Tag: Jacques Derrida

5,500 words

1. The Metaphysics of Presence

In the last installment, we introduced Heidegger’s claim that Western metaphysics ends with Nietzsche. For Heidegger, metaphysics is the expression of an anthropocentrism that culminates in the meaninglessness and inhumanity of modern technological civilization. With Nietzsche, metaphysics comes full circle and “reverses” Platonism. Nietzsche prepares the ground for the ultimate result of metaphysics, which is not actually a work of philosophy. It is modern technological civilization itself. (more…)

1,092 words

Gad Saad
Suicidal Empathy: Dying to be Kind
New York: Broadside Books, 2026

Gad Saad is a Lebanese Jew whose family moved to Canada after a Palestinian nationalist group aligned with the Global Left called Fatah kidnapped his parents. Given this history he has come to view the extremely feminine American and Canadian liberal position of empathy towards killers, convicts, and terrorists with alarm, especially as these views have become official government policy. (more…)

3,960 words

At school there was a weekly roll-call of bad boys, those who had broken the school rules at the highest level. They would be required to attend the headmaster’s office and, as the weeks of the term rolled by, a pattern began to emerge. Some boys rarely made the blacklist, some maybe once a term, some never (future prefects all). But a few names came up with some regularity, and one or two were permanent fixtures. And I should know. (more…)

2,111 words

Jacques Derrida

(Part 1 here)

Still confining ourselves for simplicity to spoken utterance.
-J.L. Austin, How to Do Things with Words
Also the epigraph to Jacques Derrida’s Signature, Event, Context (more…)

2,296 words

John Langham Austin was an English philosopher of language, an Oxford Don, and (like Alan Turing) a Military Intelligence Officer, who worked on the D-Day landings. Born in 1911, Austin died relatively young, at the age of 48, and his three books were all published posthumously. (more…)

2,578 words

Alan Sokal

Postmodernism is the first ruthlessly consistent statement of the consequences of rejecting reason.
-Stephen Hicks, Explaining Postmodernism

The story of this book begins with a hoax.
-Sokal & Bricmont, Fashionable Nonsense (more…)

Plato’s cosmology as depicted by Calcidius in his commentary to his fourth-century Latin translation of the Timaeus.

2,882 words

I am embarrassed by the world. I cannot believe that a watch exists and has no watchmaker. — Voltaire

Which of the patterns had the artificer in mind when he made the world? — Plato

Given the world we have created, or rather a world which has been created for us, whoever “we” are could do a lot worse than take advice from the Classical world. For the vast majority of us, our world is one we never made, and those who did are becoming intentionally isolated, remote from those whose lives they control, living as they do in a dry and ideological gated community. (more…)

Abraham Lincoln debating Stephen Douglas during the campaign for the 1860 presidential election, when Lincoln expressed views on blacks that would end any politician’s career today. (Litho by American School, 1858)

2,521 words

Jacques Derrida remarks that Hegel compared words used over time with coins whose inscriptions wear away with use, ultimately leaving two blank and valueless faces signifying nothing. Words change their meaning, certainly, but they also lose meaning through overuse. Our most obvious contemporary example is the word “racism.”

Racism is a perfectly natural response to the “Other” the hard ideological Left like to parade around like a show pony. It is hardwired into us and is a protective reaction, it being an evolutionary advantage to be with those like yourself, and is why from canteens in high school to canteens in penitentiaries, blacks will always sit with other blacks and whites with other whites. (more…)

3,716 words

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…)

1,570 words

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…)

2,512 words

Katherine Beem and Andy Paciorek, eds.
Folk Horror Revival: Field Studies
Wyrd Harvest Press, 2015

The 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…)

11,050 words

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.

(more…)

2,176 words

Mark Fisher
Ghosts of My Life: Writings on Depression, Hauntology and Lost Futures
Winchester, UK: Zero Books, 2014

Jacques 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…)