I actually went to work in the mines in Carbonia to run away from a girl I had got back from prison camp on August 29 I had got back home from Germany I had a bit of a holiday at home I was really emaciated I was really down I stayed at home all the time I didn’t do anything I read some newspapers some books some stuff I found lying around I passed the time like that but then I needed money and I couldn’t find any work and so I went to sea I traveled around just ...

In the last weeks preceding the collapse of his rational powers, Nietzsche wrote, “I am a rendezvous of experiences”; the word is indeed rendezvous. He meant that he had spent his life running toward the world and that the world had been running toward him.This double attraction, this movement, had been central. The immense generosity of his mind had made him the meeting point of cosmic forces, of the social currents of his time, and of the ideas that he seemed so often more to capture than to create. This generosity was a form of love. He showed us in ...

Cairo, August 3, 2011 I lie in bed, my eyes wide-open in the darkness. The air is hot and heavy with humidity and dust. I try in the dimness to remember where I am. Sad memories emerging from the deep recesses of my mind inexplicably surface along with flashes of childish, mysterious joys. I fumble numbly for the lamp, but the electricity is cut off. Satellite communications were also shut down at one point, on the orders of his Excellency the Supreme President Mohamed Hosni Mubarak. This sacred military decision had been issued in secret. Fate was on his side; it helped ...

With a radical imagination, the work of Erkki Kurenniemi (b. 1941) refutes a common sense that bases technology in frigid thought. A mathematician, nuclear physicist, and expert in digital technologies, Kurenniemi established the electronic studio at the Department of Musicology at Helsinki University in 1961–62. He collaborated with the composer Terry Riley on the first Happening to take place in Finland, with the artists group Dimensio and protagonists of the underground music scene, such as M. A. Numminen and the band Sperm. In the late 1960s, he made non- narrative short films that he hesitated to call art; a kind of ...

—What should I do? We anticipated atrocities, mayhem, chaos. All there was, was a strange stillness lingering over violence from the night before. It doesn’t matter where or when this was. There were, there are, many nights. The calmness was sincere, not eerie as one might imagine. Blood shed in peace, startles. It felt welcoming, enough to want to be there, amid anyone. We walked among people, tents, clusters of conversations, we gave out newspapers, shared news and oranges we had bought. Nine floors up, in a balcony, overlooking freedom, journalists propped their cameras for an uninterrupted airing of a live ...

Ana Prvacki: What does it mean to be “prepared” to greet? I am reminded of my grandmother and family in Romania preparing for guests in the late 1970s and early ’80s. It was an exhaustive effort. The house was cleaned, everything put in its rightful place, shiny and aired, the buffet elaborate and ornate (radishes were cut into little flowers, and parsley was laid out in patterns). And this was during the Ceaus‚escu era. There was barely enough food for the daily meals, but all the “good stuff” was brought out for guests, from meat and cocoa for cooking to ...

I’ve just returned from comforting my best friend, Gesine. In the meantime I’m sure that she won’t kill herself. The storm has not been weathered. I saw how he trashed her, then slammed the apartment door behind him. He has the delicacy to continue living with her to avoid hotel costs. He leaves her apartment and goes about his business, visiting his new mistress, a married woman for whom Gesine has been demoted. I have to take care that my words of comfort (although I usually just gather her silently in my arms and put her to bed) don’t fuel her ...

Has the human capacity for thinking and feeling been captured by the machine? This is an issue that Franco Berardi Bifo identifies when he says that we have been learning words from the machine, not the mother, leading to a situation where language and affectivity have been separated. Extending this to intellectual and social behavior, he calls this state of affairs a catastrophe of modern humanism, where we no longer have sufficient attention spans for love, tenderness, and compassion. His concern is that we are becoming more and more distanced from affect through the ways in which it is rendered, ...

The visitors from the big cities remark on how beautiful it is. And it’s true that the Benedictines had a knack for choosing the finest locations for their monasteries, and this one too, sitting alongside the long River Fulda amid verdant meadow, its large stone buildings nestled in among the smaller village houses, farms, and woods, makes a good impression. Slowly Ines shakes her head. No, no, no. It’s not beautiful, she says, it’s claustrophobic. I understand. I’m prepared for a haunted ruin of an old prison…

The black notebook marked “LAK 529” contains two periods of note-taking by György Lukács, written two years apart, which constitute part of the bequest that was recovered from the so-called Heidelberg suitcase. In 1973, with the help of a current biography, an employee of the Deutsche Bank in Heidelberg identified the owner of the material as Lukács, who had deposited them in 1917, prior to his return from Germany to Budapest. In addition to 1,600 letters and text fragments, this material also contained Das Gericht, which was presumably written in 1913 and dedicated to his first wife, Ljena Grabenko, as ...

My dear friend, Quite some time has passed since my last letter, and there are a few urgent matters that I would like to tell you about. One day, when I was writing the place-name “Kassel” on my smartphone, I made a mistake and the word was automatically corrected by the intelligent digital device to “Kabul.” This made me think of the conflicted relationship between the technologies of communication on the one hand, and intentionality and language on the other. In turn, that made me think about conflicts in general (that is, not just war), and then about the destruction of art ...

Symptom of the Present. Today, biology and the medical sciences are highly advanced in determining the physiology and neurology of sleep, and the emerging medicalization of sleep disorders has be- come a new site of “biocapital” accumulation. At the same time, our “twenty-four-hour society,” with its incessant production, communication, and consumption activities, makes sleep a problematic, uncertain element of everyday life, even perceived as a waste of time or as inertia in a mobile and pragmatic neoliberal social order obsessed by the idea of full employment of finite human existence.The anxiety around sleep (evidenced in the booming scientific research in ...