The ancient world dreamed of lost unities, and if Osiris was torn to bits, Isis would knit him back together. In the twentieth century, it was not a jealous brother but an irresistible transformation of life and production into the inhuman that would divide everyone. Indeed, Marshall McLuhan observes: “The restructuring of human work and …
The newspaper is the sea; literature flows into it at will.–Stéphane Mallarmé, “The Book: A Spiritual Instrument,” 1895If the resplendent posters betrayed their secret,we would be forever lost to ourselves …–André Breton, Soluble Fish, 1924On the morning of January 23rd, 1920, Tristan Tzara brought dada to Paris. Louis Aragon took the stage at the Palais …
From the universal to the particular, from unity to fragment, a shift in emphasis is one of the most telling signs of modernity. Where the ancient world constantly acknowledged fragmentation, it also emphasized contexts to heal it. The role of the particular becomes more pronounced as modernity develops, until a romantic like Friedrich Schlegel could …
No ideas but in things.–William Carlos WilliamsI fall to pieces each time I see you again.–Patsy ClineOn his fantastic travels, Lemuel Gulliver encounters scholars busily inventing new forms of language. These include a large mechanical device that makes texts at random, an attempt to reduce language exclusively to nouns, and, taking that idea to its …
In the first article of Salar Bill’s Art Journal, I want to look at one of the most widely used techniques in: Collage. In fact, collage has been one of the techniques used by many modernists like Picasso, and then we want to know what exactly is collage? Over the course of the twentieth century, …
One might assume that an overview of the history of existentialism would offer a definition of its subject at the outset. But existentialism, in principle, rejects a neat dictionary definition or formulation. It is not a consistent or systematic philosophy or approach to thought.If anything, existentialism defined itself against systems: systems of thought like Georg …
Respect is tied to names. Anonymity and respect rule each other out. The anonymous communication promoted by digital media is dismantling respect on a massive scale. It is also responsible for the expanding culture of indiscretion and disrespect.Social media shitstorms are anonymous, too. That is the source of their power. Names and respect are linked. …
The issue of censorship, taken strictly, seems to be of little interest if applied to the works of Spinoza in Germany. The reason is that the first book of Spinoza that was published in Germany, i.e. the German translation of the Ethics, came out as late as 1744. There was thus no opportunity for censorship …
It is perhaps more than a coincidence that the first letters of the word ‘modern’ are ‘mode’. Both words are taken from the Latin modo meaning ‘just now’. Walter Benjamin was extraordinarily attuned to modernity as a process of constant renewal already anticipated, inscribed in what is already there. For the ‘now’ is itself the …
A modern city dweller suddenly transported back to Paris or London in the 1750s would find crowds whose appearance was at once simpler and more puzzling than the crowds of our time. A man in the street now can distinguish the poor from the middle class by sight and, with a little less precision, the …