Posts Tagged ‘philosophy’

A passage from Walter Benjamin, though from a different time, could just as well be said today of those who snicker at the ‘obscenity’ of social media.
“(In Moscow I lived in a hotel in which almost all the rooms were occupied by Tibetan lamas who had come to Moscow for a congress of Buddhist churches. [...]

Void Manufacturing has posted a translation, by Patrice Riemens, of an interview with Paul Virilio, where he discusses the ongoing financial collapse. He begins by applying his well-known theory of accidents to the current crisis:
“With Tchernobyl, we have entered the era of global accidents, whose consequences are in the realm of the long term. The [...]

Reviewing Roberto Esposito’s Bios, Steven Shaviro of The Pinocchio Theory gives an excellent two-fold argument for how biopolitics scholarship generally fails to adequately reflect on global shifts in medical and economic practices since Foucault first put forth the theory in the late 70s/early 80s.
It is telling that Esposito says nothing whatsoever about the ways in [...]

The “Introduction” to Edward Skidelsky’s recently published Ernst Cassirer: The Last Philosopher of Culture paints a sad, timely portrait of that now familiar, ominous shift in German thought, circa 1929. Needless to say, the image of a powdered Levinas mocking pacifism and the virtues of civic engagement can’t help but strike a foreboding note.
On April [...]

In the chapter “Mobilizing the Consumer: Assembling the Subject of Consumption”, from their recent book Governing the Present: Administering Economic, Social and Personal Life, Peter Miller and Nikolas Rose give a fine summary of the state of consumer/consumption theory.
It begins, appropriately, with a sketch of the profound ambivalence that has marked consumer studies since the [...]

Though their reading seems a little forced, Fred Newman and Lois Holzman of the East Side Institute are finding Marx (specifically, The German Ideology) useful for developing a “revolutionary” performance social therapeutics:
“Our own work can be described as an effort to make therapeutics a way of life. We also describe our work as building community [...]

Towards the end of his epic history of the concept of “milieu”, Leo Spitzer briefly goes over the origin of the closely-related English word, “environment” – which was coined, it turns out, by Thomas Carlyle in an article on Goethe, published in Miscellanies (1827).
And “what is particularly interesting is the fact that the lines in [...]

In the 90s, when multiculturalism had the Right on the ropes, racism, so the story goes, was forced to move between-the-lines (of populist conservative discourse). As Žižek observes in The Universal Exception:
“In the election campaigns of Jesse Helms, the racist and sexist message is not publicly acknowledged — at the public level, it is sometimes [...]

The problem with this “experiment” is that the second question put to the executive - ‘This business plan will maximize profits but help the environment’ - does not correspond to the first question (’This business plan will maximize profits but harm the environment’). It’s a false, forced analogy - with predictable results.
There’s a good reason [...]