In Cinema 1, Gilles Deleuze offers a new philosophy of the image. Arguing that history has seeped into cinema behind its back, with cinema unconscious that it is already doing history’s work,[1] cinema being one of the forces that constitute history,[2] Deleuze develops a notion of the image that does not merely reflect, represent, or…
Category Archives: Phänomen
, for Husserl (as followed by Heidegger), is all we can be indubitable about.
[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…
[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…
[Claude Monet's La Gare Saint Lazare (1877)] In the preface to the English edition of Difference and Repetition (1968; 1994), Gilles Deleuze writes “that there is a more or less implicit, tacit or presupposed image of thought which determines our goals when we try to think” (xvi). This is the infamous image of thought that…
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…
After Marx has laid out the model spatially, he repeats the gesture, as if to say, “Again, again, again . . . Let’s do it again.” But differently, in another way: [Salvador Dali's The Persistence of Memory] Model 2: “Narrative” Human beings, first of all (before they are even “able to ‘make history’”), “live” (the…
I watched Ryan Fleck’s Half Nelson again last night. It was for the nth time, yet I continue to be moved by the subtle beauty of the film. It was quiet, still, uneventful, with a minimal plot, but not boring. There was no shouting, no spectacular confrontations, no grand battles (except for those underneath that…
[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…
[An example of a signifier that différance slides] [Presented in François Raffoul’s class on Contemporary French Philosophy at LSU in the fall of 2008; contains his additions and corrections] Jacques Derrida begins the essay “Différance” (perhaps the most systematic articulation of the non-concept that, according to Derrida, he “ha[s] been able to utilize” in previous…
[Vincent van Gogh's Peasant Shoes and A Pair of Shoes] [Follows "Technology"] [Based on Martin Heidegger’s “The Origin of the Work of Art,” as interpreted by Greg Schufreider] Dis-close a particular cultural-historical world for a people (das Volk), grounded on the earth. Dasein is no longer the opening up of being; the world is opened…
