially ruinous, but always susceptible to repression by means of the brightest spectacle, caesar’s golden crown, crucifiction, or the crimson blood spattering the floor of the circus maximus. [...]


Conversation, you might say, is a rattling of the chains of communication. Restrictions on what can be communicated become audible in the silences, such that the incommunicable converts into communicables. Exchanges that can be called conversations do this. It is less that they manifest discrepancies and misunderstandings between even the most familiar of interlocutors than [...]


The public venture was a flop. No one submitted. In an act of desperation,  digging up ghosts from the past, we even submitted, ourselves. This still could not save us.  But enough. We leave the public arena, which we never entered, with our dignity intact.  Back to solitude… or duality.  
If you feel that an injury [...]


– I recall being present at a conversation between two men who were very different from one another. One would say in simple and profound sentences some truth he had taken to heart; the other would listen in silence, then when reflection had done its work he would in turn express some proposition, sometimes in [...]


There once was a girl who skipped too many steps. Her friends couldn’t play hopscotch with her anymore.


A while ago we sent out the following notice (we’re going public) calling on all to submit to anonymity. No one answered  for quite some time.  But finally one brave soul has come out of the woodwork: the young H. von Teufelstier (we give his name only because we are almost sure it is fake), who [...]


It will be necessary, above all, to understand the relation between power and language.  This is not the same as the relation between power and discourse.  The most important point is that power produces a language of power, since the operation of power and the operation of a certain kind of language formation coincide and [...]


Just a short note, inspired only by the image from the last post (the first image, which was deleted, but perhaps we should let this deletion stand — thinking needs its gaps): it is strange how a generation that grew of age with Star Wars, for whom Hitler is but a mask of Darth Vadar, has [...]