"In or about December, 1910," claims Virginia Woolf
, "human character changed." Specifically Virginia Woolf
was referring to an exhibition on Manet and Post-Impressionists Art put together by art critic Roger Fry in which the subjective turn in modernist art made is sensational debut. An estranged public called the exhibition: “horror,” “madness,” “infection,” “sickness of the soul,” “putrescence,” “pornography,” “anarchy” and “evil. No doubt madness was in the air, and that many of the artist of the day held some sense of a coming dark historical rupture that would soon incarnate in world war however, the intention of artist like Kandinsky, Schoenberg, or Woolf often mirrored the concerns of the philosophers and visionaries of the day such as Henri Bergson
, William James, Sri Aurobindo
who glimpse vague utopian potentialities of a spiritual self-awakening evolving within the Zeit Geist, that Sri Aurobindo
calls a coming Subjective Age
.
, "human character changed." Specifically Virginia Woolf was referring to an exhibition on Manet and Post-Impressionists Art put together by art critic Roger Fry in which the subjective turn in modernist art made is sensational debut. An estranged public called the exhibition: “horror,” “madness,” “infection,” “sickness of the soul,” “putrescence,” “pornography,” “anarchy” and “evil. No doubt madness was in the air, and that many of the artist of the day held some sense of a coming dark historical rupture that would soon incarnate in world war however, the intention of artist like Kandinsky, Schoenberg, or Woolf often mirrored the concerns of the philosophers and visionaries of the day such as Henri Bergson, William James, Sri Aurobindo who glimpse vague utopian potentialities of a spiritual self-awakening evolving within the Zeit Geist, that Sri Aurobindo calls a coming Subjective Age. The historical discontinuities and continuities of the infamous era one hundred years ago are explored in Thomas Harrison's book The Emancipation of Dissonance
whose introductory chapter is provided in this article. What follows is an exploration of post-impressionist art. As we turn the corner into 2010 we begin with a juxtaposition of cultures at the beginning of this century between the 10's. Perhaps it is also at this time that we have one of our first encounters with post humanism as we arrive at the limits of humanism, here is Harrison on the Expressionist Movement of the Day:
whose introductory chapter is provided in this article. What follows is an exploration of post-impressionist art. As we turn the corner into 2010 we begin with a juxtaposition of cultures at the beginning of this century between the 10's. Perhaps it is also at this time that we have one of our first encounters with post humanism as we arrive at the limits of humanism, here is "As I see it, expressionism is a paradoxical undertaking: It manifests both absolute faith and absolute disbelief in the most venerable preconceptions fueling the very project of artistic expression, including beauty, order, understanding, and truth. In intellectual history it signals the end of a Western, humanistic tradition, the termination, as it were, of its guiding objective. Indeed, in one reading, this simultaneous culmination and negation of a project to give form to universally comprehensible knowledge is precisely what enables so many of the theoretical and artistic changes that succeed this radical juncture: the formal license of avant-garde art, no longer held to common standards; the new objectivist literature of the twenties, returning from the world of potential to that of things; abstract expressionism; the historicizing ontology of Martin Heidegger; the turn of intellectuals in the postwar years toward political and social engagement."
reveals a couple of Latour endnotes.
