Alain de Botton’s School of Life Presents Animated Introductions to Heidegger, The Stoics & Epicurus

in Life, Philosophy | October 5th, 2014

Why is Western philosophy so difficult, so abstruse, and so damned wordy? Perhaps it’s simply a matter of job security. It’s generally well-known, after all, that some of the most taciturn philosophers were also some of the poorest—Ludwig Wittgenstein, who was independently wealthy, notwithstanding. But if you follow the format Alain de Botton lays out in the philosophy department of his video series, “The Big Ideas,” you can pick up some Heidegger, a little Stoic thought, and the ideas of Epicurus each in under ten minutes of lighthearted commentary, accompanied by quirky animation from a studio called Mad Adam (who favor a very Terry Gilliam-like approach to their art). There are those critics who think de Botton glib and shallow, a “self-help guru to the British middle-class—a life coach.” In a certain sense, I suppose he’d have to agree with that assessment, given that his “cultural enterprise,” The School of Life, has as its tagline “good ideas for everyday life.” Do the dead European philosophers of ages past have helpful tips for our mundane 21st century existence, and do de Botton’s videos do any justice to the quality of their thought?

As to the first question, I suppose we’d have to answer, yes. As for the second—I leave it to the philosophers to weigh in. At the top of the post, we have Martin Heidegger—“the most incomprehensible German philosopher that ever lived”—in just over five minutes. It turns out that “beneath the jargon, Heidegger tells us simple, even at times homespun truths” about things like meaning and freedom. Once a ranking member of the Nazi party, Heidegger, de Botton says, “saw the error of his ways,” a claim people often repeat without a great deal of evidence. But Heidegger’s Nazi past aside, his thought, de Botton says, helps us get back in touch with the mystery of existence, what the philosopher called das sein, or “Being.” This term more or less sums up the core of Heidegger’s entire project, and I confess I never really grasped what he means by it. Maybe you will after taking de Botton’s very short course.

Next up, we have the Stoics, not a specific movement or group as such, but an entire school of thought that “flourished for 480 years in ancient Greece and Rome.” Stoicism offered a narrow range of responses to the ancient problem de Botton defines as “Life is very difficult,” and it appealed to commoners and aristocrats alike because of its universal concern with suffering. De Botton gives us the gist by referring to the way we typically use the word “stoic” these days, as a synonym for “brave.” He says a bit more, of course, about Stoicism’s answers to life’s challenges, listen above.

Finally, we have Greek philosopher Epicurus, who “helps us think about money, capitalism, and our runaway consumer society.” This despite the fact that Epicurus predates capitalism and consumer society by well over two-thousand years. Nonetheless, his thought is eternally relevant, given that its primary concern, “What makes people happy?” is a problem unlikely to be solved in anyone’s lifetime. But Epicurus had some answers, and he purveyed them—like de Botton—by founding his own school. He and his disciples, Epicureans, were rumored to be debauched and wicked libertines steeped in excessive food, drink, and sex. In fact, the opposite was true: Epicurus was an austere and sober man, who urged restraint in matters sexual and fiscal, making him, in a way, a genuine conservative.

De Botton’s “Big Ideas” curriculum currently includes two other videos that function as general defenses of the humanities: “What is Art for?” and “What is Literature for?” Both questions might sound meaningless to some refined aesthetes, but for a great many people getting on with the painful, sometimes dreary, and often harried business of daily life, questions about utility are sensible enough. New big ideas videos are on the way—in the meanwhile, visit de Botton’s School of Life Youtube channel for video shorts on “Mood,” “Relationships,” and more.

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Josh Jones is a writer and musician based in Durham, NC. Follow him at @jdmagness.

