We expect thinking to lead from darkness into light. That is the self-conception of the enlightenment. Whether in philosophy, in art, or in the sciences: the twentieth century has begun to complicate this imperialism of light (one name for this complication is deconstruction). Not in order to slide [more]
Noch einmal Le Corbusier: 19 Sommer bevor er in der Bucht vor Roquebrune ertrank, hat er sich oberhalb dieser Bucht auf des Grundstück von Eileen Grey geschlichen, mit Farbtöpfchen und Pinsel, aber ohne Unterhose. Die eine oder andere Wand des Hauses E1027 von Eileen Grey dünke ihn etwas [more]
The German ‘gar’ signifies many things. In cooking it means ‘done’, used with ‘nicht’ it is a comparison. ‘Gar’ as ‘even’ or ‘maybe’ is usually used in spoken language. In the South, in Austria and Switzerland it means ‘very’ and textbooks tell you that it would say “Abtönungsartikel”. [more]
I had the honour of meeting Lou Reed once very briefly backstage in Edinburgh at the invitation of my good friend drummer Fred Maher who was touring with him, Lou was as baffled to discover that someone who lived in Scotland might not play golf as I was [more]
This morning, the Halloween stores were jam-packed with customers. I walked into one of the stores on Hollywood Boulevard. They are the best. You can buy and be anything you want. A dollar bill. A country. Or less “abstract”: Walter White or Jesus Christ. Behind the counter there [more]
Giorgio Agamben writes: “How it is we do not know something is no less important and perhaps even more important than our ways of knowing.” An “art of ignorance” would open the subject up toward the sphere of the incommensurable Agamben calls the “zone of ignorance,” and he [more]
Art is an opening to contingency. To assert a form means to make chaos precise. The mode of being of art, Cornelius Castoriadis says, lies in “giving form to chaos”. Art is a “window on chaos” by trying to give it a form. To give chaos a form [more]
In his Logic of Scientific Discovery, which first came out in 1935, Karl Popper lays out the foundations of his epistemology of the modern natural sciences, as the subtitle of the first edition of the German original indicates. Important sections concern the principle of falsifiability of empirical-scientific theory [more]
Trying to figure out where to watch today’s soccer match between the FC Bayern and Berlin’s Hertha BSC I seriously considered getting Sky, the Pay-TV. It seemed awkward and I went to the organic supermarket instead. It felt like time traveling. Was I gone for too long? Is [more]
The reconstruction of several Baroque artifacts of military connotation that were omitted for ideological reasons during the replanting of Tiergarten in the ’50s and ’60s, were resumed after the fall of the Berlin Wall. An example is the new layout of all the former Baroque axes as big [more]
In front of my house there is bar called Erea. It is a very strange place. It’s not a very nice or charming bar and the people going there seem mysterious. I have no clue what they are doing or what they think or believe. But it seems [more]
To love belongs blindness, because it exists only as a vector into the uncertain. The subject accelerates towards a void the placeholder of which is the loved “object”.
