It is Sunday afternoon. I chose not to write in the morning. I started the day late. I read an essay that waited in my computer bag, while the fog of my mind slowly dissipated. Nowadays there is abundant news of tragedy and mayhem somewhere. Should the newspapers be criticized for reporting on the…
Think! The admonition, “think, god-damn it, think!” is the hardest, sharpest, heaviest, advisement that can be uttered and received. Many of us born to privilege, in the West, white and almost certainly male are relatively unconstrained by circumstances. A felt compulsion to think, that is, to consider that one’s lifestyle, the purchases, the use…
Iconic denotation is only syntagm, associates elements without any system: The discontinuous connotators are connected, actualized, ‘spoken’ through the syntagm of the denotation, the discontinuous world of symbols plunges into the story of the denoted scene, as though into a lustral bath of innocence. -excerpt, Rhetoric of the Image, by Roland…
The jukebox makes listening to music a highly enjoyable visual, acoustic and tactile experience. The listening is, however, very complicated and time-intensive. As my jukebox is not in constant use, it first has to be plugged in. It takes some time for the valves to warm up. After inserting the coins, I carefully press…
We live in a time without consecration… Hypercommunication, the noise of communication, desecrates the world, profanes it. Stillness produces nothing. Capitalism therefore dislikes stillness. Information capitalism produces the compulsion of communication. Stillness sharpens our sense for the higher order, which, however, need not be an order of rule or power. Stillness can be extremely…
Right Now By Van Halen Don’t wanna wait til tomorrow, Why put it off another day? One more walk through problems, Built up, and stand in our way ,ah One step ahead, one step behind me Now you gotta run to get even Make future plans, don’t dream about yesterday, hey C’mon turn, turn…
Dust in the Wind By Kansas I close my eyesOnly for a moment, and the moment’s goneAll my dreamsPass before my eyes, a curiosity Dust in the windAll they are is dust in the wind Same old songJust a drop of water in an endless seaAll we doCrumbles to the ground, though we refuse…
One of his [Heidegger’s] lectures on Aristotle begins thus: ‘Aristotle was born, worked, and died.’ Thinking is work. Later, Heidegger called thinking handwork: ‘Perhaps thinking, too, is just something like building a cabinet [Schrein]. At any rate, it is handwork. The hand makes thinking a decidedly analogue process. –excerpt, Non-things by Byung-chul Han, p….
Humans are intimate beings [Nahwesen]. Intimacy, however, is not the same as a lack of distance. Distance is a part of it. Nearness and distance belong together. The human being is thus simultaneously a being of nearness and a being of distance. That is why Kafka says that we can hold someone who is…
It’s called schadenfreude, a descriptive term for the satisfaction that wells up when someone else suffers misfortune. Confession: I felt schadenfreude while viewing the evening news’ depiction of the massive shoreline destruction, the result of the moon’s near orbit, of a high tide and the storm surge of hurricane Nicole’s wind lashed waves….