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Open Culture Picks Our 10 Avant-Garde Favorites on Ubuweb: Joyce, Borges, Sontag, Wittgenstein & More

in Film, Literature, Music, Philosophy | October 2nd, 2014

If you know about Open Culture, surely you know about Ubuweb. If you don’t, its slogan says almost everything you need to know about it: “All Avant-Garde. All the Time.” This vast online repository of cutting-edge cultural artifacts from a variety of eras also adheres steadfastly to the principle of keeping all of its material free: free in the sense of charging you nothing to read, hear or view it, and free in the sense that you can do whatever you want with it. Needless to say, the site, founded by poet Kenneth Goldsmith in 1996, has made many fans, and Ubuweb itself has tapped quite a few of the higher-profile ones to curate top ten lists. Assembled by people like New Yorker music critic Alex Ross, novelists Hari Kunzru and Rick Moody, alterna-pop star Nick “Momus” Currie, these help the potentially (and understandably) bewildered find their way through the trove of Ubuweb’s media, which is universally influential and vanishingly obscure, viscerally transgressive and vertiginously intellectual, eternally exciting and deliberately boring.

This month, Ubuweb called upon our fearless editor here at Open Culture for a top ten list. Most of the picks have been previously featured on OC. The list runs as follows:

1. Finnegans Wake (1939), Read by Patrick Healy
Open Culture: Hear All of Finnegans Wake Read Aloud: A 35 Hour Reading

“The sheer pleasure one can derive — conventional expectations duly set aside — from the almost tactile quality of Joyce’s prose, its earthy, ancient, elven sounds, seems more to the point of appreciating this odd, frustrating work. Perhaps, like any well-written poem, one simply needs to hear it read aloud. Joyce himself said so, and so you can.”

2. The Craft of Verse: Jorge Luis Borges’ Norton Lectures, 1967–68
Open Culture: Jorge Luis Borges’ 1967–8 Norton Lectures On Poetry (And Everything Else Literary)

“Nearing both 70 years of age and total blindness, Borges nonetheless gives a virtuosically wide-ranging series of talks, freely reaching across forms, countries, eras, and languages without the aid of notes. Entitled ‘This Craft of Verse,’ these lectures ostensibly deal with poetry. Alas, like many literary geeks, I know too little of poetry, but if Borges can’t motivate you to learn more, who can?”

3. Three Rare Films by Susan Sontag
Open Culture: The Filmmaking of Susan Sontag & Her 50 Favorite Films (1977)

“Sontag, they say, ‘sought to liberate art from interpretation (which is a bit ironic, of course, for someone who was essentially an exalted critic). When it came to her own film, she made something that intended to deliberately confound the notion that there was any sort of underlying meaning beyond exactly what the audience was seeing on the screen directly in front of them.’ ”

4. M.A. Numminen Sings Wittgenstein (1983 / 1989)
Open Culture: Ludwig Wittgenstein’s Tractatus Gets Adapted Into an Avant-Garde Comic Opera

“Given the Tractatus’s firebombing of an entire area of human endeavor, it’s no surprise it hasn’t fared well in many traditional departments, but that hasn’t stopped Wittgenstein’s work from finding purchase elsewhere, influencing modern artists like Jasper Johns, the Coen Brothers, and, not least surely, Finnish avant garde composer and musician M.A. Numminen. This odd character, who caused a stir in the 60s by setting sex guides to music, took it upon himself to do the same for many of the Tractatus’s propositions, and the results are, well…. Listen for yourself.”

5. Aldous Huxley’s Visionary Experience
Open Culture: Aldous Huxley, Psychedelics Enthusiast, Lectures About “the Visionary Experience” at MIT (1962)

“Huxley had already gained worldwide fame for his views on better living, which was sometimes achieved, he believed, through psychedelic drugs. This might have already sounded like old hat in, say, the San Francisco of the late 1960s, let alone the 70s and onward, but in these recordings Huxley says his piece in — I still can’t quite believe it — the MIT of the early 1960s. But diagnosed a couple years before with the cancer that would claim his life the next, he had nothing to lose by spreading the word of his substance-induced discoveries.”

6. Jacques Derrida’s Interview with Ornette Coleman [PDF]
Open Culture: Philosopher Jacques Derrida Interviews Jazz Legend Ornette Coleman: Talk Improvisation, Language & Racism (1997)

“Translating Coleman’s technique into ‘a domain that I know better, that of written language,’ Derrida ventures to compare improvisation to reading, since it ‘doesn’t exclude the pre-written framework that makes it possible.’ For him, the existence of a framework—a written composition—even if only loosely referenced in a jazz performance, ‘compromises or complicates the concept of improvisation.’ ”

7. Joey Ramone Sings a Piece by John Cage Adapted from James Joyce’s Finnegans Wake: “The Wonderful Widow of Eighteen Springs,”
Open Culture: Hear Joey Ramone Sing a Piece by John Cage Adapted from James Joyce’s Finnegans Wake

“Ramone’s interpretation of the piece is enthralling simply as a piece of recorded music. But it’s also a fascinating piece of cultural history, representing a confluence of the foremost figures in early twentieth century modernist literature, mid-century avant-garde music, and late century punk rock.”

