[Wenzel Hablik's Sunset, Mont Blanc] In the second book of Thus Spoke Zarathustra, Friedrich Nietzsche has life confide to Zarathustra: Behold, [. . .] I am that which must always overcome itself. Indeed, you call it a will to procreate or a drive to an end, to something higher, farther, more manifold: but all this…
Category Archives: Knower
is someone who asks “How to know?” and “How do we make sure we know” and “How are we sure about what we know?”
Tony Perez’s Cubao-Kalaw Kalaw-Cubao (1995) begins after a gruesome crime. Some terrible event—criminal rapes kid, criminal kills kid, cop chases criminal, criminal kills cop, criminal kills self (xii)—is briefly sketched in the prologue that serves as “a short history before the novel begins” (prologue title) (xii). The novel itself (separated by a section title, “Kid,…
[Image from Common Sense Science] Parmenides of Elea changed the course of early Greek philosophy. His philosophy not only shifted the line of inquiry found in previous accounts (most notably in the Milesians Thales, Anaximander, and Anaximenes) from cosmology to ontology; the ontology he developed also defined all succeeding accounts as the standard to which…
[The statement of purpose I'm using for my MA Review at UCI. Please leave comments and suggestions, especially before my exam (on 15 Feb)!] My main interest is in political economy. I am interested in the ways in which material scarcity (real and imagined) leads to some kind of system or regime, a certain way…
[Continues part 1] [Image from the Spanish edition of Jorge Luis Borges' The Aleph] Deleuze clarifies that the past he is referring to in the second synthesis “is not the former present itself but the element in which we focus upon [that former present]” (80). Deleuze characterizes the former present (has been) as a particular…
[The Tupinambas; Image from wikimedia] In his provocative Society Against the State, Pierre Clastres draws from his ethnographic work to provide a theory of a society that, rather than developing into the state, operates directly against it. By ‘operating against’ I mean, following Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari’s reading of Clastres in A Thousand…
In “This Sex Which Is Not One” (an essay in the book of the same title), Luce Irigaray critiques the masculine conception of feminine/female sexuality and proposes descriptions that come from a woman. Irigaray explains that within female sexuality, an opposition is set up “between ‘masculine’ clitoral activity and ‘feminine’ vaginal passivity” in which “the…
Walter Benjamin begins The Origin of German Tragic Drama with an “epistemo-critical prologue” in which, before he presents his idea of the baroque, he articulates his conception of philosophy, the activity by which he represents ideas and conceptualizes phenomena (such as the baroque).[1] Benjamin does this by charting a dichotomy, in which he situates philosophy…
[The Pintura of Chimalhuacán-Atoyac, an Amerindian "map"] Walter Mignolo’s The Darker Side of the Renaissance explores different practices of representation/expression (literature, history, cartography) and the way in which in their respective registers (language, memory, space) they have been shaped and utilized by the imperial power (Europe, Spain in particular) for its colonizing project (of the…
[João Biehl and Catarina in Vita; image by Torben Eskerod from the book] There is a place outside of Porto Alegre in Brazil where families leave behind “undesirable members” (14) (mostly sick) to wait for their death. It is called Vita, what João Biehl, in an ethnographic work, describes as a “zone of social abandonment.”…
