Pascal famously once wrote that, had Cleopatra’s nose been shorter, the world would have been irremediably different. it is easy to read this, under the guise of a certain pragmatism, as a statement on what or whom the fate of the world is really contingent upon; that is, the whims and passions of a very few ‘great men’, as they are so oft called — sovereigns and warriors, lords and tyrants —; suc... » Continue Reading
the truth is already out there, one can only hope to be embraced by it. it’s a subtle, yet intense feeling, to realize that everything’s in communion; that when one speaks, it is one voice; that when one lives, it is one life. we suffer the pains of the world, and suddenly we’re suffering with the world whole. it is in light of this concordance that Christianity understands redemption as an encoun... » Continue Reading
the rise of fascism in Europe has often been attributed to one ‘crisis of faith’, a ‘crisis of language’ even. The Third Man takes place in the midst of one of these crisis; its is a world that doesn’t recognize itself anymore, too frightened by its own shadows. it’s essentially a film about the Holocaust, perhaps one of the very first — though neither it nor the Nazis are ever directly mentioned ... » Continue Reading
is it possibly true that, like Nietzsche suggests, all philosophy has been hiterto nothing more than an interpreting of the body and a misunderstanding of the body [ eine Auslegung des Leibes und ein Missverständniss des Leibes ]? is philosophy’s judgment on the body — whether seen as a site of salvation or one of damnation — symptomatical of a certain sickness of the philosopher themself? Nietzsc... » Continue Reading
at the quasi midpoint of Virginia Woolf’s queer fantasy novel Orlando, its main character, seemingly out of nowhere, changes their sex . this is not something that she goes through — it is a ‘happening’. waking out of a seven-day sleep and in the midst of a Turkish rebellion, we are told, Orlando just is a woman now. or, how the narrator puts it, “Orlando was a man till the age of thirty; when he ... » Continue Reading
Walter Benjamin once wrote that, “hell is not something that awaits us, but this life here and now”. Longlegs is an attempt, perhaps overly didactic at times, to capture this — this which philosophers call ‘eternal recurrence’. in one scene, the main character confronts her mother about something that happened almost twenty years prior, and of which she doesn’t seem to hold any memory of. the moth... » Continue Reading
it was, in a sense, all for you. in the language of colonialism, to document means to seize. and in Meeting the Man: James Baldwin in Paris (1970) what is documented is the impotency of this very language; to put it very bluntly: there is something the filmmakers do not know because they cannot see it. Baldwin never speaks of this contradiction as much as he speaks the contradiction: h » Continue Reading
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