8. The Avant-Garde Project
Open Culture: The Avant-Garde Project: An Archive of Music by 200 Cutting-Edge Composers, Including Stravinsky, Schoenberg, Cage & More

“Every sphere of recorded music has its crate-diggers, those happy to flip through hundreds — nay, hundreds of thousands — of obscure, forgotten vinyl albums in search of their subgenre’s even obscurer, more forgotten gems. This holds especially true, if not in number than in avidity, for enthusiasts of the 20th-century classical-experimental-electroacoustic tradition that The Avant-Garde Project takes as its preservation mandate.”

9. Alice Toklas Reads Her Hashish Fudge Recipe
Open Culture: Alice B. Toklas Reads Her Famous Recipe for Hashish Fudge (1963)

“In this 1963 recording from Pacifica Radio, Toklas reads her notorious recipe. The snack ‘might provide an entertaining refreshment for a Ladies’ Bridge Club or a chapter meeting of the DAR,’ Toklas notes in her reedy, dignified voice.”

10. Jean Baudrillard Sings!
Open Culture: Jean Baudrillard Reads His Poetry, Backed By All-Star Arts Band (1996)

“Known to hip academic types and avant-garde-ists, Baudrillard’s maybe the kind of thinker who gets name-dropped more than read (and he’s no easy read). But in the audio clip above, he reads to us, from his poetry no less, while backed by the swirling abstract sounds of The Chance Band. It’s an odd, one-time, assemblage of artists and thinkers Ubuweb describes as ‘unbelievable but true!’ ”

If you’ve already seen everything on it, congratulations: you can consider yourself a true, shall we say, OC OG.

Extensive Archive of Avant-Garde & Modernist Magazines (1890–1939) Now Available Online

Take a Virtual Tour of the 1913 Exhibition That Introduced Avant-Garde Art to America

Colin Marshall hosts and produces Notebook on Cities and Culture and writes essays on cities, language, Asia, and men’s style. He’s at work on a book about Los Angeles, A Los Angeles Primer. Follow him on Twitter at @colinmarshall or on Facebook.

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A Free Cartoon Biography of Ayn Rand: Her Life & Thought

in Comics/Cartoons, Literature, Philosophy | October 2nd, 2014

Ayn Rand is one of the most divisive figures in 20th Century American thought. In some circles, particularly on Wall Street and in Washington DC think tanks, she’s seen as a patron saint of laissez faire capitalism. She preached the virtues of individualism and decried government handouts and taxes before it was cool, after all. In other circles, her bestselling books are thought to be little more than justifications of sociopathic behavior couched in stilted, preachy prose. Whittaker Chambers famously dismissed her final book, Atlas Shrugged, in a review for William F. Buckley’s National Review: “Out of a lifetime of reading, I can recall no other book in which a tone of overriding arrogance was so implacably sustained. Its shrillness is without reprieve. Its dogmatism is without appeal.”

Yet Rand’s thought found a great deal of appeal among American conservatives. Alan Greenspan, the former head of the Federal Reserve, was a member of Rand’s inner circle. Former vice presidential candidate Paul Ryan and likely presidential contender Rand Paul are both noted followers. Whether you agree with her or not, Rand is someone you need to understand if you want to get a sense of what’s going on with American politics. So for those of you who might blanche at the thought of wading through one of her phonebook-sized tomes, check out Darryl Cunningham’s cartoon biography of Rand.

Cunningham traces her life — her family’s loss of wealth and property at the hands of the Bolsheviks during the Russian Revolution, her immigration to America at age 21, and her eventual rise in fame and fortune. Elegantly and concisely, Cunningham not only lays out Rand’s philosophy but also paints a complex portrait of a deeply contradictory person. All with the help of cartoons.

