You could say, in a vulgar Freudian way, that I am the unhappy child who escapes into books. Even as a child, I was most happy being alone. This has not changed.
In contrast to modern art, which causes displeasure-modern art, by definition, hurts. In this precise sense, modern art is sublime: it causes pleasure-in-pain, it produces its effect through its own f...
أول درس يجب تعلمه هو عدم لوم الأفراد ومواقفهم، المشكلة ليست فساد الفرد وجشعه، ولكن النظام الذي يشجعه على الفساد. الحل ليس شعار في الشوارع الرئيسية وليس وول ستريت، ولكن في تغيير النظام الذي يجعل الشوار...
Are, however, the terrorist fundamentalists, be they Christian or Muslim, really fundamentalists in the authentic sense of the term? Do they really believe? What they lack is a feature that is easy to...
A little poison now and then: that makes for pleasant dreams. And much poison at the end, for a pleasant death.
Dangerous situation and we don’t have any clear ethical guidance here. And did you notice, when you talk about the possible and the impossible, how strangely this is distributed? On the one hand, in t...
But what about the apparent absurdity of the idea of dignity, freedom, and reason, sustained by extreme military discipline, including of the practice of discarding weak children? This absurdity is si...
What is true thinking? Thinking is not solving problems. The first step in thinking is to ask these sorts of questions: Is this really a problem? Is this the right way to formulate the problem? How di...
For example, tolerance designates a real problem—when I criticize it, I am, as a rule, asked: But how can you be in favor of intolerance towards foreigners, of misogyny, of homophobia? Therein resides...
When Zeno the Cynic was confronted with Eleatic proofs of the non-existence of movement, he simply raised and moved his middle finger, or so the story goes …
What this means is that we should reject not only all manifestations of ‘alternative modernity’ (which amount to a ‘capitalism without capitalism’, without its destructive aspect), but also all attemp...
Populism is ultimately always sustained by the frustrated exasperation of ordinary people, by the cry I don’t know what is going on, but I’ve just had enough of it! It cannot go on! It must stop! Such...
Another blatant case of regress as part of the capitalist progress is the enormous rise of precarious work. Precarious work deprives workers of a whole series of rights that, till recently, were taken...
Witness the surprise of the average American: 'How is it possible that these people display and practise such a disregard for their own lives?' Is not the obverse of this surprise the rather sad fact...
What if eternity is a sterile, impotent, lifeless domain of pure potentialities, which, in order fully to actualize itself, has to pass through temporal existence?
WHEN THE TURKISH COMMUNIST WRITER Panait Istrati visited the Soviet Union in the mid-1930s, the time of the big purges and show trials, a Soviet apologist trying to convince him about the need for vio...
The performative dimension at work here consists of the symbolic efficiency of the mask: wearing a mask actually makes us what we feign to be. In other words, the conclusion to be drawn from this dial...
Postmodern politics definitely has the great merit that it 'repoliticizes' a series of domains previously considered 'apolitical' or 'private'; the fact remains, however, that it does not in fact repo...
Populism is ultimately sustained by the frustrated exasperation of ordinary people, by the cry I don't know what's going on, but I've just had enough of it! It cannot go on! It must stop!
Our biological body itself is a form of hardware that needs re-programming through tantra like a new spiritual software which can release or unblock its potential.