Today’s roof was in Copenhagen. Why does it feel so good up high? Its a state of mind I think. Out of the gutters. I live in a ground floor apartment in Berlin, I am looking forward to the time when I can live a little higher in [more]
Narcissism is a form of self-refusal which aims at neutralizing the contingent portions of the self. It is clear that such a neutralization cannot succeed because the self is nothing but the placeholder of contingency. It exists only above the abyss of an inconsistency which is the ontological [more]
In his novel, Point Omega, Don DeLillo writes: It’s all embedded, the hours and minutes, words and numbers everywhere, he said, train stations, bus routes, taxi meters, surveillance cameras. It’s all about time, dimwit time, inferior time, people checking watches and other devices, other reminders. This is time [more]
‘Kazimir Malevich and the Russian Avant-Garde’ is an exhibition now running at the Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam, as I was informed by the Financial Times today. One year ago I went to Moscow with a friend to see another friend. As the latter left when we arrived (it was [more]
“To be a philosopher, to be a mummy,” writes Nietzsche in Twilight of the Idols. The philosophers — ancient and present-day philosophers, which he distinguishes from the future or coming or new philosophers — operate with “conceptual mummies”, they “kill, they stuff”..Their morality lies in the flight from [more]
Vor ein paar Tagen wurde ganz England von einer schrecklichen Angst erfasst. Grund war eine Giftspinne, die mehrfach gesichtet worden war und der man die beunruhigende Fähigkeit zusprach, sich so rasend schnell zu vermehren, dass eine Apokalypse nicht auszuschließen war. Bis sie wieder Entwarnung gaben, breiteten englische Medien, [more]
The trouble with a classicist he looks at a tree That’s all he sees, he paints a tree The trouble with a classicist he looks at the sky He doesn’t ask why, he just paints a sky The trouble with an impressionist, he looks at a log And [more]
To switch from the petulant gods who populate the Homeric world to the one Christian God already amounts to a sort of reduction of complexity. All thinking remains a form of reductive violence, and that violence is fueled by the phantasm of absolute controllability: of controlling the gods, [more]
Christian monotheism stages the double suicide of God in the form of his incarnation and his death on the cross. The infinite God is finite; his resurrection will be the call to men to unite in a community of subjects without subjectivity (i.e., without God). The incommensurable is [more]
Ladies and gentlemen the North Missisipi Allstars at Oran Mor in Glasgow a couple of days ago: [jwplayer mediaid=”10315″] a Southern band re inventing the blues, i love them, not least because Luther Dickson is an amazing guitarist whose playing I hear as am intense stream of shapes, [more]
The notion that you have to give to get goes well with the possibility of doing nothing. I really don’t want to make anyone do anything. Nihilism, the nice kind, only works when I talk about it with my friends.
On May 13, 1787, the Friendship, a brig of 278 tons, left the harbour of Portsmouth carrying seventy-six male and twenty-one female British and Irish convicts. She arrived at Port Jackson, Sydney, on 26 January 1788, minus the female convicts who had been transferred to other vessels at [more]
Nothing to report. Big storm coming. Clocks go back tonight. No more late afternoon tennis. Norwich 0-0 Cardiff. Chants of “You don’t know what you’re doing.” That’s good, says MoL. People who know what they are doing not so interesting. MoL finishes up with Fragments of the Lost [more]
The gob behind the girl chewing gum takes a working holiday down the west coast. Happens to be in Hollywood for the red carpet premiere of Anna Karenina (formerly a book by Tolstoy), credited to an ex-student of CSM living in James Dean’s first loft-style apartment. Limo downtown [more]
Innovation is driven by laziness. I was just thinking about how great it would be to have an algorithm write all my texts. Writing is governed by Zipf’s law, also called the Principle of the Least Effort, which basically states that we become less creative in our choice [more]
Or: Local Pigs Complain of Prejudice, Unfair Treatment This morning I was chased by pigs the size of pimped-up Harleys down a small forest path. The pigs made as much noise as motorcycles, grunting in a menacing pissed-off-pig-fashion, not unlike growling motors. I had spotted them early on, [more]
Music of Germany’s migrant workers revived in new compilations. Mark Terkessidis, one of the curators of the Heimatlieder project, remembers tracking down a Vietnamese workers’ choir at the Dong Xuan supermarket in the Lichtenberg area of Berlin. “Our jaws just dropped. There’s a real lack of genuine feelings [more]
Is Obama spying after Angela, out of the sheer fear, that she is a lesbian and has an affair with Michelle? Oh COME ON!!! This is such a stupid joke. Please erase it, now!! Does Obama have an affair with the bloody homosexual Vladimir Putin? Is he licking [more]
As Told by the Holy Woman in Her Own Words A Hundred or So Years after the End of the World How I died my second death in the Hygiene Maintenance Facility of the duchy of Sequoia, and what happened afterward This time when we reached the Hygiene [more]
Mr. H from F says: “Das jähe Sichlichten ist das Blitzen.” Or is it just the other way round?
You have your frequent flyer status and you somehow care about your environment (although someone once told me that no plane has ever left because he was on board. But if you spin that further, your single action would never have any consequences. You don’t have to vote [more]
Überpractical, übercomfortable, überfriendly, überefficient – Uber, the übertaxi. Yesterday I used Uber for the first time and I was pretty impressed. Uber, I want you überall.