In 1951, Simone de Beauvoir published the first part of a two-part essay entitled “Faut il Brûler Sade?” or “Must We Burn Sade?” in which she attempted to extract something from the texts of the notorious Marquis other than violent pornography. Roland Barthes would attempt a similar exercise two years later in Le degré zéro de l’écriture (Writing Degree Zero), as would another French writer who, in our ideologically divided age, arouses as much horror in certain quarters as de Sade did more generally in his own time: Jacques Derrida. But perhaps here is a heretic for whom we must pause at the stake and ask, must we burn Derrida? (more…)
Tag: Jacques Derrida
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A few years ago, a friend of mine spent a summer in the south of France with his daughter, who was in grade school at the time. Unfortunately, the daughter caught a bug toward the end of their stay, and my friend made multiple trips to the local pharmacy trying to find the right medicine for her. His French is imperfect, so he struggled to make himself understood by the druggist. (more…)
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Katherine Beem and Andy Paciorek, eds.
Folk Horror Revival: Field Studies
Wyrd Harvest Press, 2015The term “folk horror” is a relatively recent invention that can be applied to a wide range of artistic creations, not all of them belonging to the horror genre. It was popularized by the 2010 BBC TV documentary A History of Horror where the term was used to describe three horror films: Witchfinder General
, The Blood on Satan’s Claw
, and The Wicker Man
. (more…)
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Editor’s Note:
The following text is a transcript by V.S. of one of Jonathan Bowden’s most entertaining lectures, which was delivered to the 25th New Right meeting in London on February 13, 2010. Although Stewart Home is the principal subject, Bowden romps through a wide field of politically correct theories, ultra-Left sects, and decadent forms of modern art.
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Mark Fisher
Ghosts of My Life: Writings on Depression, Hauntology and Lost Futures
Winchester, UK: Zero Books, 2014Jacques Derrida’s Specters of Marx was an attempt to resurrect Marxism. Published in 1993, just after the fall of the Berlin Wall and the collapse of communism across Eastern Europe, Specters of Marx was an attempt to disrupt the apparent flow of historical progression (more…)
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5,903 words
We never manage to bury the dead completely. Their words still echo down to us from beyond life’s event horizon in direct contravention of physical law. Our stance towards death is a determining factor in how the dead return to us; in what form and with what significance they haunt the living. Although they are always there, the ways in which they interact with us vary and shift through time. And, at the present time, there is a strange blend of residual religious funerary rites and atheistic materialism. It feels very much as though we go through the motions of dispatching the dead to the next world without believing a word of it. (more…)