What makes a work of literature great? Why, to name but a few, are Hamlet, The Iliad, The Divine Comedy, War and Peace, The Flowers of Evil, Don Quixote, Faust generally considered outstanding examples of world literature? What makes one work of literature superior to another? Why is some literature read for centuries, even millennia, while others languish in scholarly[Read More…]
Death Sits at the dinner table with me He has Impeccable manners Never touches anything Never talks out of turn Truly A somewhat amiable chap Except He has the nasty habit Of compulsively looking At his watch And then grinning at me His knife and his fork Mesmerizingly glistening In his bony white fingery traps While kicking me under the[Read More…]
I searched long for You In the infinite fields Of Being I followed the myth Of your laughter I composed What I thought Was the heart Of Your Song I kept my ear Close To the coming Of any wind That might reveal The stealth Of your sudden approach But as I wandered A life spent In the concept Of[Read More…]
How shall I climb When the ladder Is not mine? How shall I reach Thine ear When such is not my speech? How shall I engender Words When diction, close, In other bosoms sleep? I am a madhouse Closed to the weeping I am a tempest Whose eye is not his I am a whisper of a Man I cannot[Read More…]
The Flesh on the Cross It is a great meditation It is a great Truth Of the World The nails of our traitors Slowly bore into us As we call out our mad pain Into the Cold Nothing As our betrayed heart exhausts Itself In the callous hands Of an unseen God Dan Corjescu teaches at the University of Tübingen’s “Studium[Read More…]
They chained you Made you know Inside and out What it is like To be rock They taught you The secret hardnesses of time The Gorgon Face Of the clock You made love To the death of hope And a little water And a little bread Was given To strengthen you Into the shrill mockery of the sea You count[Read More…]
The Gangsters were all waiting for me Their uninvited guest Their cigarettes were all lighted Their black ties were all straight I owed them without knowing And now had to pay them with my fate There was nowhere I was going Without their golden licence plate My life was theirs from the beginning There was no hand that I could[Read More…]
Do you think that love is waiting Do you think that someone’s there There are only the hounds retreating There is only a ghost going up the stairs Now all the cafès are empty Now all the waitresses have faded There’s no one to take your order There’s no rendezvous that’s fated You can pack your last suitcase You can[Read More…]
Stand at attention All you dogs And make fire for me Do not take the white branches From under the sea Leave me the Winter’s song On my tired breast Make nice with the West wind As the children run me down Cackling To the River There is an angry march Coming Red battalions of Revenge Flooding All your neat[Read More…]
I’m not really a poet I’m anti-gravity I’m stale mashed potatoes and gravy I’m what’s left out After your last pay check I’m the last words your wife says Before she kicks you out I’m the bum you most want to avoid Nah, I ain’t no poet I’m the lamplight the city always Forgets to fix I’m smallpox I’m aphasia[Read More…]
Stretching into love again After a hiatus of years Lips need old lips To see past new tears Our hands hung In Time’s hammock Patiently waiting For a rose Moon To lift moist memory From its quiet Garden Though lovers’ love is past And youth’s blind passion Now splashes in the hurrying verse Of loving recollection Your warm words have[Read More…]
All the chicken heads Are hung against the wall And in invisible velvet rooms Choice chokes on power And the stupid dance Of commanded wraiths Processes its time Declares victors’ empty victory Only the machine is glorious Structure is Caesar While the plebeians play dice Under a Lotto Number Soaked in blood Dan Corjescu teaches at the University of Tübingen’s “Studium[Read More…]
You are not a great poet The swan does not stir No flower bends No mouth opens for more breath The universe remains steadily in place All the clocks tick The crows cabal The evening doesn’t give a fig All masters are at ease You will not swim to any distant shore The red banner is not lifted And freedom[Read More…]
A Short Philosophical One-Act Play The Place: Hades (World of Shadows) Medea: In that eye within which I saw a world reduced I engendered a treacly venom so strong that love itself was sick with weakness and fear for the sipping of it Jason: It was not your love for me that caused you to eternally burn and to presently[Read More…]
The question of Reparations for the historical crime of slavery is not primarily about money. Rather it is about spiritual cleansing and healing. It is about recognizing the fact that systemic physical and mental torture have long hands that stretch out across time and space. It is about acknowledging the attempted physical and spiritual destruction of a people and the[Read More…]
I A Kingly creature; now creatureless King An Empire out of breath while breathless doing Air, water, land all three commanded to remain in place and serve They wilt under the lash of gentle commerce whilst jolly plenty stumbles along in filthy blindness All living things now cringe at the gross summons of Man Yet meanwhile Gaia gathers up[Read More…]
