Alien or Alienated? The Monstrous, the Normal, and the Tragic in Our Borders
Shakespeare, Knut Hamsun, Flannery O’Connor, and the Medieval Icelandic Göngu-Hrolfs saga each explore who is the alien, and who is alienated, within our borders.
philosophy
Antonio Gramsci Biography ‘To Live Is to Resist’ Is Unrivaled
In Gramscian fashion, Frétigné details the material conditions of Antonio Gramsci’s insight and influence while shirking historical determinism and abstract idealism.
Undone Apart: Artistry and Philosophy in Graphic Adventure Game ‘Life Is Strange’
Why create such a highly-fictionalized, aestheticized setting as Life Is Strange to express the confusion and contradictions of life?
Landing Instructions for Derrida
In his book, An Event, Perhaps, Derrida's intellectual development is adroitly unpacked by Peter Salmon without bamboozling the reader or peddling dime-store psychologizing.
Literary Scholar Andrew H. Miller On Solitude As a Common Bond
Andrew H. Miller's On Not Being Someone Else considers how contemplating other possibilities for one's life is a way of creating meaning in the life one leads.
The Singularity of Žižek
According to Slavoj Žižek's latest work, Hegel in a Wired Brain, a new kind of Fall from the Fall is necessary.
Choosing Experience in Abbas Kiarostami’s ‘Taste of Cherry’
Critic Roger Ebert was frustrated with Abbas Kiarostami's Taste of Cherry because the film subverts our desire to understand another -- the very core of cinema's intent.
The Erotic Disruption of the Self in Paul Schrader’s ‘The Comfort of Strangers’
Paul Schrader's The Comfort of Strangers presents the discomfiting encounter with another —someone like you—and yet entirely unlike you, mysterious to you, unknown and unknowable.
Breaching Closure in Pasolini’s ‘Teorema’
Pier Paolo Pasolini's classic drama, Teorema, grapples with the parable -- the manner of knowing that which always remains just beyond our grasp.
What Does Water See? On Fighting as Perception in Bruce Lee’s Kung Fu Films
Bruce Lee's fight scenes evoke Gestalt theory: actual perception is a response to a provocation. Consider this philosophy while watching the films in Bruce Lee: His Greatest Hits and you too can become the water.
On Infinity in Miranda July’s ‘Me and You and Everyone We Know’
In a strange kind of way, Miranda July's Me and You and Everyone We Know is about two competing notions of "forever" in relation to love.
