Tag Archives: Jacques Derrida

the chosen: wandering decisions

Tyranny of the majority. Its a stock character today, but is the perhaps dominant cultural aesthetic of our time: the endless variations on the neurotic and hyperarticulate, as well as sexually obsessed individual; throw in issues of class and assimilation … Continue reading

Posted in Cinema/Visual/Audio, Feature Article, Ideas/Opinion, Literature/poetry/spoken word | Tagged , , , , , , , , , , , , | Leave a comment

fanon: violence as cleansing agent

…He returned to Tunis, and, knowing that the remission he enjoyed from leukemia might end at any time, he finished his last and most important book, The Wretched of the Earth. Fanon worked twenty hours a day, interrupting his writing … Continue reading

Posted in Feature Article, Ideas/Opinion | Tagged , , , , , , , , , | Leave a comment

fanon: relegated to second class

Frantz Fanon. A prophet scorned… …When he had recovered, Fanon returned to Tunis and was appointed FLN ambassador to Accra. His job was to obtain arms and volunteers from Black African nations sympathetic to Algeria. He went at it with … Continue reading

Posted in Feature Article, Ideas/Opinion | Tagged , , , , , , , , , , , , , , | Leave a comment

fanon: fanning the flames of renewal

Theory of violent revolution. Theory of an outsider? Fifty years after his death, Frantz Fanon still has an audience but he had a peculiar role as the scorned prophet…. … The government reply was not long in coming- in the … Continue reading

Posted in Feature Article, Ideas/Opinion | Tagged , , , , , , , , , , , | Leave a comment

fanon: towards the mystique of violence

…In 1956 the Algerian war, by then two years old, reached Blida and penetrated Fanon’s hospital. The police arrested some of his Algerian male nurses. Next came the turn of one of Fanon’s fellow doctors, a Frenchman who was tortured … Continue reading

Posted in Feature Article, Ideas/Opinion | Tagged , , , , , , , , , , | Leave a comment

we need the pillows : sleeping on “waning skepticism”

From the mouth of Harold Bloom. From his quill to god’s scribe. He represents the archetype of the Gnostic personality. If there is a gnostic personality disorder Bloom is a carrier, transmitter and is chronically infected. Or as he puts … Continue reading

Posted in Art History/Antiquity/Anthropology, Feature Article, Ideas/Opinion | Tagged , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , | Leave a comment

the saturday evening you’re toast

Is disavowal repressing something unbearable, or at least sublimating it something more palatable and socially acceptable? What often arises is the concept of innocence, a byproduct of this process of disavowal and reluctance to own up and acknowledge what one … Continue reading

Posted in Art History/Antiquity/Anthropology, Feature Article, Ideas/Opinion, Modern Arts/Craft | Tagged , , , , , , , , , , , , , | Leave a comment

at the wall of disbelief

It’s another case of utter disbelief. It can be said that disbelief arises, as a primal reaction, before knowledge, rationality, and analysis roll in and suffocate it; attempts to domesticate it, tame the volatile components and explain it away, perhaps … Continue reading

Posted in Feature Article, Ideas/Opinion | Tagged , , , , , , , , , , , | Leave a comment

redemption against a brick wall

The representation of trauma. What are the limits, the intersection between the desire to understand and the voyeuristic gaze? The conjunction of political and popular culture can collapse the meaning of distance resulting in a moral strain and ambiguity where … Continue reading

Posted in Feature Article, Ideas/Opinion, Modern Arts/Craft | Tagged , , , , , , , , , , , , , , | Leave a comment

inanimate itch for the kitsch: real men don’t eat kitsch?

Modernist culture is simply not animated by eternal values of the purity of art and abstract truth. Like the dinosaur it failed to adapt and we tossed the baby out with the bath water. Not surprisingly, Walter Benjamin said that … Continue reading

Posted in Cinema/Visual/Audio, Feature Article, Ideas/Opinion, Modern Arts/Craft | Tagged , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , | Leave a comment