At the beginning of this year, I wrote an article for Counterpunch arguing that UFO sightings were a new kind of quasi-religion based on the cultural peculiarities of modern post-war America: technologism, managerism, a decline in traditional religions, cold war “after-glow”, and last but not least a pervasive sense of loss of control over one’s destiny and increasing alienation from society and[Read More…]
The Peculiar Human Gnaw has overtaken all of life Or was it always to be so? In more Halcyon days Every hunger was checked by another Until Consumption reduced nature’s maw into a tiny red sack of paroxysmal fury The First Commandment: Feed Naked Ape Even the Sun must be brought down, ever closer For the warmth of Gaia only[Read More…]
A Kingly creature; now creatureless King An Empire out of breath while breathless doing Air, water, land all three commanded to remain in place and serve They wilt under the lash of gentle commerce whilst jolly plenty stumbles along in filthy blindness All living things now cringe at the gross summons of Man Yet meanwhile Gaia gathers up her furious[Read More…]
Aristotle famously said that man was a social animal: ζῷον πολιτικόν. He also strongly implied that what distinguished man from all other animals was his rationality. Today this description seems to make more sense than ever. Human beings, contrary to the contract theorists such as Hobbes, Locke, and Rousseau, were never lone beings in search of society. They always[Read More…]
After more than a century, yet another Stabbed in the Back Myth (Dolchstoßlegende ) is being born, this time in America. As is well known, Trump has never shied away from using the fascist playbook of the 1920’s. He has already made good use of the primary fascist myth of the rebirth of the nation saved from the decadent hands[Read More…]
(Optimistically dedicated to Steven Pinker) In a world suffering from a global pandemic, it would be both easy and understandable to be morosely pessimistic. Yet, even here, midst frantic calls of doom, there are some good reasons for optimism. After a mere 10 months, the world has been able to produce at least three vaccines capable of effectively combating Covid-19.[Read More…]
What does it mean to be a dissident? At its simplest, it means to critically engage with and seek to change the material and the ideological structures of the society in which you find yourself, whether local, national, regional, or global. It means the ability to say “no” to those in power, even if the immediate opportunities for real change[Read More…]
“There are things which are worth suffering for” wrote the Czech philosopher Jan Patočka shortly before his death which was caused, in part, by the treatment he received from the Czechoslovakian secret police in March 1977. My first admittedly cynical response to this rather Christian remark is: Really? What things exactly? And how much suffering? In Václav Havel’s famous essay of[Read More…]
Time held me green and dying Though I sang in my chains like the sea. Dylan Thomas “Fern Hill” Fate show thy force, ourselves we do not owe What is decree’d must be, and be this so Shakespeare from “Twelfth Night” I often catch myself doing semi-conscious automatic things (such as needlessly refreshing my email web page, repeatedly touching[Read More…]
Although it is somewhat banal to say, it should never be forgotten how the First World War traumatized the political and cultural life of Europe, especially in the German speaking world. Heidegger’s, Jasper’s, Freud’s, Junger’s, Hesse’s (not to mention Hitler’s) inter-war works are unthinkable without this bloody caesura in European history. In a profound sense, the inter-war period in Germany[Read More…]
Globalization, Democracy, and Migration are themes which continually ignite both scholarly and non-scholarly debate. Not so surprisingly, none of this is new. In his own inimitable way, the German Enlightenment philosopher, Immanuel Kant, touched upon all these current hot topics and more. Kant’s political writings have only relatively recently been appreciated by the likes of political philosophers in the Anglo[Read More…]
Faction: A number of citizens, whether amounting to a minority or majority of the whole, who are united and actuated by some common impulse of passion, or of interest, adverse to the rights of other citizens, or to the permanent and aggregate interests of the community—James Madison The executive of the modern state is but a committee for managing the[Read More…]
Imagine this rather typical SF scenario: alien invaders arrive on Earth. They are vastly superior in intelligence, technology, and most importantly, ethics. They quickly perceive that Earthlings are a dire mortal threat to the Earth’s biosphere. They reason that they must take decisive action soon, or else the Earth will meet its biological death. What are they to do? First,[Read More…]
1) Democracies often behave like little children: reluctant to take their medicine—unless irrationally coerced. 2) A democracy’s great weakness is its vanity. The people’s vanity. A mortally dangerous tendency that is constantly in need of assurances that it is the world that is at fault rather than it. 3) In a democracy, it is often the most unpopular president or[Read More…]
