3:AM Magazine

The film has two elements that are strong: sex and violence. But neither can be neatly parcelled in conventional terms, or neatly presented and tied with a bow, particularly the violence. It’s too easy to tag it to the East End, Bow Bells and neat ribbons. It was the era of the Krays. But it was also the era of the Richardsons, south of the river. And there were others, like Jimmy Evans, who didn’t fit into the gang structure as shown in the film. So the reality is jagged anyway.

Richard Marshall interviews Paul Buck.

Something has been fixed in. Something about nothingness, about unreadability and unwriterbility, about silence and absence, abjection and a special kind of boredom. Craig Dworkin’s book is about an aspect of this fix. He looks at “works that are blank, erased, clear, or silent.” He argues that “we should understand media not as blank, base things but as social events, and that there is no medium, understood in isolation, but always a plurality of media: interpretive activities taking place in socially inscribed places.”

Richard Marshall reviews Craig Dworkin’s No Medium.

I was fascinated early on by the incompleteness theorems and the independence phenomenon, by the idea that one could prove things about the nature of proof itself. We can prove that our fundamental mathematical theories are simply unable in principle to validate themselves, to prove their own consistency, like the fantastic pronouncements of a strange gentleman whom we are unsure is a con man or a sage. For every such theory, furthermore, there will be true statements that we are unable to prove in them, and so ultimately none of our fundamental theories can have the whole story. The idea that we can prove such things about the nature of truth and provability was incredible to me, and I sought to get to the bottom of it.

Continuing the End Times series, Richard Marshall interviews Joel David Hamkins.

Philosophical debate should be open to anyone, but one can only take part in such a debate if one recognises, as every rational person should, that there is such a thing as a philosophical debate, which differs in important ways from purely factual debates. Unfortunately, this very simple and, on reflection, very obvious fact seems to elude a number of well-known scientists who, in the course of publishing best-selling works of popular science, have taken the opportunity to pour scorn on philosophy. They should follow the lead of their wiser and greater forebears, including Newton and Einstein, who were far from being unphilosophical in their thinking, and whose philosophical cast of mind contributed in a major way to the originality and importance of their theories.

Continuing the End Times series, Richard Marshall interviews E.J. Lowe.

My book on disgust is about the nature of that emotion, as it now exists, not about its evolutionary origins. Similarly one might write a book about knowledge and not bother too much with how knowledge evolved millions of years ago. As it happens, I have recently completed a book about human evolution and the hand. Both types of investigation are worthwhile.

Continuing the End Times series, Richard Marshall interviews Colin McGinn.

Paul Klee in the Bauhaus in 1921 said, ‘ the point of the entire process is simply to be able to exercise control’, that ‘accurate perspective drawing has no merit whatsoever, if for no other reason that anyone can do it.’ He thought ‘there is absolutely no necessity for a single viewpoint. For some time now, though not that long, we have been able to do without it.’ Klee talked about ‘stray centres’ and ‘stray viewpoints.’ Panofsky in a famous lecture at the Warburg talked about ‘fishbone’ perspective. Scolari thinks Klee’s painting ‘Uncomposed Objects In Space’ of 1929 is not even a fishbone perspective because ‘perspective is so off centre’ Klee avoids fixing the ‘muddiness of reality’ to a human perspective. Scolari likens Klee’s approach to a musical pentagram, ‘a device for ordering notes that in no way dictates how they are to be composed.’

Richard Marshall reviews Massimo Scolari’s Oblique Drawing: A History of Anti-Perspective.

I don’t find it satisfactory merely to add some considerations of care to the traditional moral theories for reasons similar to why it is not enough to simply insert women into the traditional structures of society and politics built on gender domination. Feminists should understand that the structures themselves have to change. The history of ethics shows it to be a very biased enterprise. Very roughly, what men have done in public life has been deemed important and relevant to moral theory, and what women have done in the household has been considered irrelevant.

Continuing the End Times series, Richard Marshall interviews Virginia Held.

Focusing on the danger of the category “pornography” in this case entails ignoring the ways in which certain subjects (BDSM practitioners, “perverts”) are being marginalsed and, indeed, criminalised, while the vanilla heterosexual mainstream is ignored or even exculpated. For me, legal, hegemonic, heterosexual commercial pornography is much more ethically pernicious than niche kink porn, as it reifies and falsifies, by means of endless repetition, ideas of “normal” male and female sexuality, that are made in the context of a patriarchal and capitalistic society and reflect its fantasies and beliefs.

Richard Marshall interviews Lisa Downing.

I find myself increasingly frustrated by the whole analytic-continental opposition, it seems less and less relevant to my actual philosophical work, and whereas once I thought there was the possibility of opening up genuine dialogue between the two traditions, I now think that is a vain hope. Moreover, even though, as I say, I tend to identify politically with the non-analytic, I don’t find myself altogether at home in either the analytic or continental camp. In this respect, I probably occupy a rather anomalous position in the contemporary landscape of academic philosophy (maybe ‘hermeneutics’ and ‘philosophical topography’ are necessarily anomalous) – in fact, officially, I am no longer even in a philosophy department – and in lots of ways that anomalous position actually suits me quite well. What I do as a philosopher doesn’t fit readily into any of the usual categories, and I am more and more engaged outside of the discipline anyway – although there other sets of political distinction and division often become operative as well.

Continuing the End Times series, Richard Marshall interviews Jeff Malpas.

Long before these argument were summarised in the legal texts, they had been elaborated by a number of Roman moralists and historians, above all Sallust, Livy and Tacitus. These writers were interested in the broader question of what it means to say of individuals – or even of whole bodies of people – that they have been made to live in the manner of slaves. The answer they give is that, if you are subject to the arbitrary will of anyone else, such that you are dependent on their mere goodwill, then you may be said to be living in servitude, however elevated may be your position in society.

Continuing the End Times series, Richard Marshall interviews Quentin Skinner.