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…
Category: Modernity
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…
The False Sublime
In his First Critique, Kant calls “determinative judgements” those in which both the particular (“these two points and the distance between them”) and the universal (“the notion that the shorter distance between two points is a straight line”) are given, the former in the form of the sensible multiplicity we experience (“this something,” “that something,…
10 – 3 ≠ 7; 10 – 3 = 13
Should we have learned indigenous mathematics or, more exactly, should we remember them – for we were all once indigenous peoples – the world would be different and probably better than it is today. For the ontology behind modern mathematics and, more broadly, modern science, is anything but neutral. Put differently, reality is not just…