Activity

B.) YOU’RE THE CAPTAIN of an American destroyer escort. Your ship is equipped with sonar. You transmit a ping, wait for the echo, ping and wait for the echo. Though whenever you ping a U-boat, by the time its echo is received, by the time its echo is processed, the U-boat’s in another place, but th…

Technology, to Heidegger, is whatever directs existence toward utility. Its expression is solely in its “enframing” (Ge-Stell), or the way by which technology recontextualizes all objects and even subjects by function: stones enframed as cutters of stones, rocks as producers of fire—a painting fram…

THE DOUBLE IS THE DUPLICATED SELF, the progenitor of mass production. If all products of a certain use resemble one another, it’s because all means of production resemble one another, because all consumers are essentially disseminations of a single consumer, a phantasmagoria manufactured by adverti…

Instead, eighteenth-century literature was best concerned with identities—which might be defined, in a Hegelian sense, as the thoughts by which a person opposes knowledge. Such is the plot of the coming-of-age novel, in which a handsome young man—typically spurned by a handsome young woman who’s op…

IF YOU’RE A WRITER, YOU translate yourself. There’s an idea in your head, or an image, and it must find its way to words. There has always been a tension, a tension or an opposition, between writing that seeks to record life as experience, in the private language of experience, and writing that see…