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Looking Back on the End of the World
Looking Back on the End of the World raises provocative questions about the possibilities of critical knowledge in social systems that seem to have surpassed history.
- GenresPhilosophyTheory
128 pages, Paperback
First published June 1, 1989
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Displaying 1 - 3 of 3 reviews
May 24, 2020
This is one of those extraordinary - beautiful - powerful - small Semiotext(e) books. Form and content - beautifully meshed. It is a precious collection of essays about the end of the world.
This book is over thirty years old, but is sharp, bright and current. It looks - squarely - at the end of the world. And it finds beauty and horror.
Breath-taking. Remarkable.
This book is over thirty years old, but is sharp, bright and current. It looks - squarely - at the end of the world. And it finds beauty and horror.
Breath-taking. Remarkable.
April 29, 2008
An introduction to many of the most "fringe" thinkers out there. Kind of a bad one though. I felt that some of the essays were more inflammatory than anything and others were a bad introduction to some thinkers. I guess neither of these stop me from loaning the book out excitedly though. I mean, how many collections of essays about the end of the world do I have to loan out?
Really.
Really.
Read
October 11, 2018Cool title, convoluted insides.
A collection of papers from a symposium in 1986. Some works have aged well, some not. If you are interested in semiotics, phenomenology, postmodernism, hermeneutics, and... if you're still reading, you might appreciate this book!
If not, enjoy some pull quotes.
First essay by Dieter: word salad and pontificating nonsense. Would get slaughtered today over use of masculine and feminine as he does, even as a thought experiment. Also, either me or this guy fundamentally misunderstands form and matter in Aristotelian biology. Bet on me.
Gebauer: fun phenomenology paper on cave art.
"The cave...does not represent the external conditions of earth, but rather inner state of man"
Cool cool.
Baudrillard: the big ticket on here. "In the exaltation of uninterrupted circulation and incessant up to datedness, societies lose the thread of their development. just as it is with speed: acceleration leads to loss of direction"
Valuable thought for now?
Wulf: "With their claim to universality, Modern scientists have forced the homogenization of individual life". Ugh. Thanks for being an intellectual forefather to crunchy anti-vaxxers and anti-intellectual crony capitalists (which have arguably done much more to homogenize individual life than science)
Good points, but this is a precursor to people in logic classes insisting that stem and logic itself is fascistic. Utter garbage.
Lenzen: "As the life of the individual only makes sense if it is threatened, if life today is suffering from a loss of meaning, that can only be combated by producing a mood of catastrophe"
Eerily relevant.
Morin: ok exploration of nothingness, with this gem of a line: "Every messiah including that of science, including that of progress, must be told: no!"
Kamper: learned a bit about negentropy, and still thinking on his ideas.
Virilio: novel take on moving through space and a great precursor to discussions on VR today.
Overall: Dense and interesting, but convoluted at times.
A collection of papers from a symposium in 1986. Some works have aged well, some not. If you are interested in semiotics, phenomenology, postmodernism, hermeneutics, and... if you're still reading, you might appreciate this book!
If not, enjoy some pull quotes.
First essay by Dieter: word salad and pontificating nonsense. Would get slaughtered today over use of masculine and feminine as he does, even as a thought experiment. Also, either me or this guy fundamentally misunderstands form and matter in Aristotelian biology. Bet on me.
Gebauer: fun phenomenology paper on cave art.
"The cave...does not represent the external conditions of earth, but rather inner state of man"
Cool cool.
Baudrillard: the big ticket on here. "In the exaltation of uninterrupted circulation and incessant up to datedness, societies lose the thread of their development. just as it is with speed: acceleration leads to loss of direction"
Valuable thought for now?
Wulf: "With their claim to universality, Modern scientists have forced the homogenization of individual life". Ugh. Thanks for being an intellectual forefather to crunchy anti-vaxxers and anti-intellectual crony capitalists (which have arguably done much more to homogenize individual life than science)
Good points, but this is a precursor to people in logic classes insisting that stem and logic itself is fascistic. Utter garbage.
Lenzen: "As the life of the individual only makes sense if it is threatened, if life today is suffering from a loss of meaning, that can only be combated by producing a mood of catastrophe"
Eerily relevant.
Morin: ok exploration of nothingness, with this gem of a line: "Every messiah including that of science, including that of progress, must be told: no!"
Kamper: learned a bit about negentropy, and still thinking on his ideas.
Virilio: novel take on moving through space and a great precursor to discussions on VR today.
Overall: Dense and interesting, but convoluted at times.
Displaying 1 - 3 of 3 reviews