3:AM Magazine

Home writes with the barmy intensity of someone cancelling superfluity. He rocks ideas from serious to gimp and back without batting an eye-lid. His fix is bold: here he junks up loose first person narration as controlled and artful as anything in Foster Wallace, say, but without the grandeur and pomp swooningly all-consuming. His unapologetic venery is done as formulaic pulp grind-house sex. S&M snuff scenes in lurid and hilarious detail that cut across the artful deposits of cultural-study tropes covering the whole performance like sand are his deft stock-in-trade. It’s all a huge, like, whelm.

Richard Marshall on Stewart Home & his anti-realist novel, Mandy, Charlie & Mary-Jane .

The connection of erotic love with a whole way of life is what leads some thinkers, like Sartre, to criticise love as inherently manipulative and a means of domination. And the connection of the idea of erotic love with a larger philosophical outlook on the world is evident in the writings of philosophers on the subject. In a sense, the history of the idea of erotic love offers an angle on the history of Western philosophy as well.

Continuing the End Times series, Richard Marshall interviews Kathleen Higgins.

I think recognition of the relative value of life is limited to some cultures, and at the risk of being offensive I’ll add that it is limited to the more mature and sophisticated cultures. As for the shift from seeing suicide as cowardly to seeing it as wise, it is a welcome change but a very dangerous one. If it becomes engrained in popular culture and thinking it will cease to be adequately reflective and will lead to perilous expectations.

Continuing the End Times series, Richard Marshall interviews C.G. Prado.

The whole book seems to work in terms of what De Keyser and Decortis in the 1980s described as an attempt to structure events, processes, actions and products in terms of a ‘continual process operator’. There are several processes that have been brought to light as important to this sort of project. A key one is anticipation. Anticipation permits readers and all those involved to get ahead of any event with deftness and precision. Anticipation can be probabilistic where we scan parameters before everything goes out of order, selecting internalised statistical structures for this purpose, as if someone had prior knowledge of the probability of things breaking down. Reading and scanning every other page at speed and relying on previous times, previous documents, gives you enough to go on to anticipate how long, how far, how deep we’re going, according to this model. Illuminated by, say, one’s recollection of Carl Einstein and Georges Batailles and their Documents project, as well as the Wallace Berman Semina project, for example, we get a sense of this book’s purpose.

Richard Marshall reviews Book Works‘ Bring The Dead Back To Life: Again A Time Machine: From Distribution to Archive.

The experimentalists think that we can only get at our concepts by way of empirical investigation, while the armchair philosophers think that we can skip the experiments and figure things out from our armchairs. What they have in common, however, is regarding our concepts as the targets of philosophical theorising, and I just don’t think that, in the vast majority of cases, the subject matter of philosophy has our concepts as its target.

Continuing the End Times series, Richard Marshall interviews Hilary Kornblith.

A more robust notion of difference entails adopting a stance of wonder, curiosity, and humility, a stance that allows you to consider the possibility that the experience and perspective of the other isn’t comparable to yours at all, but is qualitatively different. Just imagine how current political discourse concerning women’s health and reproductive autonomy would be transformed if men were seen as limited, as not capable of adopting an authoritative stance on the realities of pregnancy and birth control, and women were seen as having knowledge and experience that necessarily exceeded the understandings that men had of such phenomena. I think such an approach would lead to less gender inequality, not more.

Continuing the End Times series, Richard Marshall interviews Ann Cahill.

I enjoy political philosophy, political psychology, and the economics of public decision-making. But I’m not interested in politics per se. I don’t watch conventions. I don’t campaign. If there’s a theme in my recent work, it’s that we have too much reverence for political power and government. We have a romantic view that through government, we can come together and make decisions together in a way that expresses our status as equals. On the contrary, I think a good society is one in which politics doesn’t matter very much.

Continuing the End Times series, Richard Marshall interviews Jason Brennan.

I like very much the idea that nature – including human beings – might have hidden powers, some of which have not yet even been conceived. My view of technology is that it is all about the discovery and then utilization of hitherto unknown powers. And similarly, there may be undeveloped potential within people. I see the role of education as empowering people: developing their potential and also giving people new abilities. And the more one is empowered, the more opportunities are open to one.

Continuing the End Times Series, Richard Marshall interviews Stephen Mumford.

In the USA, we learn “art history” as western art history, and the history of Asian, or African art is a special case; we learn politics by examining our own government system, and consider other systems special cases, and the same is true of philosophy. And that parochialism is matched by similar parochialisms every place else. It is a bad idea. Each of us ends up thinking that we grow up at the Middle Pole, and that while there is diversity in the world, it is all deviations from normal – our way or doing things. The goal of education should be to dismantle the Middle Pole view, not to reinforce it in the name of the need for a grounding in one’s own civilisation.

Continuing the End Times series, Richard Marshall interviews Jay L. Garfield.

NOVEL OF THE YEAR Louis Armand’s Breakfast at Midnight (RM) Jake Arnott’s The House of Rumour (MD) Laurent Binet’s HHhH (ST) Jenni Fagan‘s The Panopticon (DA) Alasdair Gray’s Every Short Story 1951-2012 (ST) Sarah Hall’s The Beautiful Indifference (MD) Lars Iyer‘s Dogma (AG) Denis Johnson’s Train Dreams (DA) Karl Ove Knausgaard’s A Death in the [...]