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Humanities

Marking the passage from misfortune to good luck
Marking the passage from misfortune to good luck

Elisabeth Bronfen

The Elevator—A Heteropia

An even more strikingly risky moment, which for Don anticipates both a personal and a professional crisis, occurs at the open door of an elevator in the fifth season. After Megan has confessed to him that she wants to stop working at the agency so as to fully concentrate on her acting career, he accompanies her to the elevator, where he takes leave of her by demonstratively giving her a passionate kiss before the door closes. Then, as though this...
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  • architecture
  • Labor
  • everyday life
  • America
  • 1960s
Current Texts

Dieter Mersch

Digital disrupture

We really need an analysis of algorithmic conditions and their paradoxes and ambiguities that gives them an adequate framework and horizon. But instead we currently seem to be finding an algorithmic solution of the algorithmic, much as digital solutions are being offered for the problems of the digital public sphere, in the way that IT corporations, for example, use exclusively mathematical procedures to evaluate and delete “fake news,” inappropriate portrayals, or the violation of personal rights. This tends to result in a circularity that leaves the drawing of boundaries and raising of barriers solely to programming, instead of restoring them to our ethical conscience and understanding of what the social could mean today. The machine, by contrast, remains alien to any mechanical limitation—just as its inability to decide lies in the impossibility of self-calculation. The nucleus of digital culture should instead be sought where the cultural of culture is located:...

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Current Texts
From xenolinguistics to cephalo­pods

From xenolinguistics to cephalo­pods

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  • science fiction
  • linguistics
  • utopia
  • communication media
  • semiotics and semiology
  • communication

 

Topics
  • Observing the Spectator

    Observing the Spectator

    • mirror
    • observer
    • optical illusion
    • gaze
  • Wissen-Nicht-Wissen

    Wissen-Nicht-Wissen

    • idleness
    • epistemology
    • ignorance and non-knowledge
    • poetology of knowledge
    • potentiality
    • poetics
    • experiment
    • history of knowledge
    • literary studies
    • astonishment
  • Autofiction—Metafiction

    Autofiction—Metafiction

    • autofiction
    • Theory of fiction
    • memory
    • autobiography
    • fiction
  • Color and meaning

    Color and meaning

    Who is afraid of Red, Yellow, Blue…?

    • monochrome
    • color
    • image and imagery
    • chromatics / colour science
    • semiotics and semiology
Current Texts

Zoran Terzić

Everything new is a pose in the alcoves of capital

In the late nineteenth century Alfred Jarry created a prototype of the modern wannabe in his pot-bellied Père Ubu, a figure that raises entitlement to a high art. Ubu doesn’t want to be king; others urge him to it. But he is also the others. And when he does become king, CEO, or US president, he doesn’t know what it means, or if it means anything at all. He just states his claim. And so he shimmies from statement to power. And having obtained power, Ubu decerebrates the world, exposing the grounds for groundlessness, to paraphrase Ortega y Gasset. Ubu is a tautomaniac, that is, he can be explained in his own terms and is thus always in the right (being in the right is all he is). He needs no proof, but on the contrary wants “to turn the absurd into the highest power of thought” (Deleuze & Guattari)....

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Humanity is a metahuman concept.

Rolf Bossart, Milo Rau

Humanity is a metahuman concept.

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  • postmodernism
  • art theory
  • realism
  • transhumanism
  • re-enactment
  • artistic practice

 

“Aboard ship! ye philosophers!”
“Aboard ship! ye philosophers!”

Wu Yi

The Sea as Mirror

A genealogy of philosophy in the form of a geology of the diluvial, so to speak. I’ve asked: how does the ocean, as a physical presence, a dynamic relationship, and an unsettling imaginary, challenge and reinvent philosophy as it understands itself to be and defines itself against? The method I’ve hitherto practiced is one simple and well-suited to the purpose: to de-sublimate and re-sublimate the variously over-sublimated layer of sense in philosophy with one’s own being, flesh and blood, and...
  • the sea
  • history of philosophy
  • literary studies
Current Texts

Jean-Luc Nancy

غریبه‌ها غریبه‌ها

Etrange (غریب) در زبان فرانسوی از ریشه لاتین extraneus به معنای «خارجی» در برابر داخلی intraneus است. آنچه از خانه نیست unheimlich (امر غریب) از heim (خانه) نیست از منزل نیست در طرف دیگر دروازه fores است foreigner (خارجی)، خارج از ضرب و زیادی است odd (زاید) ناهنجار نامعمول نادر کمیاب تکی است seltsam (عجیب) عجیب و غریب besherat رشید ظریف پراوهام خمیده‌‌ verschroben (بد خو) خمیده شگفت‌ آور خارق‌ العاده حیرت‌ انگیز

غنای زبان امری غریب است در کلماتی که به نحوی حولِ مفهومِ غریبِ خارجی ausländer شکل گرفته اند خارج از کشور «هم‌‌ کشور ما» همانگونه  که پیش‌ تر در فرانسه می‌ گفتیم «این کشور من است» برای اشاره به کسی از روستای من محله‌ ی من استان من ولایت من

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