In recent years, Peter Sloterdijk has become one of Germany's most influential thinkers. His diverse body of work includes a Heideggerian project to think…
Alasdair MacIntyre’s Philosophy in Practice
It is a curious thing when an artist, thinker, or writer gains influence outside the audience he intends or is comfortable with. When a thinker associated with the right becomes popular on the left, or a novelist associated with the progressive left becomes popular among conservative readers, there can be a sort of strain felt between the audience in fact and the “true” audience, or between those who feel themselves to be the authentic recipients of a work’s message and meaning and those who, to the true believers, come across as opportunistic in their enjoyment of works in tension with their own views. The same is true when a writer working within an academic discipline gets picked up by those outside it: Those working within that discipline may find the co-opting of these thinkers misplaced at best or malicious at worst.
Jan Švankmajer
Jan Švankmajer is a Czech retired film director, animator, writer, playwright and artist. He draws and makes free graphics, collage, ceramics, tactile objects and assemblages. In the early 1960s, he explored informel, which later became an important part of the visual form of his animated films. He is a leading representative of late Czech surrealism. In his film work, he created an unmistakable and quite specific style, determined primarily by a compulsively unorthodox combination of externally disparate elements. The anti-artistic nature of this process, based on collage or assemblage, functions as a meaning-making factor. The author himself claims that the intersubjective communication between him and the viewer works only through evoked associations, and his films fulfil their subversive mission only when, even in the most fantastic moments, they look like a record of reality. Some of the works he created together with his wife Eva Švankmajerová.
poetic web: unfolding spiral
'poetic web: unfolding spiral' is a non-linear text I wrote as part of my bachelor thesis at the HFBK Hamburg. Driven by curiosity about the poetic web, the object of the text rather became the opening of a reflective space, where I could touch on the constraints and possibilities of language, words, worlds, and their artifacts, relation and meaning-making, smoothness, attention, and agency, and see how subtle shifts in understanding allowed for words to restructure and new meanings to grow.
Paul Feyerabend
Paul Feyerabend (b.1924, d.1994), having studied science at theUniversity of Vienna, moved into philosophy for his doctoral thesis,made a name for himself both as an expositor and (later) as a critic ofKarl Popper's “critical rationalism”, and went on to becomeone of the twentieth century's most famous philosophers of science. Animaginative maverick, he became a critic of philosophy of scienceitself, particularly of “rationalist” attempts to lay downor discover rules of scientific method.
The Standpoint of Heimatlosigskeit and the Planet
Since the launch of Sputnik in 1957, it has become impossible to comprehend the world solely through the lens of Hegel’s Berlin or Kojève’s Paris—even as nation-states continue to wrestle with their growing obsolescence. The planetary condition of human existence has also intensified a form of nihilism rooted in modernity: geographically through globalization, and cosmically through thermodynamics. If, in the twentieth century, reactionary politics sought to “overcome modernity” by returning to a notion of homeland (Heimat), the twenty-first century calls for a renewed framework—one that begins, perhaps, from the standpoint of Heimatlosigkeit.
The Standpoint of Heimatlosigskeit and the Planet
Since the launch of Sputnik in 1957, it has become impossible to comprehend the world solely through the lens of Hegel’s Berlin or Kojève’s Paris—even as nation-states continue to wrestle with their growing obsolescence. The planetary condition of human existence has also intensified a form of nihilism rooted in modernity: geographically through globalization, and cosmically through thermodynamics. If, in the twentieth century, reactionary politics sought to “overcome modernity” by returning to a notion of homeland (Heimat), the twenty-first century calls for a renewed framework—one that begins, perhaps, from the standpoint of Heimatlosigkeit.
The Shapeshifter’s Little Brother
On Mark Zuckerberg’s AI manifesto—aka nine blog posts in a trenchcoat.
The Skeleton Library
On Interpolatable Archives, Part 1: Compulsions to Connect, Warburg, Borges and Goldsmith, Cultural Technologies and Digital Oralities
Manuscript — an imagined editor for research writing
A walk through an imagined product for academic writing, mocked up by Claude Design.
Letter on Humanism
"Letter on Humanism" (German: Über den Humanismus)[1] refers to a famous letter written by Martin Heidegger in December 1946 in response to a series of questions by Jean Beaufret (10 November 1946) about the development of French existentialism.[2] Heidegger reworked the letter for publication in 1947. He distanced himself from Sartre's position and existentialism in general in this letter.[3]
About - personal canon
finding meaning in life through literature, art, design, and culture ✦✧ through weekly posts and enthusiastic conversations. Click to read personal canon, by Celine Nguyen, a Substack publication with tens of thousands of subscribers.
The Imperfectionist: Navigating by aliveness
I’m amazed and very pleased to say that the UK paperback of Meditations for Mortals entered the Sunday Times bestsellers at number 9 this week, after being selected as a Waterst...
The Colonization of Confidence., Sightless Scribbles
A fabulously gay blind author.