Pale/ontology: The Dinosaurian Critique of Philosophy
When it comes to the non-human world, philosophers have an unusual tic: they all suddenly start talking about desks. They should be talking about the real Absolute Other: the dinosaur.
While dystopian fiction, film, and television is now as popular as it’s ever been, we’ve surgically amputated our fears about societal collapse from our individual ambitions.
Exposure to more ads means more reading and seeing and hearing the empty rhetoric of essentialist perlocution: paltered clichés, tropes, maxims, lies, and nonsense. One result, in Barthes’ view, is a cheapening of the greater language.
The artist Rammellzee used the term ‘lightdwellers’ to reference a generic societal elite. Decades later, ‘the lofts’ can do a similar job for a certain kind of New Yorker. Ditto for ‘condos.’
Full Stop editors recommend books, music, TV and films for your enjoyment. This round features Pagan priestesses, the great Koonklaster, & Christina Ricci chained to a radiator.
On Jungian shadows, Elena Ferrante, THE BABADOOK, and the sinister side of motherhood.
Men of Myth: On Bruce Springsteen & Bob Dylan’s ‘Basement Tapes’
Whereas early blues and country artists were subsumed under the mythology of their genre, rock was about individual stardom from the outset. Where do Dylan & Springsteen stand in relation to their progenitors?
In 2014 our features writers tackled topics ranging from police ontology to Bowie fandom to the pitiful lack of diversity in contemporary publishing.
Under the Skin: David Cronenberg’s CONSUMED
Though Cronenberg is undeniably preoccupied with decaying and deformed flesh, he also evinces a gleefulness in probing physical transformations, and how they both impact and reflect upon the psyche.
The Post-Apocalyptic Counterrevolution Will Not Be Televised
If it’s true that the world’s poorest will disproportionately suffer the effects of climate change, we are engaging in a kind of philosophical counterrevolution, undoing the modern idea that the masses matter at all.