Category: Philosophy
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Solnit’s hope vs. Arendt’s natality
Rebecca Solnit’s definition of hope is so succinct a summary of my own definition that I assume I must have picked it up from her (and from others who got it from the same source). This version is from a new interview at LARB, which I’m stashing here so I can cite it properly going…
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feral empiricism
Not sure if the title term is Mark Carrigan’s own coining, here—it seems to be a g**glewhack, so maybe it is?—but I like it enough that I’m stashing it here, with some of the material for context: The phrase “do your research!” is ubiquitous across the subcultures which have popped up amidst platform capitalism’s epistemic…
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wreckage upon wreckage
Eagleton on (Jameson on) Benjamin, and specifically on his Angelus Novus: The angel can’t move because his wings have become entangled in a storm, and Jameson seems uncertain about what this storm represents. Benjamin actually tells us: it is the myth of perpetual progress. What stops the angel from waking the dead here and now,…
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the reader can always handle the full complexity of the idea
Sara Hendren, ladies and gentlemen: The opposite of jargon is not “plain language.” It is sparkling lucidity. Too many academics translate from theory to the everyday by employing a kind of verbal shrug — they say, Don’t be afraid of this fancy term here. It just means… [insert mealy-mouthed generalities]. The shrug is an attempt…
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climate change aesthetics and the logic of the spectacle
Via Andrew Curry’s reliably interesting Just Two Things newsletter, here’s a piece by the Magnum photography collective about the portrayal of climate change in contemporary photography, and in particular the work of a non-profit called Climate Visuals, which is… … founded in research in social science; they use evidence gathered from focus groups in Europe…