Category: philosophy

• Parasites

  Nov 17

  The ‘creditor’ always becomes more humane as his wealth increases; finally, the amount of his wealth determines how much injury he can sustain without suffering from it. It is not impossible… more ›

• Toward a General Hermeneutics

  May 22

  In the early nineteenth century Friedrich D. E. Schleiermacher rejected the specialized hermeneutics of medieval philosophy (that is, theological, juridical, and literary hermeneutics) and in their place proposed a general… more ›

• Memory of the Word

  May 15

  According to the myth of the origin of written language as told by Socrates in the Phaedrus, Theuth declares that written language, the materiality of the word, will make the Egyptians… more ›

• An-Original Translation

  Apr 17

  Imagine being a historian of nineteenth-century Paris and your academic publisher demanding to see the original city before accepting your manuscript. What kind of original would you provide? A map… more ›

• The Circumscription of Triangles & Squares

  Mar 24

  Spirit/soul/life, pneuma/pysché/zoè or bios, spiritus/anima/vita, Geist/Seele/Leben­­­—these are the triangles and squares in which we imprudently pretend to recognize stable semantic determinations, and then to circumscribe or skirt round the abysses… more ›

• Plant-Thinking

  Mar 5

  Recently I read Michael Marder’s Plant-Thinking: A Philosophy of Vegetal Life. I liked it well enough. It offers an erudite reading and counter-reading to “the plant” within the metaphysical tradition… more ›

• Elegy for José Gaos

  Mar 3

  Philosophy in Mexico, philosophy in Latin America has suffered the loss of its most distinguished cultivators. Faced with so painful a fact, these words, devoid of serenity and written with… more ›

• Antimanifesto for a Simulated World

  Feb 26

  Jean Baudrillard’s 1981 Simulacra and Simulation, translated by Sheila Faria Glaser in 1994, contains a four-page essay entitled “Hypermarket and Hypercommodity.” This short essay articulates the structure of the media… more ›

• Two Lost Projects

  Feb 24

  Resistances: The Problem of Fascism Walter Benjamin on fascism George Bataille on fascism Emmanuel Lévinas on fascism Jan Patočka on resistance Hannah Arendt on totalitarianism Michel Foucault on resistance Slavoj… more ›

• Errant Thought

  Feb 17

  The Humanities! The very name should call up something wild. From the moment Socrates started wandering the Greek market and driving Athenian aristocrats to their wits end, their place has… more ›