Tag: history
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Fragmentary, No. 28
This reciprocal determination operates elsewhere as well, although by other means and with other aims. It involves a double displacement, which renders a concept plausible or true by pointing to an error and, at the same time, by enforcing belief in something real through a denunciation of the false. The assumption is made that what […]
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Fragmentary, No. 16
The notion of ‘just now’ has been lived out indeed in a century already divided into decades with names and nicknames, ranging from the dynastic to the dynamic, from Edwardian to Roaring. Most important, an instant-by-instant difference in the actual experience of historical time lives out—and in—the rhythms of an unprecedented and accelerating pace of […]
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Fragmentary, No. 11
My wing is ready for flight, I would like to turn back. If I stayed everliving time, I’d still have little luck. —Gerhard Scholem, “Greetings from the Angelus” There is a picture by Klee called Angelus Novus. It shows an angel who seems about to move away from something he stares at. His eyes are wide, […]
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Fragmentary, No. 8
[T]he four theses of modernity. We cannot not periodize. Modernity is not a concept, philosophical or otherwise, but a narrative category. The narrative of modernity cannot be organized around categories of subjectivity; consciousness and subjectivity are unrepresentable; only situations of modernity can be narrated. No ‘theory’ of modernity makes sense today unless it comes to […]
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Fragmentary, No. 2
“One of the mysteries in the history of chemistry is how seldom chemists blew themselves up while investigating novel substances and reactions. Hydrogen and oxygen . . . can burn smoothly together, but they can also react explosively. Priestley used to carry small bottles of these two airs, and he entertained visitors by exploding the […]
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