Tag: books
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The Discipline of Civilization: Sloterdijk on Domestication, Spheres, Europe, and Philosophical Distance
In the provided interview-documentary philosophy is treated less as a storehouse of doctrines than as a contested social function: a practice that owes an account of its utility, its authority, and its freedom under modern conditions. Within a carefully edited alternation of interviewer prompts, narrated contextualization, and Sloterdijk’s own self-characterizations, the film constructs a description…
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Freud’s Journey as an Outsider: Exploring Identity and Antisemitism in Vienna’s Complex Culture
The ARTE documentary Outsider. Freud. presents Sigmund Freud (1856–1939) through a deliberately biographical and experiential lens, treating his theoretical production less as an abstract “system” and more as a sequence of intellectual responses to lived ruptures. It frames Freud’s work as developing under persistent conditions of exposure—social, familial, bodily, and political—and argues that these conditions…
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The War on Warriors: Behind the Betrayal of the Men Who Keep Us Free
At the center of The War on Warriors lies a problem that is neither narrowly political nor merely institutional but existential: the degradation of the very principle by which a republic sustains the moral and functional distinction between those who defend it and those who are defended by it. The book examines the dissolution of…
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Zero to One: Notes on Startups, or How to Build the Future
Zero to One can be read as a sustained attempt to isolate what “newness” means when it is treated as an object of practical reason rather than as a decorative label for novelty. Its governing problem-space concerns how a finite agent, acting under uncertainty and inside institutions oriented toward repetition, can nonetheless form determinate commitments…
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Origins of Modern Japanese Literature
Origins of Modern Japanese Literature analyses the historical constitution of “modern literature” by treating it as an institutional and epistemic formation whose apparent self-evidence is produced through determinate operations of perception, language, and social organization. Karatani’s distinctive contribution is in a method that reconstructs “origins” as effects of inversion: the modern system retroactively posits the…
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Inside Palantir: How a Secretive Tech Titan is Shaping the Future of AI, Warfare, and Global Data
J. Hayden Elsen’s Inside Palantir: How a Secretive Tech Titan is Shaping the Future of AI, Warfare, and Global Data puts forward a claim about contemporary power: the decisive institutional transformation of the present is realized through software platforms that convert heterogeneous data into actionable, governable, and contractible forms of knowledge. The book’s contribution lies…
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Hegel’s World Revolutions
Richard Bourke’s Hegel’s World Revolutions claims that Hegel’s historical and political philosophy yields its central diagnostics only when reconstructed through the sequence of revolutions that, in Hegel’s account, generate modern freedom while repeatedly placing it at risk. Bourke’s distinctive contribution lies in combining source-driven intellectual history with conceptual analysis in order to reinsert Hegel into…
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‘Opera’s Second Death’ by Slavoj Žižek & Mladen Dolar
Opera’s Second Death is not simply a philosophical reflection on opera, but as a sustained theoretical experiment in which opera is treated as a privileged site for thinking some of the most intractable problems of modern philosophy: death and repetition, enjoyment and loss, subjectivity and its dissolution, the relation between symbolic order and bodily excess,…
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Cosmopolitan Right at the Borderline: Strict Hospitality, Material Interdependence, and the Juridical Conditions of Peace
Roberta Picardi’s lecture advances a precise scholarly stake: it seeks to determine, within Kant’s Perpetual Peace and the juridical architecture presupposed by it, what cosmopolitan right is as a peace-promoting factor when its content is explicitly restricted to “universal hospitality.” The distinctive contribution consists in a methodical narrowing that refuses two familiar assimilations at once:…
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Beckett, Lacan, and the Gaze
The book advances the claim that Beckett’s visual universe can be described neither through a general theory of “modernist perception” nor through a simple psychoanalytic allegory of seeing, but only by reconstructing the specific way in which the gaze functions as an impersonal, structuring dimension where subject and world fail to meet. In forming a…
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‘The Unnamable’ by Samuel Beckett
Beckett’s The Unnamable presents itself as the limit‐case of narrative fiction and as an experiment in what remains of subjectivity when every conventional support of the novel—plot, character, world, and even a stable first person—is progressively dissolved. It pursues, with almost pedantic consistency, the question of whether there can be a self at all once…
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‘The Psychology of Love’ by Sigmund Freud
The Psychology of Love gathers, in a single, carefully sequenced volume, Freud’s principal inquiries into how erotic life is constituted by fantasy, conflict, and the vicissitudes of development. Its scholarly stake lies in showing—with clinical and metapsychological precision—that human sexuality is always already symbolically mediated, that desire is organized by scenes and substitutions rather than…
Simon Gros 