Doll Power
Where do thoughts of death lead?
Barbie is forever denied the awkward self-consciousness that makes possible both ambition and disappointment. ...
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A New Perspective on Richard Rorty’s Philosophy
A series of lectures belatedly published in English sheds new light on the mind of a moralist
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Richard Rorty, the American philosopher and public intellectual who died in 2007, is perhaps best known as “the philosopher who predicted Donald Trump.” In Achieving Our Country, a book articulating his reflections on the possibilities and prospects for democracy in the United States, Rorty worried that economic inequality, coupled with ...
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On the Uses and Disadvantages of Historical Comparisons for Life
(Vom Nutzen und Nachteil historischer Vergleiche für das Leben)
In the ghetto there was only black and white. Seventy years later, Krystyna remembered looking down from the bridge and seeing brightly-colored flowers at a market on the Aryan Side. She remembered, too, the day that she and her mother escaped from the ghetto, and her stepfather’s aunt on the ...
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The Rebirth of Tragedy
We are all existentialists now, knowing only that we must try to carry on
Today we find ourselves in the midst of another great
calamity. Once again we are compelled to ask whether our rational faculties are
capable of coping with a virus about which we know far too little. The measures
we think we need to take to keep untold numbers from dying are themselves so
painful ...
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Poetry’s Intrinsic Ontology of Change
Plasticity, Translation and the Work of Catherine Malabou
The fragmentation of deconstruction can feel liberating, a rush of loosed energy. But it can also feel untethered, endless; panic inducing. While it allows for each of us and our writing to be multiple, it also prevents us from ever feeling grounded. Plasticity as a driving method in translation allows ...
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Why Nietzsche is Not Responsible for Donald Trump
The Post-Truth Perspective
This is a true story.
The acclaimed TV series Fargo starts off exactly in the same way as the movie of the same name in 1996. Just as the cult film by the Coen brothers, the TV drama whose first season was aired in 2014 displays the warning “This is a true story.” ...
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The Resuscitation of Truth
A Pragmatic Defense of Political Integrity
Time magazine recently re-purposed a cover-graphic and feature article from 1966, changing the title-question from “Is God Dead?” to “Is Truth Dead?” The central figure in this feature was, as you might expect, the current president of the United States.
Donald Trump’s fondness for the lie, whether big or small, has ...
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Trump’s Call to Order
The Politics of Resentment
Throughout the twentieth-century other thinkers drew on Popper’s intuition to stress a common opposition to the universalistic aspirations of modernity: fundamental political, moral, and cultural concepts functioned to denigrate and marginalize others who didn’t measure up to its criteria of rationality. This aspirational rationality was responsible not only for twentieth-century ...
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Trump’s Gothic Populism
Comparing Trump’s Inauguration Speech to Obama’s
Unsurprisingly, Trump hit all the main notes of contemporary radical populism: the Manichean, moralistic distinction between the pure people and the corrupt elite; the anti-pluralist idealization of a common, unified people; and the commitment to a populist leader who directly incarnates the general will: Trump expresses himself as the pure, ...
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The Banality of Woody
Reviewing Irrational Man (2015) and Cafe Society (2016)
Irrational Man, a film by Woody Allen (2015)
Café Society, a film by Woody Allen (2016)
(Caution: mild spoiler alerts)
“You’re a comedian. You want to do mankind a real service? Tell funnier jokes”, says the space alien in Woody Allen’s Stardust Memories (1980), which still, despite its ambitions, falls into the category ...
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