Category: Thinkers

  • Journal Entry: The Void, by Mary Fox

    Journal Entry: The Void, by Mary Fox Introduction What follows is neither philosophical, nor academic. It is, however, both self-indulgent and self-referential, as a journal can only be. It presents no “truths” and it is peppered with inconsistencies and flaws, because I am. I began my journal in May of this year in an attempt…

  • Baudrillard’s Second Life, by René Capovin

    Baudrillard’s Second Life, by René Capovin translated from the Italian by Alan N. Shapiro (this is the draft of a translation that still needs some polishing) The Reality of Virtual Reality Fashion in the modern sense, according to E. Esposito, presupposes the becoming-autonomous of interaction, and is linked, in particular, to the communications of the mass…

  • Georges Bataille and Epistemology

    Let us now consider the origins of science (oh, I forgot, for deconstruction there is no such thing as origins) from the point of view of a different reading of Bataille’s work on religion and ‘archaic’ societies. Bataille’s Theory of Religion and The Accursed Share have been read by a couple of generations of (hippie)…

  • The End of Homo Oeconomicus

    Da der Mensch ein lebendiges Wesen ist, müssen wir unser Konzept vom Menschen ändern, vom Homo Oeconomicus zu einer Idee des kreativen Menschen, wie der Physiker-Philosoph Hans-Peter Dürr sagt. Wie alle lebendigen Organismen verfügt auch der Mensch über eine Wachstumsfähighkeit. Er ist aber nicht nur einfach eine Kreatur, die essen muss, die sich durch Nahrungsaufnahme ernährt,…

  • Data and Baudrillard, by Franco La Polla

    Data and Baudrillard by Franco La Polla translated from the Italian by Alan N. Shapiro This is a translation of one chapter of Franco La Polla’s book Star Trek: Foto di Gruppo con Astronave (Bologna: Editrice Punto Zero, 1996; pp.106-113). La Polla, a distinguished Professor of the History of North American Culture at the University…

  • The Car of the Future is a Virtual Reality Game Platform

    Paul Virilio is a French theorist of technology whose work has focused on architecture, art, transportation, war, urban planning, and the cinema. Virilio’s central concept is speed, as in the title of his major early work Speed and Politics (1977). He is also a theorist of accidents and crashes. Virilio argues that military technologies and…

  • A Critique of the Idea of Neutral Language, by Marc Silver

    Arguing the Case: Language and Play in Argumentation by Marc Silver Over the past thirty years there has been an intense scrutiny brought to bear upon the ways in which various disciplines deploy rhetorical devices to “argue their case,” as well as to consolidate their identities and maintain them intact. In Arguing the Case: Language…

  • Inscribe Philosophy into the Heart of Computer Science

    co-author: Alexis Clancy There are many individuals in the technology and cyberculture communities who are not just “engineers” or techie programmers. They are already working to bring software together with art and sociology. These people are our friends and allies. However, in their projects, they are working two or three levels removed from the core…

  • Only Impossible Exchange Is Possible, by Aurel Schmidt (translated by Alan N. Shapiro)

    Aurel Schmidt: (translated from the German by Alan N. Shapiro) Impossible exchange is an impossible subject. In Jean Baudrillard’s book Impossible Exchange (2001),  the matter is treated in such a way that one is better off with an associative and meditative interpretive approach than with a discursive reading. When I read the book, much of…

  • In Search of the Child’s Innocence, by Caroline Heinrich (translated by Alan N. Shapiro)

    Caroline Heinrich: (translated from the German by Alan N. Shapiro) I begin with a quotation. “The child is innocence and forgetfulness, a new beginning, a sport, a self-propelling wheel, a first motion, a sacred Yes”, writes Nietzsche in Zarathustra. The child is innocent because s/he starts all over again from scratch. S/he starts from the…

  • Adolf Portmann on the New Biology, by Gianna Maria Gatti (translated by Alan N. Shapiro)

    This action, offering light to the plant, enables the latter to externalize its ‘interiority’. A fascinating interpretation that, deriving from an unusual vision of the artwork, instills in it a deeper and certainly original value. Suggesting this original meaning is the theory developed around the time of the 1960s by the Swiss biologist Adolf Portmann.

  • Merleau-Ponty and Marx on Nature and Art, by Gianna Maria Gatti (translated by Alan N. Shapiro)

    Man places between himself and nature those signs useful to denote and represent it, sanctioning the beginning of the autonomous differentiation of the phenomenal world. In the Upper Paleolithic, the figurations of wild animals drawn on the walls of caves, between magic and the practice of the satisfaction of vital needs and control over nature.

  • Consumer Culture and Naming the Animals, by Alan N. Shapiro

    In his famous essay “Myth Today,” published in 1957, Roland Barthes added a second dimension to the semiotic analysis of Ferdinand de Saussure, to the insight of the Swiss linguist that language is a social institution. Barthes added a social theory of culture to the social theory of language.

  • Richard Rorty on Radicalism, Liberalism, and Poetic Language

    I was very impressed reading something that Richard Rorty wrote about revolutionaries in his essay “The Contingency of Community” ( in the book “Contingency, irony, and solidarity”). Rorty argues very cogently for a kind of “impossible” deconstructive synthesis of radicalism and liberalism.

  • Star Trek, Marx and Time Travel

    Alan Shapiro – Star guest of the next Transmediale – on new computers, 1968 and anarchism Interview in the Berlin daily newspaper “Neues Deutschland,” January 5, 2010 Translated from the German by Dwight “Doc” Gooden As a software specialist, Alan Shapiro would like to set the digital world on a new footing.