"The outraged do not form a stable we who are displaying concern for society as a whole. Enraged citizens, even though they are citizens, do not demonstrate concern for the whole of social body so much as for themselves. For this reason, outrage quickly dissipates." (7) Is the essence of political structure in liberal society … Continue reading Critique of Swarm – Part 2
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Critique of Swarm – Part 1
The following is a first part of a critique of Byung-Chul Han's In the Swarm. This will respond to the first chapter. I. NO RESPECT "Respect presupposes a distanced look - the pathos of distance. Today, it is yielding to the obtrusive staring of spectacle…. A society without respect, without the pathos of distance, paves … Continue reading Critique of Swarm – Part 1
Notes from the Night Shift
Self-Portrait at Work On my first day at work, after my lunch break at 2:00am, I am locked out of the library where I am assigned to be trained. The radio I have been given doesn't work, but I am soon found by F____ who I am shadowing. F_____ is older, he has long grey … Continue reading Notes from the Night Shift
New Published Article: “More Acid than Communism” and post-script
Last week I had the pleasure of being published by Cosmonaut magazine. You can read the piece, “More Acid than Communism” here. Now that the piece has been out for a while I wanted to write a little bit from a more personal perspective about my concerns with Acid Communism and the opportunities and roadblocks … Continue reading New Published Article: “More Acid than Communism” and post-script
Mental Health Awareness Month, Repost: “Notes Of a Dirty Young Man”
As part of mental health awareness month I wanted to repost this piece that I originally wrote several years ago while I was in a state of particularly bad depression. I wrote an addendum, then later deleted it, some time afterwards because I didn’t want someone to read it without understanding the context in which … Continue reading Mental Health Awareness Month, Repost: “Notes Of a Dirty Young Man”
The Biography, The Accounting of Life, Will Come – (Blanchot, Judgement, the Question of Political Redemption)
"Proletarian revolutions criticize themselves constantly, interrupt themselves continually in their own course, come back to the apparently accomplished in order to begin it afresh, deride with unmerciful thoroughness the inadequacies, weaknesses and paltryness of their first attempts, seem to throw down their adversary only that he may draw new strength from the earth and rise … Continue reading The Biography, The Accounting of Life, Will Come – (Blanchot, Judgement, the Question of Political Redemption)
A Consummation Devoutly To Be Wish’d -The Speech of Hamlet, The Desire of Ending
To be, or not to be, that is the question: Whether 'tis nobler in the mind to suffer The slings and arrows of outrageous fortune, Or to take arms against a sea of troubles And by opposing end them. To die—to sleep, No more; and by a sleep to say we end The heart-ache and … Continue reading A Consummation Devoutly To Be Wish’d -The Speech of Hamlet, The Desire of Ending
The Storyteller: Observations on Walter Benjamin and Roleplaying Games
I "The art of storytelling is coming to an end. One meets with fewer and fewer people who know how to tell a tale properly."[i] So starts Walter Benjamin's 1936 essay "The Storyteller: Observations on the Works of Nikolai Leskov." To Benjamin, who lived through the first World War, the art (or "craft" as he … Continue reading The Storyteller: Observations on Walter Benjamin and Roleplaying Games
Reading Blanchot: Everyday Alienation
"My strangeness had as its cause all that which made me not seem strange to her. With horror she discovered in everything that was ordinary about her the source of everything that was extraordinary about me." - Blanchot, Thomas the Obscure "... in the real world, every being who lives consciously has recourse to fiction; he is … Continue reading Reading Blanchot: Everyday Alienation
Lacunae – An Essay of Exchanges
“We can never hold the world either within speech or outside of speech, the only destiny from now on fitting is that language, in perpetual pursuit and perpetual rupture and without having any other meaning than this pursuit and this rupture, should indefinitely persist.” -Maurice Blanchot “We are imagined beings, beings of vision - … Continue reading Lacunae – An Essay of Exchanges
Pen and Screen 