In the film Being There (Hal Ashby, 1979)—a cinematic adaptation of a story by Polish writer Jerzy Kosiński—Chauncey Gardiner, an unforgettable Peter Sellers, is a simple man without a past, an ideology, or an inner world, whose life has been reduced to just two activities: tending a garden and watching television…
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The Algorithmic Gardener Read More »
If the middle class was born out of the need of a productive economy to have stable, long-term consumer-citizens, today’s speculative financial economy essentially requires indebted tenants living in a state of permanent precarity…
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The Middle Class: Chronicle of a Death Foretold Read More »
After a long period of fading, truth finally revealed itself to be what it always was: a fable. Thus, the era of contemporary cynicism was inaugurated—the era of those disillusioned with Truth, of those who know that everything is nothing more than a semblance of truth (Baudrillard’s era of the simulacrum), of the Other of truth that does not exist (Lacan), which is merely a semblance with which one cynically ironizes…
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The Extinction of Desire in the Era of Technological Jouissance Read More »
Thrown into the world through the birth canal, the new being will yearn for the rest of its life to return to a mythical state of completeness to which it can never return. A dream stolen from death, which it will only fleetingly caress in ephemeral moments of fulfilment…
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Is Love Unnecessarily Necessary? Read More »
In 1992, the French anthropologist Marc Augé published his work Non-lieux. Introduction à une anthropologie de la surmodernité (Non-Places: Introduction to an Anthropology of Supermodernity), in which he introduces the concept of the “non-place” as the new space of modernity, in opposition to the anthropological place—that which articulates identity, relationship, and history…
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The Ghost of the “Non-Place” Read More »
The mire, breathed into by the divine breath of the tree of life, could not escape the fragility of its structure, and the vital fluid that soaked it ended up festering in the eternity of paradise, turning into a slow and painful suppuration, akin to that of other creatures dwelling there…
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The theory of evolution has always seemed to me to be one of the most fascinating scientific hypotheses. Extremely simple in its approach—chance proposes (acting as the motor of variety) and natural selection disposes (acting as the filter of order)—this straightforward framework manages to provide a simple explanation for an extremely complex phenomenon that is backed by extensive evidence, all without contradicting physics. This is because chance introduces entropy…
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The dichotomy between the “madonna and the whore”—between the woman one loves and the woman one desires—and the difficulty of reconciling them into one, was an expression coined by Freud that gained currency to denote a certain schizoid ambivalence inherited from the Oedipus complex in some men…
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When Love Alone Is Not Enough Read More »
Stalker—the protagonist of the 1979 film of the same name by Russian director Andrei Tarkovsky—is a guide who leads visitors, lost to themselves, to “the Zone.” It is an abandoned place of indeterminate geographical coordinates where a meteorite is said to have fallen and where an extraterrestrial civilization once resided…
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Stalker, the Guide to Nowhere Read More »
Les Diables (2002), a film directed by French filmmaker Christophe Ruggia, is a marvelous work about two lost children adrift—Joseph and Chloé—who, having been abandoned at birth, flee from the rest of the world…
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The Devils and the Alleged Demon Read More »
