Archive for the ‘ violence ’ 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 ]
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 ]
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 ]