We feel that even if all possible sci entific questions be answered, the problems of life have still not been touched at all —Ludwig Wittgenstein Tractatus Recently I received an angry note about the persistence of religion in the modern world as proof of the world’s ongoing irrationality in response to some of my comments in my lately published article[Read More…]
Socrates was the first revolutionary. He opened up with a legendary oracular search the inner space from which the individual, as we understand him today, would eventually emerge. His “daemon” was that which spoke the necessary freedom and autonomy to become what we are. His was the first lesson. His student, Plato, brought on the second movement. He postulated the[Read More…]
Faction: a number of citizens, whether amounting to a minority or majority of the whole, who are united and actuated by some common impulse of passion, or of interest, adverse to the rights of other citizens, or to the permanent and aggregate interests of the community. James Madison Never has the word “conspiracy” been spoken so easily. Never has the[Read More…]
Fukuyama’s book is a profound book and as a profound book it is profoundly misleading. A mixture of Platonic and Hegelian psychology/historical teleology as well as offering a good explanation for the historical origins of bourgeois man in Hobbes and Locke, it misleads not necessarily in the assertion that we cannot imagine a better world than one where liberal-capitalist democracy[Read More…]
Considerate se questo è un uomo Che lavora nel fango Che non conosce pace Consider if this be a man Who works in the mud Who knows no peace –Primo Levi Globalization is about many things. It‘s about flows. It‘s about identities. And, perhaps most importantly, it‘s about dreams. The chief proponents of Globalization are mainly positive when it[Read More…]
Does Nietzsche have anything important to say to us, we the current inhabitants of a global age? Nietzsche speaks of spiritual health as a result of the superabundance of the life force, of a Dionysian affirmation of ones existence of ones process of becoming what one is. The courage of laughter is called for. A profound laughter that is in[Read More…]
Following the lead of the late Ulrich Beck in works such as Risk Society and Power in the Modern Age the time has now come to ask ourselves whether or not the Green party is already or is about to become a global political party. First a little background in theory. Beck was, of course, famous for introducing the idea[Read More…]
There once was a world where state actors operated in an anarchic international environment, where maximizing their overall power was their goal, and war was their means of achieving it. That world is now dead. In its place we have the current spectacle of what were known as the “great powers” who are now, at least, formally if by no[Read More…]
Here’s a thought: What if alien civilizations want to be left completely alone? Listed below are some of the unspoken presumptions underlying our nascent interstellar expansionism: We know what “universal intelligence” means. (Our most celebrated scientists usually equate this with “technical control over nature”— all “aliens” wash their hands before dinner and watch sitcoms) Closely tied to assumption number one[Read More…]
This democracy makes possible prosperity without freedom. — Jürgen Habermas Constantly we are collapsing. Constantly we are fixing. — Vaclav Smil I define modernism as any attempt by modern men and women to become subjects as well as objects of modernization, to get a grip on the modern world and make themselves at home in it. — Marshall Berman[Read More…]
You don’t have to control everything to be in total control. In the modern world this seeming paradox is a systemic reality. In the past, classic totalitarian governments sought to literally control every aspect of biopower. As it turned out, this was a very inefficient and self-defeating way to maintain and increase scientific knowledge and technology, capital accumulation, and total[Read More…]
There may have been a time when the US and Russia were serious geopolitical rivals. That time has long since passed. Now, the two “nations” (elite controlled entities masquerading as a res publica) play the neat, little old game known as Bad Cop/Good Cop. Elite interests, practices, and life styles of both countries have long since converged. Russian elites have[Read More…]
To characterize modern day America as a fascist state is at one and the same time both ahistorical and close to the present truth. In order to resolve this apparent contradiction we must understand that modern day fascism displays certain rough, jagged continuities as well as discontinuities with its interwar past. Operationally, fascism was, at least initially, an alliance between[Read More…]
A bureaucrat-turned- minister in a mess 
Hundreds Of Thousands Of Workers’ 24-Hour Mega Transport Strike Halts Germany 
Oldest Interfaith Organization in America Calls for Children to Have More Rights Than Guns 
What’s the Best Way Out from the War in Ukraine? 
