To be free, in my opinion, is to sizzle with life, and to dwell in the intervals between the spectacular occurrence of an event with the utmost longing. Here I will turn to Nietzsche because doing so legitimates my own thoughts, who would take someone like me seriously without paying an homage to another canonical figure, but also because he was a ( Read more... )

America is in a crazy place right now. Let me take for a moment the topic of Gun Rights. The NRA is in the back pocket of the GOP... because for some reason we stupidly associate "Capitalism" with "Freedom" instead of exploitation and misery. The problem is... We should be trying to get the NRA to turn their aggression AGAINST the bourgeoisie. ( Read more... )

Digging away at the layered sedimentation of history, can we know about the past? Or is it lost forever beneath impenetrable encrustations and strata, like geological rock formations burying and preserving ancient artifacts. Historians are like archaeologists on some level, but there is a certain futility to pretending like we can "Know" about the ( Read more... )

Just re-read on of my favorite books from my Georges Bataille phase ( Read more... )

Possible "nows" are nothing (i.e. cause anxiety and cannot be represented). Being is always locked into the "Now" that is... what is grounds the possibility of becoming. What will "be" will be within History and Time. In other words, there is no escape from Time, that is, until death and then who knows what happens then ( Read more... )

The discourse of "Man," as in Rights of Man, Liberal Humanism, and The Human Sciences began when the Classical Period ended. The entire book is primarily about this transition, and how subsequent philosophers are indebted to this transition. While the book reads like a History of Philosophy, very few sources are cited. Rarely is a footnote given, ( Read more... )

So I've been jogging almost every day for the last two weeks now. Five out of the last six days I've gone 4 miles, and on the other day I went 1.5 miles. My goal is to lose 10-15 lbs. this summer, and it feels great to finally take my life back into my own hands again ( Read more... )

I was trying to explain this to my wife today. I believe the Buddhists got a few things right for a few simple reasons. I feel as though Karma makes sense. To me, Buddhism is all about recycling, re-appropriating, reusing, and renegotiating energy. There is some positive and some negative energy in the world. But for the most part, none of this ( Read more... )

The World is a War Machine. But it is also a Loving Machine. These two impulses drive the entire world. The insatiable desire for acceptance, love, affection, approval, and nurturing actually leads to the wanton abuses of power, war, destruction, and so forth ( Read more... )

Recently I gave a talk at the Association for the Psychoanalysis of Culture and Society (APCS). It was an attempt to do a post-modern Marxist reading of The Sopranos (don't laugh just yet). For the most part these conferences devoted to Television are sorry excuses for serious intellectual work as professors are sitting around talking about the ( Read more... )