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 […]
The working class hero in arts and letters continues to capture the modern imagination, whatever your political bent. It’s rarer to see in the logical sciences, where pure a priori judgements are prized, those that insist on a kind of hands-off knowledge independent of experience.The writings of J. B. S. Haldane seem to be an […]
To find oneself in possession of a restored vitality is not the same as what it means to be accorded more or less mortality, but could be what aids it. It’s an improbable formulation that might help to explain an otherwise odd concern brought to my awareness in a book review by Norwegian author Karl […]
People who are not embarrassed to admit having read and enjoyed Thomas Mann’s The Magic Mountain probably aren’t squeamish either about swimming in public pools. Regrettably, I can’t lay claim to either set. Nonetheless, if you think about it long enough (which could be my problem), the literary example of Hans Castorp can be swapped […]
The memory of a founding event is said to be called up periodically in the interest of preserving historical continuity. A skeptic would add it’s in order to re-instantiate previous authority. Both are wrong, or at least don’t give the full story, for two reasons. First, continuity doesn’t work that way. There is not an […]
Modern Bengali language poet Jibanananda Das’s short poem, “The Hunt” has been described as bitterly ironic yet appropriate to utter in especially benighted times (Radice 2003):“…To warm their bodies through the cold night, up-country menials kept a fire goingIn the field – red fire like a cockscomb blossom,Still burning, contorting dry asvattha leaves.Its color in […]
In a 2010 article by Aaron Kunin, an entertaining connection is brought into view between art – “(d)ecoration in the sense of the elaboration of abstract surface patterns ‘for the pleasure of art, without seeking to convey any truth with it’” – and cruelty (“Decoration, Modernism, Cruelty,” Johns Hopkins UP).I’m not talking about the already […]
Among the prevailing arguments today against factory farming is the refutation that the dominion passage from the Book of Genesis authorizes this practice. The argument essentially rejects the extension of the dominion doctrine to cover this widespread practice even though it was made to serve at one time (and for many continues to serve) as […]
Under the gaze of a closely policed semantic horizon, what unfolds are not playful accidents productive of ‘semantic mirage’ but a mirage of play whose badly acted mirth is discomfiting to the onlooker for the deadly seriousness with which it defends its interests. Yet, while it can’t be said definitively that something understood falsely, i.e., […]
Radical enlightenment philosophy animates the subversive character of Disney’s indestructible classic Alice in Wonderland (Israel, Spinoza), radical in the singular use of redness to demonstrate the concept self-conscious unity of apperception (Pippen, Kant), subversive in pointing to its own performance of artifice (painting the roses), which simultaneously instructs and critiques the use of technology as […]