How Indigenous Land Management Practices Are a Blueprint for Climate-Resilient Agriculture 
In memory of Hugo Chavez on 10th death Anniversary 
Xi’s ‘Chilling’ Remarks: A Multipolar World Offers Challenges and Opportunities to the Middle East and Africa 
Ukraine War – US-China Relations And the Doomsday Clock 
Anti-Rahul Defamation Card Has Its Limitations! 
Questions We Should Ask to Understand Real Impact of Poverty Reduction and Welfare Schemes 
Punjab: Democracy Under Siege? 
Declaration excessive dividends by the Board of HZL may not be in compliance with Section 123 of the Companies Act 
Men, masculinities, and gender equality 
EU Warns After Russia Plans To Place Tactical Nuclear Weapon In Belarus 
A Hazardous Decision: Supplying Ukraine with Depleted Uranium Shells 
Media and the March to War 
The Basic Issue is not of Taking Sides in Superpower Rivalry, it is of Durable Peace to Save Earth’s Life 
The Pentagon’s Budget from Hell 
“…I want poetry to be detonated like a bomb!” -Nathalie Quintane 
Bundelkhand Must Choose its Priorities Carefully 
Citizenship: Beyond the Forked Vision 
Caste-wise census is necessary for balanced development 
Tribal woman murdered after rape in Rohtas and strong protest demanding punishment of culprits 
Why Avoiding Catastrophic War is the Biggest Priority Today 
Labor in market, and the mainstream economics 
Serbia Shall Never Forget NATO Aggression, Vows Serb President 
Kerala’s New Public Health Bill 2023: Subservient to Market Forces rather than Deliberative Democracy 
The Piracy of Development – The 3-Ds: Dispossession, Displacement, Destitution 
The Contemporary Relevance of Rosa Luxemburg 
Does Court Judgement on Rahul Gandhi Breach Human Rights (Freedom of Expression) 
From Oslo to Sharm el-Sheik 
Is Washington now Khan’s Buddy? 
Nord Stream sabotage was to undercut Germany, says Seymour Hersh It Will Be Hard And Cost A Lot Of Blood For Ukraine To Kick Out Russians, Says Top U.S. General 
Saudi – Iran rapprochement: A chance for peace 
Day 30 of the NREGA Protest: Students and Activists Detained by the Delhi Police An Irrational Verdict? 
Trump Rot at the EPA 
AUKUS, the Australian Labor Party, and Growing Dissent 
Palestinians Don’t Exist? 
Our beloved K.P.Sasi is no more. Filmmaker, cartoonist, writer, mentor, friend and above all tireless activist championing the cause of every underdog, Sasi breathed his last, mid-afternoon this Christmas day – after battling a medical condition for months. I remember the last time I met him, almost exactly a month before he passed away, at the ayurvedic healing center in[Read More…]