Rand preached the virtue of individuality but she ruthlessly excommunicated anyone in her cult-like inner circle who deviated from her ideology. She praised reason over emotion but her spectacularly complicated personal life was riddled with petty jealousies and long simmering feuds. She abhorred government aid for the poor but she lived on Social Security at the end of her life. And perhaps strangest of all, considering the current American political climate, Rand vocally supported both atheism and abortion rights, but she has been utterly embraced by the American right.

You can see a page of Cunningham’s work above, or you can read his entire work, 66 pages of comic goodness, at ACT-I-VATE.

via io9

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Jonathan Crow is a Los Angeles-based writer and filmmaker whose work has appeared in Yahoo!, The Hollywood Reporter, and other publications. You can follow him at @jonccrow. And check out his blog Veeptopus, featuring one new drawing of a vice president with an octopus on his head daily. The Veeptopus store is here.

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Philosopher Jacques Derrida Interviews Jazz Legend Ornette Coleman: Talk Improvisation, Language & Racism (1997)

in Jazz, Music, Philosophy | September 26th, 2014

Images of Derrida and Coleman, via Wikimedia Commons

This most certainly ranks as one of my favorite things on the internet, and I dearly wish we had audio to share with you, though I doubt any exists. What we do have is an English translation from the French of an interview that originally took place in English between philosopher Jacques Derrida and jazz great Ornette Coleman.

Now there are those who dismiss Derrida—who consider his methods fraudulent. If you’re one of them, this is obviously not for you. For those who appreciate the turns of his thought, and the fascinating possibilities inherent in a Derridian approach to jazz improvisation, not to mention the convergences and points of conflict between these two disparate cultural figures, read on.

The interview took place in 1997, “before and during Coleman’s three concerts at La Villette, a museum and performing arts complex north of Paris that houses, among other things, the world-renowned Paris Conservatory.” As I mentioned, the two spoke in English but, as translator Timothy S. Murphy—who worked with a version published in the French magazine Les Inrockuptibles—notes, “original transcripts could not be located.” Curiously, at the heart of the conversation is a discussion about language, particularly “languages of origin.” In answer to Derrida’s first question about a program Coleman would present later that year in New York called Civilization, the saxophonist replies, “I’m trying to express a concept according to which you can translate one thing into another. I think that sound has a much more democratic relationship to information, because you don’t need the alphabet to understand music.”

As one example of this “democratic relationship,” Coleman cites the relationship between the jazz musician and the composer—or his text: “the jazz musician is probably the only person for whom the composer is not a very interesting individual, in the sense that he prefers to destroy what the composer writes or says.” Coleman goes on later in the interview to clarify his ideas about improvisation as democratic communication:

[T]he idea is that two or three people can have a conversation with sounds, without trying to dominate or lead it. What I mean is that you have to be… intelligent, I suppose that’s the word. In improvised music I think the musicians are trying to reassemble an emotional or intellectual puzzle in which the instruments give the tone. It’s primarily the piano that has served at all times as the framework in music, but it’s no longer indispensable and, in fact, the commercial aspect of music is very uncertain. Commercial music is not necessarily more accessible, but it is limited.

Translating Coleman’s technique into “a domain that I know better, that of written language,” Derrida ventures to compare improvisation to reading, since it “doesn’t exclude the pre-written framework that makes it possible.” For him, the existence of a framework—a written composition—even if only loosely referenced in a jazz performance, “compromises or complicates the concept of improvisation.” As Derrida and Coleman try to work through the possibility of true improvisation, the exchange becomes a fascinating deconstructive take on the relationships between jazz and writing. (For more on this aspect of their discussion, see “Deconstructin(g) Jazz Improvisation,” an article in the open access journal Critical Studies in Improvisation.)

The interview isn’t all philosophy. It ranges all over the place, from Coleman’s early days in Texas, then New York, to the impact of technology on music, to Coleman’s completely original theory of music, which he calls “harmolodics.” They also discuss globalization and the experience of growing up as a racial minority—an experience Derrida relates to very much. At one point, Coleman observes, “being black and a descendent of slaves, I have no idea what my language of origin was.” Derrida responds in kind, referencing one of his seminal texts, Monolingualism of the Other:

JD: If we were here to talk about me, which is not the case, I would tell you that, in a different but analogous manner, it’s the same thing for me. I was born into a family of Algerian Jews who spoke French, but that was not really their language of origin [… ] I have no contact of any sort with my language of origin, or rather that of my supposed ancestors.