(which I’m reading with a study group right now) a master signifier is a meaningless signifier that organizes other concepts into a coherent understanding. Examples of master-signifiers that Zizek gives are Communism, God, the Law. He says a master signifier is an empty signifier (i.e. no signified or meaning) yet in its transcendent place in an ideology it organizes all the other signifiers. For example, Communism has been a master signifier which, through its presence, creates a certain kind of sense for the concepts: class struggle, commodity, ideology, alienation, etc. Posted by Jeff Meyerhoff to 
in which Nandy theorizes resistance to colonialism in 
. This was the first work of non-biblical literature I’d ever invested considerable energy in studying. I poured myself into not merely the book, but also the reception that met the book when it was first published and the evolution its various readings have undertaken since. (This doesn’t count as a book, per se, but if we were to include essays, I’d have to point to my long-standing devotion to 
’s essay “The Task of the Translator.” Since encountering this I’ve been committed to the notion that texts and ideas in general have a kind of organic life-cycle — deformations, repressions, internal squabbles, decay, death, afterlife, etc. — and cannot imagine approaching them in a de-contextualized, non-materialistic way, even if this means, as it must, that all such thinking is radically incomplete. If I were to continue this passing comment into a full-fledged paragraph I’d go on at length about how W. G. Sebald’s 
illustrates all this perfectly, but I’ll just leave it as a parenthetical aside.) Reading The Confidence-Man provided me with the means, in fits and starts and via a warren of wayward paths, to cast about for a sense of theological subjectivity immersed in the complexity of its own self-creativity. I’ve come a long way since this, and none of the Melville stuff has seen the light of day in any official capacity, but perhaps one day.
. Where Adam and Anthony found themselves changed by Nietzsche, Schelling was it for me. Though not as immediately “sexy” as Nietzsche, the middle-period of Schelling’s work is no less intense. I read this book at the perfect time: it harmonized in a shocking way with how I’d been reading Melville in particular; it was engaged in a profound philosophical dialogue that was not so much contradictory as excessive to the assumptions about Being that inform deconstruction; and, even more, it was written in a typically Teutonic non-clever tone whose mesmerizingly poetic cadence summoned a disturbing image of a God-who-is-created that emboldened me to keep advancing in my reflections on aesthetics in the thinking of ontology and theology.
. Nothing else embodied the “network” (which I would now probably call “ecology”) of creativity I sought to theorize like that work — certainly not in that voice, which always seemed to simultaneously say more and less than it seemed. I felt as though Serres was beckoning his readers not merely to consume his work and ideas, but insisting instead that we had an ethical, indeed even a biological, responsibility both to consume and then shit out his ideas, for in that shitting we were fertilizing the field for something else. Whether we owned the field or laid claim to the crop, or whether we were trespassing, it mattered not, since the ideas weren’t really possessions — momentary sustenance, if anything. I can’t say that Serres’ philosophy has carried into my recent work, but this spirit, or at least the one I took from it, certainly has.
. Here my overarching concern with aesthetics was re-articulated for me in a political register. Ranciere resisted the denigration of aesthetics in our political philosophies, and instead presented a way for me to move forward with my work on the theological value of duplicity and creativity. His work has inspired me to direct attention to the concrete extension (dare I say ‘praxis’?) of my understanding of aesthetics — toward the fully-embodied, present struggles and practicalities of life faced by those who are denied a self-creative sensibility.
. Just a stunning piece of work. In my opinion, if you only pick up one of the books any of us have mentioned, get it, and you’ll be well on the way to full-fledged AUFS initiation.
, take a strong pro-hierarchy stance and align themselves with neoconservative values.
into the 21st century. It’s a site that consistently brings high quality thinking and it has started focusing on posthuman destinies lately.
, Chicago University of Chicago Press, 2005
. London: Sage Publications, 2000.
, New York Random House Press, 1970
than most people do. His attitude from the start seems to me the right one: “we cannot go back to pre-Heideggerian philosophy, but there is something out of order about the climate of that philosophy.” [...] And I think readers of this blog know that I’ll be the first to give Whitehead as much credit as possible: he’s a genuinely great philosopher, and any given century doesn’t have too many of those. [...]
.
, whom I regarded as the greatest philosopher that had ever lived. Curiously enough, 
] 
said in 1968, when the American Anthropological Association was debating whether to pass a resolution against the war in 
, 
together with Bergson and Deleuze, as if they all belonged to some grand vitalist alliance of contemporary philosophy. They don’t. For there is a major philosophical difference between those who solve the deadlock in favor of the continuum, and those who solve it in favor of the discrete, and Whitehead and Latour (both heirs of occasionalism) resolve it in favor of the discrete. 
was busy with. Nevertheless, there are commonalities of much significance and interesting possibilities.