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.
philosophy
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.
Buridan’s Ass and the Problem of Free Will in John Sturges’ ‘The Great Escape’
Escape in John Sturge's The Great Escape is a tactical mission, a way to remain in the war despite having been taken out of it. Free Will is complicated.
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.
First Tragedy, Then Farce, Then What?
Riffing off Marx's riff on Hegel on history, art historian and critic Hal Foster contemplates political culture and cultural politics in the age of Donald Trump in What Comes After Farce?
We Must Not Mean What We Say: On Godard’s ‘Le Petit Soldat’
While philosopher Stanley Cavell endeavors to show that we must mean what we say in a very important sense, Godard's Bruno Forestier of Le Petit Soldat suggests that we simply cannot and must not mean what we say.