I Marx once famously wrote that a spectre was haunting Europe: the spectre of communism. It can be affirmed that, today, a very different spectre, coming from northern Europe, haunts contemporary thought – and that, along the way, it has encountered another, older ghost – and that, together, like Typhon and Echidna, they have brought…
Category: Thought
What Dies, and What Lasts: On Rosenzweig’s Indictment against Anaximander
I Franz Rosenzweig, in The Star of Redemption — which is a very interesting book, partly written in the trenches of the Balkan front during World War I —, accuses philosophy — he says: from Ionia to Jena, that is to say, all the history of philosophy, from its inception with the Ionian philosophers (Thales,…
Moreau contra Impressionists
In a letter addressed in 1897 to Leopold Goldschmidt – who, having acquired a painting of his, Jupiter and Semele, asks its author for some comments on it – Gustave Moreau writes: “It would be deplorable if this admirable art, which can succeed in expressing so many things, so many noble, ingenious and profound and…
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…
“It’s a Giraffe” – or, the Dangers of Russian Mysticism
We have written elsewhere on Russian Christian Neo-Fascism. When, in February 2022, Russia launched its invasion of Ukraine we were temporarily residing in St. Petersburg, where Sofya was involved in several artistic projects and Carlos was about to start teaching contemporary philosophy at the European University. In the wake of the invasion we left St….
The Eidos of a Mango Tree
I Unlike what Deleuze (1990, pp. 253-66) claims, it is not Plato but Aristotle (in An. Pr., I, 27) who reduces the individual to typological classification (this is an individual mango tree, mango trees belong in the mangifera genus, which are part of the anacardiaceæ family [fig. 1], etc.), which means that, from Aristotle’s standpoint,…
On Concepts
One of the many faces of contemporary philosophy expresses at least three interdependent emotional states which interchange depending on the occasion: a concern about how to relate to the Other, a repulsion against any kind of concepts, and a sincere fascination with the non-philosophical. It can all be said to begin with Levinas and Derrida,…
Mythology’s Oblivion
An epoch – any epoch – can be assessed by both the quantity and the quality of its gods. Christianity has accustomed us to imagine a single god: an all-powerful Father as the hypostasis of human hope; and once that god has been declared dead, the two only gods we still seem capable of evoking…
Diagrams as Figures of Thought (a game)
In a “Klein bottle,” container and content become indiscernible from one another, and so their difference becomes iridescent (i.e. when look from different perspectives, each one seems to change into the other): Diagrams are perfect examples of “Klein bottles,” for they consist in turning conceptual content into visual form, which is also the reason why…
Enigma and Early Greek Thinking
People say that [Homer] died on the island of Ios when he found himself undone because he could not solve the riddle of the fishing boys. The riddle was: “We left whatever we caught and carry whatever we didn’t”. They were obscuring in riddle the fact they actually had discarded whichever of the lice they…