Artist and film-maker, Hito Steyerl, asks us to stand shoulder to shoulder with our digital equivalents. Digital images are Things (like you and me) - a plethora of compressed, corrupted representations pushed and pulled through increasingly policed and capitalised information networks. If 80% of all internet traffic^* is SPAM - a liberated excess withdrawn^** from accepted channels of communication - perhaps it is in The Poor Image we find our closest kin? [more inside]
posted by 0bvious on Feb 16, 2012 - 5 comments

But like many an inarticulate young lover, I thought for a time that seduction was a matter of giving the right book to the right woman. In my case it was Barthes’s A Lover’s Discourse: a meditation on Goethe’s Sorrows of Young Werther that catalogues the melancholic lover’s prized ‘image repertoire’ – the scene of waiting, the feeling of being dissolved in the presence of the loved being, the attraction of suicide – and thinly veils the author’s own life as a middle-aged gay man in Paris in the 1970s. This gift was always a prelude to disaster.

– RB and Me: An Education is an essay by Brian G. Dillon about his relationship with the books of French philosopher Roland Barthes. It's also a lovely autobiography of an awkward boy finding his place in life. Dillon's website collects his essays, and is trove of interesting insight. Besides writing essays and fiction, Dillon is also the UK editor of Cabinet Magazine, and you can read a fair number of his articles online, including ones on Beau Brummel and the cravat, hypochondria and hydrotherapy.
posted by Kattullus on Dec 1, 2011 - 4 comments

"Only if the opposing team can prove that the material world of our perceptions is real, and not a hallucination, do they earn the right to have their arguments considered on their merits." High school debate used to be the province of fast talkers with notecards full of facts and figures -- until literary theory got into the act. Kritik, a family of tactics derived from au courant Continental thinkers like Foucault, Zizek, Spivak (and old favorites like Nietzsche and Heidegger) aims not merely to counter the opposing team's arguments but to expose them as manifestations of implicit oppressive paradigms. Kritik was pioneered in the early 1990s by Ft. Hays State University debate coach Bill Shanahan (who later experimented with another novel tactic by mooning a rival debate coach in a college meet.) [more inside]
posted by escabeche on Jun 7, 2010 - 128 comments

THEORY, LITERATURE, HOAX (in the style of Borges)
posted by puny human on May 10, 2010 - 35 comments

"Ontologiam seu scientiam de Aliquo et Nihilo, Ente et Non ente, Re et modo rei, Substantia et Accidente." - Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz (1646-1716). [more inside]
posted by ageispolis on Jan 12, 2010 - 18 comments

Take three kids and a flute. Anne says the flute should be given to her because she is the only one who knows how to play it. Bob says the flute should be handed to him as he is so poor he has no toys to play with. Carla says the flute is hers because it is the fruit of her own labour. How do we decide between these three legitimate claims? [more inside]
posted by lucia__is__dada on Aug 21, 2009 - 193 comments

"Žižek!" is a feature documentary exploring the eccentric personality and esoteric work of the "wild man of theory": the eminent Slovenian philosopher Slavoj Žižek. Part 2, Part 3, Part 4, Part 5, Part 6, Part 7. [more inside]
posted by homunculus on May 12, 2008 - 18 comments

The Meaning of Life. "We create life, we search for it, we manipulate and revere it. Is it possible that we haven't yet defined the term (PDF)?" [Via The Loom.]
posted by homunculus on Sep 6, 2007 - 43 comments

Semiotics for beginners. via Michael Bérubé
posted by kenko on Jul 27, 2005 - 21 comments

Smolin vs. Susskind on the anthropic principle. For those keeping score: Stephen Hawking is for it. Brian Greene is not.
posted by kliuless on Sep 4, 2004 - 10 comments