Conrad’s darkness
“I have never been able to find in any man’s book or any man’s talk anything…
Fragile identities, fragile memories
It is justice which extracts from traumatizing remembrances their exemplary value, turns memory into a project, and it…
The return of sacred violence
“Central to both torture and terror is the political psychology of degradation” Â Paul Kahn, Sacred violence:…
The death of the soul
In The Australian this weekend Greg Sheridan, the conservative and perceptive foreign affairs journalist, comments on…
Mr Dylan’s bad language
I like to check out the winners of the Nobel Prize for Literature. The world of…
Waste books and epigrams
“The excuses we make to ourselves when we want to do something are excellent material for…
Hannah Arendt and remembering thought
After listening to an episode of the On Being podcast, titled Thinking and Friendship in Dark…
Impermanence
There are fragments of songs from my youth stirring. Not lyrics, but angry frustrated declamations. No…
Six asides about culture (and Havel, reblogged)
“Who among us can know what may seem today to be marginal graphomania might not one…
The recurring reproach to reason
Today, I finished reading Andrew Scull’s Madness in Civilization: a cultural history of insanity, which has…