OC: Do you ever ask yourself if the language that you speak now interferes with your actual thoughts? Can a language of origin influence your thoughts?

JD: It is an enigma for me.

Indeed. Derrida then recalls his first visit to the United States, in 1956, where there were “ ‘Reserved for Whites’ signs everywhere.” “You experienced all that?” he asks Coleman, who replies:

Yes. In any case, what I like about Paris is the fact that you can’t be a snob and a racist at the same time here, because that won’t do. Paris is the only city I know where racism never exists in your presence, it’s something you hear spoken of.

“That doesn’t mean there is no racism,” says Derrida, “but one is obliged to conceal it to the extent possible.”

You really should read the whole interview. The English translation was published in the journal Genre and comes to us via Ubuweb, who host a pdf. For more excerpts, see posts at The New Yorker and The Liberator Magazine. As interesting a read as this doubly-translated interview is, the live experience itself was a painful one for Derrida. Though he had been invited by the saxophonist, Coleman’s impatient Parisian fans booed him, eventually forcing him off the stage. In a Time magazine interview, the self-conscious philosopher recalled it as “a very unhappy event.” But, he says, “it was in the paper the next day, so it was a happy ending.”

Hear more of Coleman’s thoughts on language, sound, and technology in the 2008 interview above (see here for Part 2). The year previous, in another conjunction of the worlds of language and music, Coleman was awarded the Pulitzer Prize in music for his live album Sound Grammar, a title that succinctly expresses Coleman’s belief in music as a universal language.

Image of Ornette Coleman by Geert Vandepoele

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Josh Jones is a writer and musician based in Durham, NC. Follow him at @jdmagness.

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Georges Bataille: An Introduction to The Radical Philosopher’s Life & Thought Through Film and eTexts

in Film, Literature, Philosophy | September 10th, 2014

Charles Baudelaire’s decadent visions pushed the Victorian cult of beauty toward modernism, Henry Miller’s lurid epics pushed a then staid modernism toward anarchic beat writing, and Georges Bataille and the surrealists of his arts journal Documents gave us much of the culture we have today, call it what you will if postmodern is too passé. Obsessed with torture, pornography, horror, and bodily fluids, Bataille “wanted to bring art down to the base level of other physical phenomena,” says surrealist scholar Dawn Ades. Where other transgressive figures of the past have mostly been tamed, Bataille, I submit, is still quite dangerous. The Bataille quote that opens the film above, A perte de vue (“As far as the eye can see”), won’t go down easily with almost anyone: “The world,” reads narrator Jean-Claude Dauphin, “is only inhabitable on the condition that nothing in it is respected.” This, the documentary suggests, is Bataille’s philosophy, one he defines as “a need for sensibility to call up disturbance.”

Bataille, a failed priest and sometime librarian, founded surrealist flagship Documents in 1929, published 15 issues, then went on to write novels, poems, and essays for the next thirty years. But his most famous work has remained his first, The Story of the Eye, originally published under the pseudonym Lord Auch in 1928. It’s a book that even today can seem like “social anthrax,” as novelist John Wray put it, in a way that other once taboo-breaking works like Joyce’s Ulysses, for example, certainly do not. It’s an apt comparison, not on literary grounds, but given that both writers were haunted by once fervent Catholicism turned to fervent rejection. Writes Mark Hudson in The Guardian, “he did believe in his own transgressive philosophies in a quasi-religious sense.” Like Joyce, “there’s a powerful dualism in his thought, a profound religious impulse.” Unlike Joyce—or Bataille’s fellow surrealists for that matter, who “excommunicated” him from the movement—“there is still much in his work that is difficult to redeem and far from being accommodated by the mainstream—if indeed it ever can be.”

