The dog days. Strange weather. We wait. We walken the dog. I had to do a panel on the difference between making fiction films and documentary. More pointing with fiction, I find, while recognising nothing of the process that the others talked about with their multi-camera set-ups. It [more]

Unendlichkeit ist anstrengend. Weil sie nie aufhört. Deshalb wird man ja auch verrückt, wenn man sich mit dem Weltall beschäftigt. Gedanklich. Was komischerweise gegen Unendlichkeits-Blues hilft: die Bilder anschauen, die das Hubble-Weltraumteleskop vom Weltall macht. Bilder von Planeten, Cepheiden, ganzen Galaxien. Sie geben der Unendlichkeit ein Gesicht. Es [more]

It is our third day in Gasthof Kohlern, a small, isolated hotel in Süd Tirol, tucked into a mountain’s gentle slope. All 17 rooms are full, and breakfast and dinner are served in the large front dining room with blond pine floors and picture windows overlooking the valley. [more]

I had such a nice topic to write about today, and now I ran out of time. I had this whole idea laid out on illegible script – script that looks like writing but really is just ornament – to be found in Early Modern painting. It would [more]

Yes once more it’s time to leave Delhi and hit the road. But before the road gets hit a plane is taken. And before the plane is taken passing time at the airport happened. And that again is how this picture came to life. As simple as that.

As Told by the Holy Woman in Her Own Words A Hundred or So Years after the End of the World Matilda never failed to remind me of the trouble I’d caused for them with the Duke. With each passing day it seemed to be bothering her more, [more]

There is a certain coolness about Chinese grannies that I’ve always admired. These Shanghainese ladies for example gang up in my neighborhood every day – they just sit, drink tea, sit, play mahjong, chat and sit. After dinner they go a public square and dance to old Chinese folk [more]

In a letter to Thomas Mann dated August 1, 1950, Theodor W. Adorno—anticipating his conception of negative dialectics—described the “writer’s dilemma” in words that apply to the dilemma of art in general: “One either defers to the tact of language, which almost inevitably involves a loss of precision [more]

The truth of love is experienced rather than known. „It is in the deepest part of the lure that the sensation of truth comes to rest“ (Roland Barthes). A feeling which relies on the absence rather than presence of the other, on the distance between the two lovers, [more]

In a lecture during a colloquium at the Collège international de philosophie dedicated to Jean-Luc Nancy in 2002, Alain Badiou called for the distinction of his and Nancy’s thought: a distinction which differentiates between a finite thought of the finite a finite thought of the infinite. Ultimately it [more]

Let us recall the famous sentences Michel Foucault wrote: “It is no longer possible to think in our day other than in the void left by man’s disappearance. For this void does not create a deficiency; it does not constitute a lacuna that must be filled. It is [more]

A collective, in my terms, is a community whose members are bound by nothing but the absence of an objective or absolute bond. The collective is perhaps nothing other than the community without community evoked by Georges Bataille and Maurice Blanchot (although in different ways). The bond that [more]

conspiracy tour

I recently attended a meetup centered on the future of the book. How will our digital future accommodate the current notion of a ‘book’? According to one of the evening’s speakers, we read (and write!) much more today than we did a decade ago. However, what is changing [more]

I was always interested in Joaquin Phoenix cleft lip. He is one of the actors, that play with his lips. They are a big part of his art. When Joaquin talks the cleft is moving up and down and you can’t help staring at it. The cleft makes [more]

It is a praxis difficult to grasp. Adopting the eye of the alien, looking at a place, a planet, an environment as otherness, without human projection or anthropomorphist construction and prejudice. Antihumanism integrates the strangeness of the rock, insect, plant and animal, while resisting the immediate equation to [more]

UN Women has recently launched a campaign against sexism. The pictures show close-up portraits of women’s faces, on which, instead of the mouth, appears a Google search box. In it, the beginning of a sentence such as “Women shouldn’t” and beneath it Google’s suggestions on how you should [more]

David of Japan sings with luminous hair and elegant powdered face: “Boys, now the times are changing / The going could get rough / Are you contemplating moving out somewhere? / Boys, will you ever find the time? Here we are stranded / Somehow it seems the same / [more]

once upon a time there was the Ise shrine and every twenty years some monchs full of tears renewed the Gekū and the Naikū because they are into Shinto and like you #3 Wie gesagt begann alles so ziemlich in der Mitte der Woche. Es begann an einem [more]

its not because I learnt about how to be a businessman by reading marx and then the dust jackets of althusser no thats not why i am broke i know the difference between an isa as in ideological state apparatus and an isa as in individual savings account [more]

