The crisis of ’29, which was a real catastrophe, cannot happen again today. It has been supplanted by a perpetual simulation of crisis. Unlike a society’s heroic or intrinsic values, the simulated, synthetic values (see Reagan) that have taken their place no longer threaten to collapse. Their own weight no long threatens to result…
Orwell had it easy when fixing 1984 as the crucial point. What we are condemned to may be, after time itself has unfolded, the disappearance of time in the instantaneousness of action. That is the price of change. In the exaltation of uninterrupted circulation and incessant up-to-dateness, societies lose the thread of their development….
Look at the two great events: [the advent of] nuclear power and revolution. It is utterly pointless to hope for the one or to fear the other since both have already occurred. Everything has been liberated, changed, undermined; what more do you want? It is useless to hope: things are there; born or stillborn,…
We are no longer in a state of growth;we are in a state of excess.We are living in a society of excrescence,meaning that which incessantly develops without being measurableagainst its own objectives.…growing out of control at cross purposes with itself…This process can be compared best with cancerous metastases – *** As long as…
The truly beautiful cannot be touched. It demands distance. Faced with the sublime, we stand back in awe. When praying we fold our hands. The sense of touch destroys distance. It knows no astonishment. It demystifies, de-auratizes and renders profane what is touched. The touchscreen sublates the negativity of the other, of the unavailable….
Communicationwith a smartphone is disembodiedand without a gaze.Community has a bodily dimension.Because of its lack of corporeality,digital communication weakens community.The gaze stabilizes community.Digitization makes the other as gaze disappear. The absence of the gaze is partly responsiblefor the loss of empathy in the digital age.When a parent stares at a smartphone, the infant is…
In the age of non-things,there is something almost utopianabout the notion of possession.Possession is characterized byan intimacy and inwardness.For a thing to be a possession, I must havean intense relationship with it.You do not possess an electronic gadget.Because we no longer possess them, consumer goodsquickly end up on the rubbish heap.Possession is something internalized…
Mid September and Fall is approaching. I anticipate a last visit to the drag strip for the Saturday coming up. Drag racing is a quintessential male, warm weather sport. Race cars constructed to achieve maximum acceleration are an icon of a passing era. I confess my love of the adrenaline stimulating sight and sound…
More from Friedrich Nietzsche… To live alone one must be an animal or a god, says Aristotle. But you can be both –a philosopher. Twilight of the Idols, “Epigrams and Maxims,” Section 3 Philosophy offers an asylum to a man into which no tyranny can force its way, the inward cave, the labyrinth of…
The laws of numbers assume there are identical things, but in fact, nothing is identical with anything else. -Human, All Too Human, “Of First and Last Things,” Section 19 Mathematics would certainly not have come into existence if one had known from the beginning that there was in nature no such thing as a…