You can read four of Bataille’s challenging pieces at Supervert’s elibrary: The Story of the Eye and three essays, “The Use Value of D.A.F. de Sade,” “The Big Toe,” and “The Cruel Practice of Art.” Bataille’s philosophy, writes Supervert, “apparently lay in personal experience—in particular his childhood with a suicidal mother and a blind, syphilitic father.” This kind of psychologizing may seem superfluous, yet Bataille introduces himself to us, in his own words—through audio interviews in the first few minutes of A pert de vue—as the product of “a sad place to be.” Personal origins aside, Bataille’s philosophy has resonated widely and “helped pave the way to contemporary critical theory.” By embracing everything rejected, feared, or held in contempt, Bataille reclaimed everyday parts of human existence—those we euphemize or seek to contain—for literature, philosophy… and well, the internet. If some of Bataille’s preoccupations are irredeemable for mainstream tastes, you may find as you watch the film above and read Bataille’s writing that this is for good reason.

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Josh Jones is a writer and musician based in Durham, NC. Follow him at @jdmagness

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Ludwig Wittgenstein’s Tractatus Gets Adapted Into an Avant-Garde Comic Opera

in Music, Opera, Philosophy | August 28th, 2014

Ludwig Wittgenstein, enfant terrible or idiot savant? A student of the great Bertrand Russell and protégé of renowned mathematician and logician Gottlob Frege, the angry young upstart’s Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus put both elder thinkers on notice: The days of their comfortable assumptions were numbered, in a series of austere, cryptic aphorisms and symbolic propositions that make very little sense to those of us who lack the prodigious intellects of Russell and Frege. While Wittgenstein is often dismissed, writes Paul Horwich at New York Times’ philosophy blog “The Stone,” as “self indulgently obscure,” perhaps the real reason many academic philosophers reject his work is that it renders them superfluous. Philosophy, Wittgenstein obliquely claimed in his half-mystical, hyper-logical treatise, “can’t give us the kind of knowledge generally regarded as its raison d’être.”

Given the Tractatus’s firebombing of an entire area of human endeavor, it’s no surprise it hasn’t fared well in many traditional departments, but that hasn’t stopped Wittgenstein’s work from finding purchase elsewhere, influencing modern artists like Jasper Johns, the Coen Brothers, and, not least surely, Finnish avant garde composer and musician M.A. Numminen.

This odd character, who caused a stir in the 60s by setting sex guides to music, took it upon himself to do the same for many of the Tractatus’s propositions, and the results are, well…. Listen for yourself. At the top of the post, we have video of Numminen performing the fifth and final movement of his Tractatus suite—the famous final proposition of that strange little book: “Whereof one cannot speak, thereof one must be silent” (“Woven man nicht sprechen kann, darüber muss man schweigen”). Numminen sings this in German, in his high-pitched, creaking voice. The rest of the suite he sings in English. Just above, hear the first movement, “The World Is…,” and below, hear movements 2–4, “In Order To Tell…,” “A Thought Is…,” and “The General Form Of A Truth Function.” He even sings the symbols, in breathless transcription. You can stream and download the full suite at Ubuweb and follow along at the Tractatus hypertext here.

Should Numminen’s tinpan alley-like compositions strike you as a particularly ridiculous setting for Wittgenstein’s genius, fear not; the Motet below (“Excerota Tractati Logico-Philosophici”), by composer Elisabeth Lutyens, treats the eccentric German’s work with a great deal more reverence.

via Leiter Reports

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Josh Jones is a writer and musician based in Durham, NC. Follow him at @jdmagness

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Philosopher Alain Badiou Performs a Scene From His Play, Ahmed The Philosopher (2011)

in Philosophy, Theatre | August 26th, 2014

Alain Badiou occupies an odd place in contemporary philosophy. Showered with superlatives like “France’s greatest living philosopher” and “one of the greatest thinkers of our time,” he somehow doesn’t merit even a cursory entry in that definitive academic reference site, the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy. Whether this is simply an editorial oversight or an intentional slight, I am not qualified to say.

Perhaps one of the difficulties of writing concisely on Badiou is that Badiou himself roams far and wide—from Hegel to Lacan, Kant, Marx, Descartes, and even St. Paul. Not easily identifiable as belonging to one school or another, Badiou’s work, though staunchly politically left, resists anti-humanist postmodernism and seeks to ground truth in universals. It’s an unsurprising tack given that he first trained in mathematics.

