What is truth in the postmodern age? The artistic generation of the twentieth century has grown up immersed in the delirious imagination of postmodern thought, which insists upon the ultimate uncertainty of meaning and that there is no self-evident truth. This title explores the possibilities and parameters of a postmodern imagination freed from the philosophical responsibilities of fiction, fact, and replication of lived experience. Mobilizing an array of scholars and contemporary artists, this study examines postmodern thinking through the lenses of (...) identity and visual culture. Speculative, critical, and always creative in its approach, "In Praise of Nonsense" focuses on theories of disappearance, irony, and nonsense, where the pleasures of the imaginary give rise to artistic inspiration. (shrink)

Explanations of the violence perpetrated by the Khmer Rouge between 1975 and 1979 in Cambodia often conflate two events: the far-ranging and self-destructive violence within the revolutionary Party, which led to the deaths of tens of thousands of cadres, and the larger genocidal destruction of so-called “counter-revolutionary” classes and ethnic minorities. The exterminationist violence inflicted within the Khmer Rouge organization itself is perplexing, for its shape and sequence cannot be explained by theories of mass violence in the current literatures on (...) genocide or state terror. Our aim in this article is twofold. First, we show how key features of a theory of limitless, exterminationist, and ultimately self-destructive violence are contained within G.W.F. Hegel’s obscure analysis of the Terror of the French Revolution. Second, this Hegelian theory of exterminationist violence with a particular model of modern consciousness at its heart, can account for the transformation of typical forms of r.. (shrink)

The ArgumentDuring the nineteenth century, physicists and chemists, using different linguistic modes of expression, sought to describe the world for different purposes; thus, both disciplines gradually were nudged toward demarcation and self-image identification. In the course of doing so the rich complexity of the empire of chemistry was born. The essential challenge was closely connected with analysis, synthesis, and chemical process: learning the art ofwatchingsubstances change andmakingsubstances change. Pursued in theory-poor and phenomenology-rich contexts chemistry nevertheless made itself intellectually, professionally, societally, (...) and industrially creditable and attractive. The developing links between physics and chemistry are examined in this paper from the perspective of the discipline of chemistry more specifically than from the side of physics. Chemists came to believe that essentially physics was no more than mechanics. All else belonged to the domain of chemistry.Not before the last decades of the century were firm collaborative links and genuine reciprocity fostered between physics and chemistry, and then primarily on account of the common utility of scientific research tools. At a more fundamental level physics and chemistry, in contradistinction to all the other natural sciences, experienced partial overlap and convergence because of unique mutual reliance on the construction of systems each according to its own theoretical conceptions. Still amalgamation was unthinkable. Eventually physical chemistry was loosened from chemistry in the same way that, somewhat later, chemical physics was emancipated from physics. The intrinsic messiness of chemistry, one might suggest, tends more readily to foster Bohr's opinion that “there is no rock bottom to the study of nature,” rather than Einstein's view that “we can realistically, ultimately, put it all together.”. (shrink)

The most lively issue in Habakkuk studies is the meaning of Chapter 3 and its relationship to the prophetic corpus as a whole. The vivid and, in its canonical context, unusual imagery of this theophanic hymn has intrigued and puzzled exegetes. The study which follows is an effort to address this issue in a synthetic fashion, employing insights from textual, poetic, linguistic, historical, archaeological, and theological investigations based on the most recent data available in these areas. The intention is to (...) clarify, as far as possible, the source of this poem in Israelite life and the reason for its position in the canon in order to contribute to the developing understanding of this brief but complex prophetic book. - Preface. (shrink)

Hallucination: the perception of an impossible image. That which can never appear suddenly does so anyways - a private world that appears only to the eye of the one imagining it... until now. Ted Serios, psychic photographer, claimed he could project images directly from his mind onto photographic film. Under the sign of the psychic photograph, “Hallucinating Ted Serios” is a theorization of the dominant forms of uncertainty that persist in postmodern evaluations of representation, interpretation and identity. The central thesis (...) of this paper is that the imaginary and the real have collapsed into the spectral hallucination of one another, rendering impossible the rhetorical separation of hallucination from image. With the collapse of the boundary between the fictive and the real, the world of representation becomes intelligible only as an imaginary phenomenon; with the collapse between the object and the observer, interpretation is rendered deceptively magical; and, with the collapse between the self and its anonymous double, identity itself is relegated to a state of impossibility. Consequently, under the persisting signs of the imaginary, the magical and the impossible, “Hallucinating Ted Serios” asserts that in our contemporary world there no longer exists the possibility of failed performativity – psychic, imaginary or otherwise. (shrink)