君子不器
Book Review (2009)| ‘Brothers,’ by Yu Hua Imagine a novel written by William Dean Howells together with D. H. Lawrence, updated by Tom Wolfe and then filmed by Baz Luhrmann, and you’ll have some idea of what “Brothers” would be like, had it originated in the West. Translate that imaginary novel-film into Chinese, and you…
Eugene Thacker – Weird, Eerie, and Monstrous: A Review of “The Weird and the Eerie” by Mark Fisher Fisher’s interest in Lovecraft stems from this shift in perspective from the human-centric to the nonhuman-oriented – not simply a psychology of “fear,” but the unnerving, impersonal calm of the weird and eerie. As scholars of the…
How Did Humanism Die? How Did It Survive? In 2019, the idea of “humanism” feels passé. If humanism means “universally shared values,” or “progress,” or an exceptionalism based on the power of reason, then the cruelties of industrial capitalism and the mass violence of two World Wars have given those meanings very little to subsist…
Peter Sloterdijk’s Philosophy Gives Reasons for Living …Sloterdijk is a thinker of, and for, the post–Cold War world. If you were to sketch Sloterdijk’s understanding of history, as it emerges in his recent work, it would go something like this. From earliest times until the rise of the modern world, mankind endowed the world with…