As if his philosophical work weren’t enough, Badiou also writes novels and plays. Of the latter, his Ahmed the Philosopher: 34 Short Plays for Children & Everyone Else has recently appeared in an English translation by Joseph Litvak. Just above, you can see Litvak as Ahmed and Badiou himself as “a curmudgeonly French demon,” writes Critical Theory, “who takes joy in informing for the police.” Filmed in Germany in 2011,

This scene, entitled “Terror,” serves as a commentary on French xenophobia towards Arab immigrants. Badiou at one point also draws reference to Nazi-occupied France, a sort of “good old days” for Badiou’s callous character.

Badiou as the “demon of the cities” spotlights the brute limitations imposed by violent, unjust police, who summarily execute innocent people in the streets. Taking perverse pleasure in describing such an occurrence, the demon leers, “I like to imagine that I’m hidden behind a curtain. I salivate!” before going on to describe with relish the even uglier scenario of a “bungled” shooting. The audience giggles uneasily, unsure quite how to respond to the exaggerated evil Badiou performs. It seems unthinkable, absurd, their nervous laughter suggests, that anyone but a cartoon devil could take such sadistic delight in this kind of cruelty, much less, as the demon does, initiate it with anonymous libel. It’s an unnerving performance of an even more unnerving piece of writing. Below, you can see more scenes from Ahmed the Philosopher, performed in English sans Badiou at UC Irvine in 2010.

If you like Badiou as an actor, this may be your only chance to see him perform. However, the extroverted philosopher hopes to break into Hollywood in another capacity—bringing his translation of Plato’s Republic to the screen, with, in his grand design, Brad Pitt in the leading role, Sean Connery as Socrates, and Meryl Streep as “Mrs. Plato.” I wish him all the luck in the world. With the blockbuster success of religous epics like Noah, perhaps we’re primed for a Hollywood version of ancient Greek thought, though like the former film, purists would no doubt find ample reason to fly up in arms over a guaranteed multitude of philosophical blasphemies.

via Critical Theory

Radical Thinkers: Five Videos Profile Max Horkheimer, Alain Badiou & Other Radical Theorists

Hear Michel Foucault’s Lecture “The Culture of the Self,” Presented in English at UC Berkeley (1983)

Josh Jones is a writer and musician based in Durham, NC. Follow him at @jdmagness

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George Orwell Reviews a Book by That “Bag of Wind,” Jean-Paul Sartre (1948)

in Letters, Philosophy | August 20th, 2014

Yesterday we featured George Orwell’s review of Adolf Hitler’s Mein Kampf — not just an isolated newspaper piece, or one of a scattered few, in a life otherwise spent churning out important novels like Animal Farm and 1984, but a particularly perceptive book review among the many in his prolific journalistic career. (He even wrote “Confessions of a Book Reviewer,” the definitive article on that practice.) Today we have another of Orwell’s pieces taking on a well-known 20th-century Continental figure: this time, the French existentialist philosopher Jean-Paul Sartre and his book Portrait of the Antisemite.

But as a prelude to the review, have a look at the October 1948 letter above, posted originally at Letters of Note. In it, Orwell writes to his publisher Frederic Warburg, keeping him posted on the state of the manuscript of 1984. Then, at the very end, he adds that “I have just had Sartre’s book on antisemitism, which you published, to review. I think Sartre is a bag of wind and I am going to give him a good boot.” That “good boot,” which ran in The Observer the next month, goes like this:

Antisemitism is obviously a subject that needs serious study, but it seems unlikely that it will get it in the near future. The trouble is that so long as antisemitism is regarded simply as a disgraceful aberration, almost a crime, anyone literate enough to have heard the word will naturally claim to be immune from it; with the result that books on antisemitism tend to be mere exercises in casting motes out of other people’s eyes. M. Sartre’s book is no exception, and it is probably no better for having been written in 1944, in the uneasy, self-justifying, quisling-hunting period that followed on the Liberation.

At the beginning, M. Sartre informs us that antisemitism has no rational basis: at the end, that it will not exist in a classless society, and that in the meantime it can perhaps be combated to some extent by education and propaganda. These conclusions would hardly be worth stating for their own sake, and in between them there is, in spite of much cerebration, little real discussion of the subject, and no factual evidence worth mentioning.

