Many will remember the story of Walter Benjamin’s chiasmatic crossing of the politicization of art with the aestheticization of politics. He wanted to recover a time when news of the world didn’t come to us already shot through with explanation. The notion of an impoverished narrative tradition beyond journalism persists in non-marginalized cultures, the implication […]

But for German philosopher Martin Heidegger’s self-induced undoing, his writings about caring as a pre-requisite to knowing the truth of things would seem to be the right remedy to a hardened state that makes villains of what it does not know.Daniel O’Hara is among those for whom Heidegger can’t be wholly redeemed. Citing Jacques Derrida’s […]

Like Lucy with the football, the dream of a return to sincerity in the cultural mediascape can only ever be a send up of earnestness, reason being “that ship has sailed,” as the saying goes. The cold fact of this might dampen our enjoyment of gimmicky shows selling the end of irony, unless you’re in […]