What must it feel, in remote corners of the earth when Western bombs fall on their lands? There you are, doing your chores, getting by on a quiet day, breathing in the breeze as you think about them, the people of your house, nurturing something that happened last time, that moment, resenting something else, many…
Category Archives: Masses
engulfs the individual in a (usually conformist) collective.
[Peter-Paul Rubens' The Prophet Elijah Receiving Bread and Water from an Angel] In From Hegel to Marx, Sidney Hook traces the intellectual development of Karl Marx within the context of the dominant Hegelian philosophy of his day. While Karl Marx was indeed highly influenced by the systematic, totalizing, and absolute philosophy of Hegel, in the…
[Frederick II, enlightened Prussian monarch, conversing with Voltaire, French philosoph; Image from Beowulf's Tomb] In his succinct and accessible Hegel, Peter Singer explains the basics of Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel’s philosophy. One of the key concepts discussed is the idea of the progress of history, or, better yet, of history as progress, i.e. of history…
[The Berkeley Free Speech movement; Image from The Berkeley Daily Planet] In the section of the essay of the book of the same title, Jean-Luc Nancy explicates his notion of being singular plural. Composed of three words that, as Nancy describes, “do not have any determined syntax (‘being’ is a verb or noun; ‘singular’ and…
I have just passed my comprehensive exam for my MA in Comparative Literature at Louisiana State University. The area of focus is critical theory, specifically Marxism, psychoanalysis, and Foucault and Deleuze. I thought I would pose my responses to the first two parts of the exam (the third and last part being the oral defense).…
[Shopping at Macy's, the world's largest store; Image from corbis] Andrew Bacevich, Professor of International Relations at Boston University, contributes to the discourse on American empire in an interview with Bill Moyers. Bacevich’s thesis is that America’s current troubles (brewing for decades now)—a consequence of its worldwide empire—are caused not by something external—some enemy plotting…
Fellows, Friends, and Others, I am sending another one of my reports from the field. As stipulated, I am using the species’ own mode of transmission, their own semiology—what is referred to in these parts as “language” (though, technically speaking, they use many “languages” organized in a similar way as a system (i.e. as “language”),…
[Jacques-Louis David's rendering of Napoleon's coronation] In Discipline and Punish, Michel Foucault traces the genealogy of social control, specifically the ways in which the State has disciplined (made manageable, kept in line, made to obey) its populace (usually by punishing)—whether in confronting criminality, disease, (preparation for) war, (economic) production, education, . . .—activities in general…
[The New York Stock Exchange on Wall Street; Image from the New York Times] [Continues "Blood on Our Hands"] Roughly four decades earlier, in the midst of another war, the major newspapers performed an act against the government analogous to the exposés we witnessed of late. In 1971, the New York Times and the Washington…
[Image from masternewmedia.org] [Continues "The Surge"] As the war effort was going on abroad, another war was being waged at home: the war of information, with the news media at the forefront. Frontline chronicles how the mainstream media was used by the White House to help build its case for war in Iraq. The media,…
