Tag: Philosophy
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‘Against Progress’ by Slavoj Žižek
Slavoj Žižek’s Against Progress is not a conventional monograph so much as a deliberately fissured surface that refuses to heal: a collection of analytic incursions that turn the received object—“progress”—into a problem that will not stop returning as symptom, screen, and compulsion. The wager is that only a description that never quite stabilizes can meet…
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Žižek’s First As Tragedy, Then As Farce
Slavoj Žižek’s First As Tragedy, Then As Farce appears, on first approach, to be a slender intervention into the disorientation of the first post–Cold War decade, yet it insists on staging a wholesale rectification of how that decade should be named, remembered, and used. It is a book anchored in the shock of two emblematic…
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Interview with Nick Land, the Father of Accelerationism: Capitalism, and the Transformative Power of Technology
The Interview situates itself as a long, unhurried encounter with a thinker who long ago abandoned the safety rails of inherited philosophical diction in favor of a thermodynamic lexicon keyed to markets, code, circuitry, and the machinic appetites of a world already departing from us. Hosted by Theory Underground and released in mid-October 2024 as…
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Žižek’s Heaven in Disorder | 天上大乱
Comrades of the interval—neither before nor after, but in the thickening middle—what follows keeps faith with a specifically 2021 mood: an in-between composition framed by emergency, written when vaccination queues braided with border queues, when lockdown routines folded into supply-chain algorithms, and when a pathogen taught political economy at scale. The temporal setting matters. Numbers,…
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Hegel and the State
Franz Rosenzweig’s Hegel and the State (1920; first English translation 2024) is far more than an erudite study of Hegel’s political thought; it is a monumental philosophical biography, a tragic historical meditation, and an intellectual reckoning with the failure of German idealism’s promise when confronted with the realities of nineteenth- and early twentieth-century politics. Written…
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Hegel and the Philosophy of Right
Dudley Knowles’ Hegel and the Philosophy of Right is one of the most sustained and philosophically rigorous engagements with Hegel’s Philosophy of Right, a work that itself remains among the most complex statements of modern political philosophy. The Philosophy of Right is notorious both for its forbidding prose and for the controversies it has generated:…
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‘Basic Concepts of Ancient Philosophy’ by Martin Heidegger
Martin Heidegger’s Basic Concepts of Ancient Philosophy stands as one of the most decisive documents of his Marburg period, a lecture course delivered in 1926, at the very moment in which the contours of Being and Time had been brought to their sharpest formulation. While that magnum opus provides a radically new analytic of existence…
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The Critique of Pure Modernity: Hegel, Heidegger, and After
The Critique of Pure Modernity: Hegel, Heidegger, and After is David Kolb’s uncompromising attempt to prise open the conceptual grammar by which modernity so often flatters and confines itself. He begins from the disquiet that “modernity” seems to demand a cruel alternative—either oppressive inheritances or an abstracted, procedural freedom—and he refuses the ultimacy of that…
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The Disciplines of Interpretation: Lessing, Herder, Schlegel and Hermeneutics in Germany 1750-1800
Robert S. Leventhal’s The Disciplines of Interpretation: Lessing, Herder, Schlegel and Hermeneutics in Germany, 1750–1800 is a genealogy of interpretive reason at the precise historical moment when “reading” ceases to be a private virtuosity and becomes a structured practice, an institutional technology, and a self-questioning mode of historical knowledge. Published by Walter de Gruyter in…
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Herder on Nationality, Humanity, and History
To describe Frederick M. Barnard’s Herder on Nationality, Humanity, and History is to chart a work that treats Johann Gottfried Herder not merely as a source of quotable slogans about Volk, language, and culture, but as an architect of a supple vision in which the formative powers of a people’s speech, memory, and art are…
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Johann Gottfried Herder on World History: An Anthology
Johann Gottfried Herder on World History: An Anthology presents Herder’s lifelong wager that history becomes intelligible only when narrated as the becoming of humanity—not a thin abstraction but a living principle that binds language, climate, custom, belief, and art into a single, ever-unfinished text. The editors, Hans Adler and Ernest A. Menze, organize thirty-eight selections…
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Herder’s Essay on Being: A Translation and Critical Approaches
Herder’s Essay on Being: A Translation and Critical Approaches, edited by John K. Noyes, is a landmark publication that makes accessible for the first time in English Johann Gottfried Herder’s Versuch über das Sein (Essay on Being), a youthful but philosophically decisive text from 1763–64. Long overshadowed by the commanding figure of Kant, Herder has…
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Žižek’s Too Late to Awaken: What Lies Ahead When There Is No Future
Too Late to Awaken: What Lies Ahead When There Is No Future is Žižek at his most distilled and unflinching: a diagnosis of the present whose wager is that we can only act if we renounce the narcotic hope that action will preserve the continuity of how we live now. From the opening pages he…
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Alexandre Kojève’s Introduction to the Reading of Hegel: Lectures on the Phenomenology of Spirit
Introduction to the Reading of Hegel: Lectures on the Phenomenology of Spirit stands as one of the twentieth century’s rare philosophical milestones, a work that both revived and reoriented an entire French understanding of Hegel’s magnum opus. Born in the ferment of pre‑World War II Paris, these lectures—delivered by Alexandre Kojève between 1933 and 1939…
Simon Gros 