David Auerbach on literature, philosophy, film, etc.
David Auerbach
Categories
Jacob Burckhardt on Amateurism
When it comes to scholarship and criticism, I prefer Jacob Burckhardt’s amateur/specialist dichotomy to Isaiah Berlin’s fox and hedgehog: The word ‘amateur’ owes its evil reputation to the arts. An artist must be a master ...
Jan Assmann on Auschwitz and Guilt
I don’t study ethics much because there is already such a high bar in reaching a minimal level of human decency, so slicing and dicing moral principles feels like buying a fuzzy sweater for a ...
Novalis: Monologue
The excellent piece on Novalis in this week’s TLS quoted a bit of his brilliant Monolog, and it’s short enough I figured I’d just post the whole thing here: Speaking and writing is a crazy ...
The Turin Horse
BERNHARD: Because everything’s in ruins. Everything’s been degraded, but I could say that they’ve ruined and degraded everything. Because this is not some kind of cataclysm, coming about with so-called innocent human aid. On the ...
Cargo 200: Blurred Spaces
Russian director Aleksey Balabanov is a fascinating and discomfiting filmmaker, responsible for one of the very few successful Kafka adaptations, The Castle, to which Balabanov boldly appended his own ending. Technically brilliant, Balabanov is generally ...
Absolutism in the French Enlightenment
This letter is from the June 8 TLS, in response to a review of Jonathan Israel’s Democratic Enlightenment. It’s a far more substantive review than Darin MacMahon’s silly dismissal, but it makes the ubiquitous mistake of ...
“We Are All Anonymous” Video
Thanks to Punkcast, video is now available of the Triple Canopy discussion with Gabriella Coleman, James Grimmelmann, and me, discussing Anonymity as Culture and Our Weirdness is Free. Thanks to all involved for making it a great event. I ...
Links
- 50 Watts
- Anecdotal Evidence
- Balaustion
- Bibliographing
- Bifurcated Life
- chakira
- Common Reader
- Dilettante Scholar
- Early Modern Whale
- Eudaemonist
- Georgy Riecke
- Obooki
- Paul Raymont
- Pseudopodium
- Slawkenbergius's Tales
- Stochastic Bookmark
- The Idiot and the Dog
- This Public Address
- Three-Toed Sloth
- Times Flow Stemmed
- Waste
- With Hidden Noise
- wood s lot
- Wuthering Expectations
