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A Carnival of Destruction
The elite's complicity in mass movements lies in their thrill at unmasking societal hypocrisy, yet this descent into shamelessness fuels a carnival of destruction that empowers mob rule. Straddling the line between boldness and brazen disregard, figures like Trump and Musk embody the seductive but corrosive allure of totalitarian nihilism.11-17-2024
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Hannah Arendt’s Ethics
By Samantha HillTwo pieces on Hannah Arendt’s analysis of Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil appeared this week. In a review essay for Contemporary Political Theory John Macready offers a probing critique of Deirdre Lauren Mahony’s Hannah Arendt’s Ethics...
05-12-2019
What Illiberal Democracy Means
By Roger BerkowitzIn the United States, terms like “academic freedom” and “free speech” have come to be scoffed at by many students and faculty. They have somehow been turned into conservative talking points.
05-12-2019
Student Protests
By Samantha HillStudents at Philadelphia’s University of the Arts are trying to get Camille Paglia fired “and replaced by a queer person of color.” The campaign was provoked by a talk Paglia proposed on “Ambiguous Images: Sexual Duality and Sexual Multiplicity in Western Art.”
05-12-2019
Martin Heidegger and Günther Anders on Technology: On Ray Kurzweil, Fritz Lang, and Transhumanism
By Babette BabichAll mere chasing after the future so as to work out a picture of it through calculation in order to extend what is present and half thought into what, now veiled, is yet to come, itself still moves within the prevailing attitude belonging to technological calculating representation.
- Martin Heidegger, The Turning
05-09-2019
Naive Thinking on Race
Roger BerkowitzInterviewing Thomas Chatterton Williams, Otis Houston asks Chatterton Williams about a line from Terence “I am human; nothing human is alien to me.” Isn’t that naive, Houston asks? Chatterton Williams responds in praise of a certain naivete.
05-05-2019
When YouTube Overtakes Life
By Roger BerkowitzJesse Singal tells the story of Desh Amila, a Sri Lankan immigrant and Australian citizen who “has built a career out of facilitating intellectually oriented public events, often between people with serious disagreements.” Desh, as he is called, has specialized in organizing difficult conversations on topics like Islamic extremism.
05-05-2019
Reading Arendt Now
By Samantha HillPeople often ask me, “Why Arendt?” The honest answer is that I fell in love with her writing my freshman year of college, reading The Human Condition on a brown leather sofa in the library, between the stacks.
05-05-2019
Arendt on Marx
By Samantha HillGeoffrey Wildanger reviews the first volume of Hannah Arendt’s Critical Edition The Modern Challenge to Tradition: Fragmente eines Buchs, focusing on Arendt’s unfinished Marx manuscript.
05-02-2019