One of the most cryptic of Heidegger’s terms is what he calls, as part of the Fourfold (das Geviert), the gods.[1] In this Log entry, my aim is not to provide a history of this term in Heidegger’s corpus, contextualise it within his ontology, pitch explanations against each other, or explain it in relation to the Fourfold overall,[2] but to simply highlight … Read More
Hannah Arendt’s Desert
Globalised contemporary life constitutes a new kind of desert, a new totalitarianism. It stands for the withering away of everything between us. The fact that we live in a desert is not new. Nietzsche already intimates as much in his own reading of life in the nineteenth century, but it is Hannah Arendt who gives us the most incisive interpretation … Read More
Simon Streather’s Night Paintings
A Few Unruly Thoughts This essay was written for Simon Streather’s exhibition Night Paintings at The Cello Factory, London (October 2018). Simon Streather’s new paintings look like rare objects, either time-worn watercolours or perhaps old stained documents. Or maybe they are made to evoke fragments of ancient scrolls that can only be shown on parchment paper. Perhaps there is a reference to archives … Read More
Nikolai Fedorov’s Death
It is a well-known fact that death, being outside of all linguistic referent, cannot be represented; language is indeed utterly incapable of addressing death properly speaking. But is this always the case? Can we imagine a way of conceiving death without at the same time bumping into the limitations of language? To address this old issue, I have chosen, for … Read More
William Carlos Williams’s Cuts
Besides seeking the universal in the parochial, William Carlos Williams’s collection of poems Spring and Allis also an attempt to capture what appears to be immediately available to experience. As he writes: “…the thing [the reader] never knows and never dares to know is what he is at the exact moment that he is. And this moment is the only thing … Read More