Archive for the ‘ Uncategorized ’ Category
The novelization, dramatization, and serialization of the serial killer is perhaps the last expression of a genuinely epic form. The serial killer, as it were, is an epic hero without an epic world, and without the least trace of a world-renewing idealism. His gestures are artistic and creative, and stand precisely opposed to the interpretive [ READ MORE ]
There is no history of history; that is an illusion and a pernicious one. Any historiography that represents itself as a history of history or a representation of all histories that have been constructed or all types of history has failed to understand history’s basic gesture, to recast everything in a different shape, with different [ READ MORE ]
The latest video on YouTube to have gone viral: Jewel, her appearance obscured, singing her own songs at a Karaoke bar. The celebrity, defeated by reality television, has no choice left, if she is to preserve her aura, than pass back through the veil of obscurity. She must be born again from the everyday. One [ READ MORE ]
This peculiar and so popular act, the act of _taking_ a photo as one says in English, rips a piece out of the world and makes it into a thing. Without fail, there is one thing, most often at or near the center, in a photograph. Even those photographs destined to remain undeveloped or stay [ READ MORE ]
Eternity used to fall upon the work like a shooting star: this was so for Homer, but Virgil made eternity his work. Then Ovid, in his teasing, bitter melancholy, fixed the star of eternity back in its place, and made the work the place of its birth. Can this dialectical thread guide us through the [ READ MORE ]
I remember certain devices from my childhood, already relics then and even more so now, which exerted a sinister if oblique charm that removed them far from the spheres of ordinary life. You put your hand somewhere, a touch was necessary: and it gave you a reading — a message on an index card, typed [ READ MORE ]
Doctors, Socrates explains, speaks differently to slaves and the free-born. To the latter they only prescribe and command; only with the former is it necessary to explain the cause of disease and the nature of the cure, and to persuade them of the need for the given remedy. This distinction is critical: it has everything [ READ MORE ]
There are no facts, only interpretations. True. But one could just as easily say: there are no interpretations, only facts. The boundary between facts and interpretations is fluid, though not imprecise, and the difference can only be conceived in relation to time. An interpretation is a fact in the process of becoming; a fact an [ READ MORE ]
Interpretation is not for them. They are gone: it is for us, through them. Insofar as we may be them, or made out of them, they are not gone, and the situation grows exponentially more imbricated. Why, if we believe this, do we ask for precision in scholarship? When we read a text it already [ READ MORE ]
The structure of the celebrity-fetish is simple enough: the virtues of the celebrity are social virtues, qualities that only exist in the medium of social interactions, yet they can only be represented as the special qualities of the exceptional, celebrated individual. But what are these social virtues? Here things become tricky, and the limits of [ READ MORE ]
There are two regimes in the university, and they are constantly at war. One is a remnant of the medieval system, in which there always had to be a full complement of apprentices and masters moving through to guarantee the stability and longevity of the institution. What is meant by institution is always the physical [ READ MORE ]
involves first and foremost a thought of history, with the caveat that what comes “first and foremost” in a truly historical thinking in fact comes last. Let us avoid mentioning the obvious and unavoidable convection of these concepts and processes. Task: to place this cataract at the center of what we call “thought” and to [ READ MORE ]
There are certain struggles which, frivolous and insignificant, and hence so easily forgotten, nevertheless contain the greatest social, historico-political, even metaphysical weight. Consider the battle between teenagers (and, above all, teenage girls) and their parents over the household telephone. (That this was, above all, a staple of domestic comedy does not speak again its significance). [ READ MORE ]
For many nights, I have dreamed only this: I am walking back home, in the deep hours of the night. I pass briskly through the sidewalks and down through deep underpasses. Shadowy figures, with fierce dogs, congregate on the corners. I bend my path against the storefront to keep from being caught by their bite. [ READ MORE ]
Television dramas do not spin-off. Rather they become franchises, either (as in CSI or Law and Order) demonstrating the inescapable universality of crime and justice, or — as in Beverly Hill 90210 and Melrose Place — revealing, in properly tragic fashion, the intensification of the vices that plague the privileged. Only the sit-com spins off. [ READ MORE ]
To be the root of similarity among persons, personality must follow a rule. Let us try to imagine it. More than likely, it would take something like this form: all true imitations, becoming like someone or something else, draw their power from the inimitable. This can best be explained by showing the other extreme, that [ READ MORE ]
Once personality is stolen from the grip of metaphysics, that is, from psychologists, and defined as imitation of imitation, or imitability, as a new relation between personae and their masks, a new relation between persons can be glimpsed. The intellectual world begins to appear as a traveling theater troupe, and one wonders often when someone [ READ MORE ]
The most powerful fantasies of the sitcom are directed against the capitalist mode of production, which they seek either to dismantle through humor or dissolve into irrelevance. Hence the two poles of the sitcom, following a typology that, as Benjamin argued, became sedimented in the 19th century: the work-sitcom and the home-sitcom. Most are hybrids, [ READ MORE ]
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 [ READ MORE ]
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, [ READ MORE ]
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 [ READ MORE ]
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, voluptuous [ READ MORE ]
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. [ READ MORE ]
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 a [ READ MORE ]
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, and least of all by innate grammar—language became speakable [ READ MORE ]
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, [ READ MORE ]
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 [ READ MORE ]
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 [ READ MORE ]
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 [ READ MORE ]
“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 [ READ MORE ]
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 [ READ MORE ]
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, [ READ MORE ]
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 ]
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 ]
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 ]
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 ]
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 [ READ MORE ]
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” — you turned myself back to myself, which [ READ MORE ]
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 [ READ MORE ]
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 [ READ MORE ]
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 [ READ MORE ]
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 [ READ MORE ]
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 [ READ MORE ]
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 [ READ MORE ]