60pages is everything and its contrary. It’s appearing and disappearing. It’s the “I” and the “We”. It’s the “Yes” and the “No”. … It depends entirely upon the perspective. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Fe2WHLGfvLc

I was going to read the fascinating new edition of Merkur, the flashy, amazing, heart-stoppingly astute magazine for retired German professors and stuck-up Feuilletonisten – I was at their office on Mommsenstraße a while ago to witness the latest scoop of German publishing, a new edition of the [more]

MoL forgets. Enlisted Agent S. first in the months leading up to the fall of the wall. Couldn’t manage it alone. Meant to take it to Leeds but lost the funding. MoL says Leeds is a theme park, and Paris a swear word. Buzz word: Brody. MoL moved his [more]

Inside lampion.

Among penguins, dolphins, monkeys and other animals, it is considered normal when two males or two females have same-sex sex. Even insects and spiders copulate regularly among conspecifics of the same sex and this with an astonishing frequency. Up to 85% of male beetles in some species live [more]

Is Markus Lanz the lost son of Howard Carpendale? They do look very similar and they have the same amount of humor (none). Strangely enough in the Lanz show everybody was laughing when one of them was saying something. A really intimate and touching talk on TV tonight. [more]

Today’s finds: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iXYXuHVTS_k

Mäx just wrote: nomen est omen // see/read Freud, now, see/read Sigmund, see Carl Jung (C.G.) and Lacan. Don’t bother about the Jacques / it is La-can. Got it? Look at the names! Today I proposed Sascha Lobo. Mäx: “no”, Rebecca da Gama, “no way,” Boris Groys: “later, [more]

Here is Mäx again: “It is not about the beauty of the names––how exotic or whatever they sound. We are calculating 763 components for 6 names per week// in a web of 8 weeks. It’s a map. Call it a frame. The grammar is out there! Read Steinweg [more]

Five minutes after my last post Mäx wrote: “My cat’s name is not ‘Heinrich’ but ‘Jean-Luc’! I don’t live there // I live here:” Sorry Mäx! You are a genius Mäx. The names you are putting together are beautiful: Victoria Gisborne-Land, Murat Suner, Britanni Sonnenberg, Mei-Lun Xue, Victoria [more]

I first worked with Mäx in Bremen this summer. For the speculative Mahagonny re-enactment. Mäx wrote a program, which calculated the amount to forget about Brecht. The program said: keep 27,4% of the original content, the costumes, etc. And it worked. Mäx wrote a tool (he might be [more]

People! To tell you the truth: 60pages is not about us and has nothing to do with you or gin or tonic. It’s not about content or style or subject or ideas or therapy. This is about names. The name-game. When Carson Chan didn’t want to write in [more]

The dead God is the only God with whom the modern subject can live. It is once God has died (or seems to have died) that he becomes relevant to man. The inexistence of God is the condition of the possibility of the subject. Because this is a [more]

Let us take the definition of nihilism Jean-Luc Nancy proposes. Nihilism, he writes, is nothing but “the final incandescence of sense,” “sense taken to its point of excess.” When sense is driven to the utmost it is extreme sense, external and hyperbolic acumen. Acuminated sense negates itself, hollows itself [more]

MoL sent Agent S. to Berlin on a mission. Agent S., who has been deep-cover for years, was briefed cold-war style, on a need-to-know basis only, wasn’t even told there was no longer a wall. Agent S. was instructed to come back with the Fassbinder cans or take [more]

(For Laura) On the whole, I would say I’m not all that afraid of death. On a scale of 1 (can’t wait to be dead!) to 10 (eating only kale to stave off the Grim Reaper), I’m a 5 (I avoid both dodgy neighbourhoods and kale shakes). As [more]

Auf mikroskopischen Aufnahmen wirken Bakterien und Viren erhaben. Sie verkörpern die Schönheit, die im Schrecklichen liegt. Es macht einem Angst und Freude zugleich, dass man so etwas Erstaunliches im eigenen Körper hat. In einem Körper vielleicht, der von außen eher nicht so toll aussieht, wimmelt es nur so [more]

As Told by the Holy Woman in Her Own Words A Hundred or So Years after the End of the World How I went back to Sequoia, where my sister betrayed me again So I made my way north again. This time I flew straight as an arrow, [more]

Every Tuesday evening I am playing tennis with a friend in Schlieren, a suburb of Zurich. The first thing you want to do after arriving in Schlieren with the S-Bahn is jumping in front of the next incoming intercity train from Bern or Basel. In other words: Schlieren [more]