The essential difference between structuring contradictions in thought and structuring repression lies in the immateriality of the former as distinct from the irretrievability of the latter to consciousness, or so it is said. People who try to persuade you the second thing ‘never happened’ are either confused or guilty of gaslighting, whereas to claim this […]
Lately, mainstream media outlets have opted to cut to the chase in their cueing the fear of loss of meaningful distinctions necessary to the binding of communities with the more concisely phrased “fear of godless disorder.” Yet, is this latest appropriation of the moral relativism argument more than what it appears to be, i.e., an […]
It’s true I’ve been reduced lately to doing Google searches out of sheer exasperation – “what’s the deal with proportions?” or, “homologues, what’s the deal?” It’s a handy feature and a workable starting point if you ever want to figure stuff out without Malcolm Gladwell giving you all the answers.Speaking of Malcolm Gladwell, his David […]
The main point of contention about science doesn’t come from an anti-science stance. People who make it their business to refute that long discredited position are doing little more than shooting from the hip. Rather it’s to correct against a misplaced complacency and false sense of security that still linger today from discredited or outmoded […]
Representations of uniformity or the illusion of total agreement must have their own ends, yet the illusion of infinitude where there is only the finite presents a far-reaching representational problem.In a journal article, “Measuring the Shape of the Universe,” Neil Cornish and Jeffrey Weeks described this problem and the difficulty in finding a solution:In a […]
In an article that appeared in The Paris Review, “The Most Misread Poem in America,” David Orr wrote of the Robert Frost poem, “The Road Not Taken,” – “almost everyone gets it wrong”:It isn’t a wolf in sheep’s clothing so much as a wolf that is somehow also a sheep, or a sheep that is […]
Someone sold a set of lectures by physicist Max Born to Strand Bookstore in New York City. Physics and Politics is a thin volume bound in hardcover cloth with the jacket missing; not considered rare or anything like that. I found it on one of the sidewalk carts and bought it for two dollars.Some of […]
Byung-Chul Han remarks on a lack of “bearing” – defined as a measured stance, reserve and posture – as what sets apart digitally-mediated protestations from formations mounted by a “we who are displaying concern for a society as a whole” (In the Swarm, MIT Press 2017, 7).Han calls “scandal society” the phenomenon particular to social […]
In the contest of who is more principled, more just, it’s as though the outcome really does determine or confirm, rather than serve as the alibi for, rights and entitlements won by brute force.Yet it’s difficult to say whether ‘brute-ness’ of this kind is to be identified as belonging to the ‘brute’ cognitive processes Jason […]
Having come across a fragment of Proust’s posthumously published essay collection prior to reading Peter Szondi’s treatment of Proust (1978), it doesn’t strike me as the case that Proust’s motive was to “escape from the sway of time itself,” as Szondi maintained (“Hope in the Past: On Walter Benjamin,” from On Textual Understanding and Other […]