We are solemnly informed that antisemitism is almost unknown among the working class. It is a malady of the bourgeoisie, and, above all, of that goat upon whom all our sins are laid, the “petty bourgeois.” Within the bourgeoisie it is seldom found among scientists and engineers. It is a peculiarity of people who think of nationality in terms of inherited culture and property in terms of land.

Why these people should pick on Jews rather than some other victim M. Sartre does not discuss, except, in one place, by putting forward the ancient and very dubious theory that the Jews are hated because they are supposed to have been responsible for the Crucifixion. He makes no attempt to relate antisemitism to such obviously allied phenomena as for instance, colour prejudice.

Part of what is wrong with M. Sartre’s approach is indicated by his title. “The” anti-Semite, he seems to imply all through the book, is always the same kind of person, recognizable at a glance and, so to speak, in action the whole time. Actually one has only to use a little observation to see that antisemitism is extremely widespread, is not confined to any one class, and, above all, in any but the worst cases, is intermittent.

But these facts would not square with M. Sartre’s atomised vision of society. There is, he comes near to saying, no such thing as a human being, there are only different categories of men, such as “the” worker and “the” bourgeois, all classifiable in much the same way as insects. Another of these insect-like creatures is “the” Jew, who, it seems, can usually be distinguished by his physical appearance. It is true that there are two kinds of Jew, the “Authentic Jew,” who wants to remain Jewish, and the “Inauthentic Jew,” who would like to be assimilated; but a Jew, of whichever variety, is not just another human being. He is wrong, at this stage of history, if he tries to assimilate himself, and we are wrong if we try to ignore his racial origin. He should be accepted into the national community, not as an ordinary Englishman, Frenchman, or whatever it may be, but as a Jew.

It will be seen that this position is itself dangerously close to anti-semitism. Race prejudice of any kind is a neurosis, and it is doubtful whether argument can either increase or diminish it, but the net effect of books of this kind, if they have an effect, is probably to make antisemitism slightly more prevalent than it was before. The first step towards serious study of antisemitism is to stop regarding it as a crime. Meanwhile, the less talk there is about “the” Jew or “the” antisemite, as a species of animal different from ourselves, the better.

In Philosophy Now, Martin Tyrrell writes on Orwell’s relationship to the subject, which he saw “as a kind of gratuitous cleverness and he had no appetite for that. In Orwell’s writings, fiction or non-fiction, there are few good intellectuals. Where they appear, then it is usually only to spin words without meaning. At best, they are inadvertently confusing; at worst, deliberately so: Marxists, for example, or nationalists or Anglo or Roman Catholics. Or Jean-Paul Sartre. [ … ] Bewildered by existentialism, what most irked Orwell about Sartre was his seeming denial of individuality.” Tyrrell describes Orwell as “an individualist so much so that, when he came to list his reasons for becoming a writer, he put ‘sheer egoism’ at the top. In addition, and much more controversially, his review of Mein Kampf sees in Hitler more than a little of the tragic Orwellian hero, the small man embarked upon a doomed revolt.” Not everyone, of course, will agree with Orwell’s aggressively plainspoken takes on Hitler and Nazism, or Sartre and existentialism, but try substituting a variety of other controversial “-isms” for “antisemitism” in the review above, and you’ll see how we’d still think more clearly if we bore his observations in mind today.

via Letters of Note

George Orwell Explains in a Revealing 1944 Letter Why He’d Write 1984

George Orwell’s 1984: Free eBook, Audio Book & Study Resources

Jean-Paul Sartre Breaks Down the Bad Faith of Intellectuals

Sartre, Heidegger, Nietzsche: Documentary Presents Three Philosophers in Three Hours

Walter Kaufmann’s Classic Lectures on Nietzsche, Kierkegaard and Sartre (1960)

Colin Marshall hosts and produces Notebook on Cities and Culture and writes essays on cities, language, Asia, and men’s style. He’s at work on a book about Los Angeles, A Los Angeles Primer. Follow him on Twitter at @colinmarshall or on Facebook.

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