Velcro City Tourist Board

Category: Philosophy

  • the exit that is creation, the power of falsity that is truth

    Apparently it was Gilles Deleuze’s birthday yesterday, so big thanks for BIG OTHER coughing up a selection of quotes by the man himself, among which this one was the one that I really needed to read today: Creation takes place in bottlenecks…A creator who isn’t grabbed around the throat by a set of impossibilities is…

  • like a shadow anticipating its own body

    From the opening chapter of Wild Thought, being a fresh translation of the book by Levi-Strauss which was first translated as The Savage Mind: We should not, for all this, fall back on the vulgar thesis (which is however, admissible in the narrow perspective in which it is situated) that magic is a timorous and…

  • not merely window-dressing

    Adam Tooze, an aside in an account of the unfolding Ghanian debt crisis: Narratives are not merely window-dressing. They matter, because they fuel optimism and sustain belief, which infuses the assessment of analysts and credit rating agencies. Narratives are amongst the tools with which capital allocators manage the uncertainty inherent in any investment, but which…

  • science found it hard to converse with the rest of society

    Nice to see a typically long LRB review of Latour’s last two books, but Harding makes a bit of a blunder here, perhaps due to his not having been party to decades of STS discourse: There was a hint in We Have Never Been Modern that science found it hard to converse with the rest…

  • intellectual fracking / notes toward the declaration of the Butlerian jihad

    Friend-of-the-show Jay Springett talks a lot about “cultural fracking”, and is back on that beat this weekend. I’m feeling it; the big cultural events I’ve seen discussed this morning in the various feeds I follow have included another Star Wars prequel, another Indiana Jones movie, a “dark” Pinocchio remake. (Lest you think I’m pretending not…