Three images stand in Berlin’s Gemäldegalerie in a kind of silent disproportion to one another, as though the museum had accidentally opened a breach and allowed three distinct ontological climates to coexist without mediation. One gets immediately caught in their differing ways of breathing—one swollen with movement, one suspended in inward gravity, one abruptly turned…
Category: Modernity
Style Brisé (I): Modernity’s Musical Ghost
“Searching (for) limits” beyond those previously assigned and “getting rid of the glue” that held everything together in organic fashion: these are the expressions Richard Taruskin employs to characterize two distinct, though broadly contemporaneous, aesthetic responses within post-Wagnerian European music. The first, associated with the German tradition of Mahler, Strauss, and ultimately Schoenberg, sought to…
Ontologies of the Fragmentary
The greatness and the misery of an era—each of them probably containing both in similar proportion—can certainly be measured in different ways. One such way consists in examining the richness or poverty of its ideas not only with regard to their number, but also to their complexity; and this, in turn, depends, at least in…
Aphrodite’s Wounded Hand
Ancient Greek pair of eyes made of bronze, marble, frit, quartz, and obsidian. 5th century BCE or Later. Metropolitan Museum, New York. Object 1991.11.3a, b I A fresh look at Greek mythology requires perhaps that we view its gods (θεοί) both as those who offer us a deeper “insight” into things – for with just…
After Nietzsche
I Nietzsche claims that the way in which we picture the world affirms or denies what we are ready to put in it, in short, that our representations rely on a pre-representational basis, inasmuch as we see what we see depending on how we are inclined to value it. In other words, he underscores the…
On the Counter-Odyssean Background of Contemporary Philosophy
What follows is the synopsis and chapter one of Carlos’s new book project, which is provisionally titled: Ulysses’s Mast: Prolegomena to a Post-nihilist Philosophy. The book argues that contemporary philosophy has lashed itself to Ulysses’s mast to sail past what Adorno called the coincidence of identity and positivity, being and plenitude. Ulysses’s mast thus symbolises…
Hybris Over What Is: On Aeschylus
(N.B. This entry follows from the conclusion to the previous one, titled “Τhe Last God.”) hybris (“excess”) must be extinguished more than a fire (ὕβριν χρὴ σβεννύναι μᾶλλον ἢ πυρκαῖήν) – Heraclitus, DK B43(⊛) “Prometheus,” προμηθεύς (pro-metheus) means “forethought” (from προ- [pro-, “fore-”] + μανθάνω [manthano, to “think”]). It is paramount to make clear the…
The Last God
It can be said that, in its fragility, the last in the sense of the last flash of something remains for us as a claim even after it passes. Such is its power. Entitled “The Last God” (»Der letze Gott«), the penultimate chapter of Heidegger’s posthumously-published Contributions to Philosophy opens with a reflection similar to…
Turning Physics into Semantics: On Extra-Modern Magic
The real question is not whether the touch of a woodpecker’s beak does in fact cure toothache. It is rather whether there is a point of view from which a woodpecker’s beak and a man’s tooth can be seen as “going together” (the use of this congruity for therapeutic purposes being only one of its…
Capitalism as Acculturation – or, the Revolutionary Force of the Past
December 9, 1973. In an article published in the Corriere della Sera Pasolini laments the acculturation brought about by capitalism. In particular, he deplores the loss of the “peripheral cultures which, until a few years ago had their own life assured – essentially a free life, even if within the poorest, or even miserable, peripheral…