[Michelangelo's The Creation of Adam] In contrast to Deleuze’s intensive ontology, you can look to the hylomorphic model (hylo meaning matter, morph referring to form): form imposed on matter, matter made to conform, form realized in matter, matter exemplifying form, thing corresponding to idea, person measured against standard. Think of Platonic forms, of which things…
Monthly Archives: July 2007
“Let’s leave. Tonight.” “What are you talking about?” “Do you have any idea how much it kills me whenever you get jealous of me? Talking to a girl, or talking about them? Don’t you think I see? Don’t you think I saw just now—And that wasn’t even a friend!” “You don’t know what you’re talking…
[Arbeit Macht Frei by Heidi Winner from Incredible Art] Walter Benjamin is often criticized by other Marxists for his positive prognosis and advocacy of modern mass art. (In this light, he is set against Theodor Adorno, who deploys polemical attacks in his essays on the culture industry.) The common view is that Benjamin, in “The…
[Rembrandt's Artist in His Studio] [Follows "Husserl's Phenomenological Reductions"] [Based on Martin Heidegger’s “On the Essence of Grounds,” as interpreted by Greg Schufreider] By virtue of the transcendental reduction, Husserl ended up elevating consciousness, the subject, into the transcendental ego, placing it over and above all other beings, constitutive (rather than a part) of the…
[Image from the cover of Guy Debord's Society of the Spectacle] There comes a time, I think, when we stop imitating. When we get tired of looking around, observing how others (re)act, how they do things, how they live . . . patterning our lives according to these archetypes (patterns of behavior we (Imaginarily) share…
Georg Lukács begins History and Class Consciousness with the question, “What is orthodox Marxism?” In what does orthodox Marxism consist? What does it mean to be an orthodox Marxist? Rather than shy away from the designation—at a time when it was “fashionable to greet any profession of faith in Marxism with ironical disdain”— Lukács asserts…
