Tag: biographies

2,156 words

“Have you accepted Jesus, Agent Starling? Do you have faith?”
“I was raised Lutheran.”
“That’s not what I asked.” — Thomas Harris, Hannibal

I am a sick man. I am an angry man. — Fyodor Dostoyevsky, Notes from Underground

“I am one thing,” wrote Friedrich Nietzsche, “my writings another.” Although a few decades after his death this aphorism would chime with the Derridean, post-structuralist dictum that there is “nothing outside the text,” a hermeneutic approach to philosophy excludes the philosopher’s life to its detriment. (more…)

2,388 words

Part 7 of 7 (Part 1 here, Part 6 here)

7. Final Wisdom: The Truth Was Not in Him!

“We’d be fools not to ride this strange torpedo to the end!” (more…)

Putin meeting with families of the victims of the Kursk submarine disaster in 2000.

4,319 words

Part 2 of 3 (Part 1 here, Part 3 here)

In the several chapters which deal with Russia’s transformation from a state-run to a mixed economy, Putin is described as frequently involved, but only indirectly: never the main mover and never in the spotlight. (more…)

Putin during his time as a KGB agent in the 1980s.

4,873 words

Part 1 of 3 (Part 2 here)

Thomas Fasbender
Wladimir W. Putin: Eine politische Biographie (Vladimir Putin: A Political Biography)
Neuruppin Landt Manuscriptum 2021, 565 pp. (more…)

Salvador Dalí, Perpignan Train Station

5,557 words

Part 3 of 3 (Part 1 here, Part 2 here)

With Young Virgin Auto-Sodomized by Her Own Chastity, Dalí returned to his paranoiac-critical concerns (i.e., autoeroticism), but now transformed. The paranoiac origin is Dalí’s obsession with Vermeer’s The Lacemaker, which in turn he believed to “consist” in rhinoceroses’ horns. (more…)

Salvador Dalí, The Persistence of Memory

5,672 words

Part 2 of 3 (Part 1 here, Part 3 here)

This excursus has prematurely broached The Gala Situation, so let’s go back to where we started, with Dalí beginning to apply his method: “For the next few years Dalí’s paranoiac process remained preoccupied with fetishist obsessions, including masturbation and his fear of heterosexual sex.”[1] (more…)

6,241 words

Part 1 of 3 (Part 2 here)

Christopher Heath Brown, Jean-Pierre Isbouts
The Dalí Legacy: How an Eccentric Genius Changed the Art World and Created a Lasting Legacy
Apollo Publishers, 2021

“The only difference between me and the Surrealists is that I am a Surrealist.” — Salvador Dalí (more…)

2,782 slov

English original here

Gianfranco de Turris
Julius Evola: The Philosopher and Magician in War: 1943–1945
Rochester, VT: Inner Traditions, 2020

Tento anglický překlad díla Gianfranca de Turrise Julius Evola: Un filosofo in guerra 1943–1945 přichází v příhodný čas, protože ukazuje, jak se velký muž vyrovnává se zhroucením společnosti i osobní tragédií. (more…)

3,334 words

Ron Chernow
Grant
New York: Penguin Press, 2017

Ulysses S. Grant is one of the archetypal Americans. A brilliant general who would only accept unconditional surrender. A modest president who eschewed pomp in favor of simple, democratic attire. (more…)

6,990 words

Suppose your best friend from when you were a young’un became the meanest hombre ever to leave boot-prints on the ground. It indeed happened, on the wild frontier of the Austro-Hungarian Empire. Had Attila the Hun been brought forward in time to meet him, he wouldn’t have challenged a gunslinger like that to a duel at twenty paces. The town of Linz might not be big enough for both of them, but the 5th-century “Scourge of God” would’ve known better than to tangle with the dastardly desperado of the Danube! (more…)

3,484 words

Czech version here

Gianfranco de Turris
Julius Evola: The Philosopher and Magician in War: 1943–1945
Rochester, VT: Inner Traditions, 2020

This English translation of Gianfranco de Turris’s Julius Evola: Un filosofo in guerra 1943–1945 has come along at just the right time, for it shows us how a great man coped both with societal collapse and with personal tragedy. (more…)