Πολιτεία (Politeia) The Greek word translates into English as Republic. It is the title of Plato’s well known work, The Republic. The Greek word comes from the term polis, a description of a commercial, administrative community such as Athens in her heyday, a city-state. A polis is more sharply defined is the administrative and…
My reading in Julia Kristeva’s This Incredible Need To Believe continues. Here are some quotations from the book that are particularly arresting this morning. What is art? …adventures of immanence. Infinite intellectual love (literature, art, etc.) when they are carried out and received not as “objects of consummation” but as the very being of…
In fact, we are the orphans of a reality that came too late and which is only, like truth, an “official report” in “delayed time.” Excerpt, Radical Thought by Jean Baudrillard Yesterday, while driving, listening to an interview on NPR, I heard this story. In Kane County where I presently live, the county government has…
…it is the world that must proceed to its own analysis. It is the world, not reality, that must be revealed not as a truth, but as an illusion. We must trap reality, we must go faster than reality. The idea too must go faster than its own shadow. But if the idea goes…
The requirement of this thought is double and contradictory. It does not consist in analyzing the world to extract from it an improbable truth. It does not adapt itself dialectically to the facts and abstract from them some logical construction. It is much more subtle than that, and more perverse as well. This thought…
In contrast to the discourse of reality and rationality, which bets on the fact that there is something (some meaning) rather than nothing, and which, in the last analysis, wants to be built on the preservative notion of an objective and decipherable world, radical thought bets on the illusion of the world. This thought…
Our discussion topic last night was a question with three words: “What is life?“ Thoughts have come to mind about this intriguing question that I wish to express. In the course of wrestling with the topic last night one of our members referenced the famous lines of Shakespeare from Macbeth, Act V, Scene V,…
Tuesday, and I plan to have lunch with a friend. Later in the day, I hope to meet another friend for coffee at Starbucks. Can I imagine a more agreeable day? It gets better. In the evening, I will join a group of old friends via Zoom to discuss the topic, “What Is Life?” …
Five minutes of bliss. A friend suggested including Lou Reed’s Sweet Jane for one of my posts. Here it is. So what is the message? I think there are many messages. What does the melody, the back-beat signifying the pulse of the universe, and the lyrics, showing the ebb and flow of life “as…
Wait, hasn’t that title already been taken? Who could forget that Jean Paul Sartre wrote the existentialist play Huis clos in 1944? I understand the technical meaning of the term is that of a conversation behind closed doors, a private conversation. Are there not things that one does not say out loud in public,…
