Monthly Archives April 2010

Gadamer and Heidegger at Work

A Private Cellar

One day a colleague, Marcello Marchesi, came from Milan with a book, The Metamorphosis by Franz Kafka … The unconscious, which Dostoevsky had used to probe and analyze emotions, became, in this book, material for the plot itself … Here was the individual unconscious, a shadow zone, a private cellar suddenly clarified … Kafka moved [...]

This Light

This light, this light, has been transformed into noise for him. From Blindness by José Saramago (stills from Blindness by Fernando Meirelles)

Of Kafka’s Mice and Men

In a letter posted from Zürau to his friend Max Brod Kafka announces a retribution: ‘You write so little about yourself, I take revenge with mice’. Brod, who’s prone to psychologizing virtually everything Kafka writes him (a kind of pyschology aptly characterized by Calasso as ‘not very different from what would one day become the [...]

Reappraising Utopia

The growing list of movies dealing with utopian/dystopian issues can not be simply dismissed as a Hollywood capitalization of our consumer need for or addiction to widescreen rehearsals of a humanity in crisis, facing apocalypse or enduring to the point of near extinction: catastrophe. Or rather the need is there but for not obvious reasons. [...]