i'm an activist thriving on layers and layers of affinity for shades of nuance. i have a life-long love for the Weird / Uncanny / Unheimlich.
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Privacy matters because it shields us from possible abuses of power. Human beings need privacy just as much as they …
"The CIA is the most powerful secret police force in the world. Its hand has been seen in many incidents, …
The Nature of Tyranny was written and published at the dawn of the twentieth century by Abdul Rahman Al-Kawakibi, one …
An urgent reckoning with digital technology’s fundamentally right-wing legal and economic underpinnings
In a timely challenge to the potent political …
An explosive memoir charting one woman’s career at the heart of one of the most influential companies on the planet, …
Volum nominalizat la Premiile Observator cultural pentru Eseu/Publicistică, ediția 2025
Traducerea textelor din limba engleză de Marius-Adrian Hazaparu
„După ce …
The way I understand it, Post-Europe explores two questions: 1. What is the future of philosophy in Asia? 2. How can European philosophy transcend its roots in colonialism / violence / imposition and become relevant once more as a lens through which we can reason about the interplay between technology and society?
I think that the answers Yuk Hui proposes to these two questions are the following: 1. Asian philosophy needs to go through a process of individuation of thought. For this, it needs internal tension, an understand of its roots, counter-points to stand against and, crucially, a creative outlook. 2. Post-European philosophy can come from a Europe that leaves behind the obsession with nationality, and instead assumes the embodied position of the "homeless"/ "nation-less" person / people.
"On the front of geopolitics, we find increasing resistance against American imperialism along with the homogenisation that it brought about. Such resistance in the name of national security ends up in calls for autonomy and state sovereignty on one hand, and a multipolar world on the other. But how different are they from the call for Heimat, for the return to the state in the name of the people? That is however not a solution that we should look to in order to resolve the planetary crisis in the twenty-first century, since increasing competition between states will never put an end to wars and to the intensifying exploitation of the planet. The longing for Heimat has become a global melodrama in the past century, expressing itself as antagonism between self and other, leading to conflicts of all kinds. Therefore, we must envision our journey by looking at it from the standpoint of Heimatlosigkeit."
— Post-Europe by Yuk Hui (Page 119)
Nicholas is a would-be poet and video-store clerk with a weeping hole in his hand …
The Cipher is addictive. The first-person narration manages to name a lot of details, to make room for a lot of backstory, while still sounding like it could be the transcript of someone telling you a really long anecdote.
The "horror" of the entire novel is, perhaps, contained in how fast the unbelievable becomes mundane. In how easy it is to accept the premise of the book and perhaps wonder what we might do, faced with similar circumstances.
To define 'progress' is to lay claim to the future. Seminal thinker Slavoj Žižek turns …
Why did this apparently irrational strategy work? Because the knowledge contained in ‘Of course we know very well’ is not neutral : its objectivity is already biased. What we ‘know very well’, what is ‘obvious’, what is accepted as a matter of course, is not written in stone, but in shi# ing sand; it is a socially-constructed shared hegemonic opinion which obfuscates its owns cracks and inconsistencies in order to seem immutable, and our task is to change it. Th e point is not to provide ‘alternative facts’, but to undermine the framing that makes us select some facts and ignore others. This is why we are not dealing here with the usual disavowal but with a courageous act of taking a risk and ignoring our apparent limitations. Our stance should be: we know we appear weak and divided, but we should nevertheless do what has to be done. We know (or feel with the force of seeming knowledge) that we cannot avert environmental collapse, but we should still take the actions that would give us the best chance of doing so. In such a situation, where apocalypse is on the horizon, one should bear in mind that the standard logic of probability no longer applies – we need a different logic, that described by Jean-Pierre Dupuy:
"The catastrophic event is inscribed into the future as a destiny, for sure, but also as a contingent accident . . . [I]f an outstanding event takes place, a catastrophe, for example, it could not not have taken place; nonetheless, insofar as it did not take place, it is not inevitable. It is thus the event’s actualization – the fact that it takes place – which retroactively creates its necessity."
Nicholas is a would-be poet and video-store clerk with a weeping hole in his hand - weeping not blood, but …
