Double Reading

So far Did Someone Say Totalitarianism is proving to be one of my favorite Zizek books. It doesn’t use as much pop culture examples (jokes, Hitchcock movies, Kafka, etc.), but focuses more on politics and philosophy and ethics. It’s been a long time since a book has caused me to think so much, and that’s [...]

On Friday (Jan. 13th), I got to see the Seattle premier of new documentary Zizek! at the Northwest Film Forum. The film is distributed by Zeitgeist Films, a company I became familiar with because they also distributed the somewhat life-changing The Corporation. I’ve know that they were working on a movie about Slavoj Zizek, my [...]

(This idea was inspired by a comment Slavoj Zizek made in the movie Zizek!, which I saw tonight and I will post thoughts on soon. This tirade isn’t directed toward anyone, and it makes sweeping overgeneralizations. Consider it a polemic, in that case, and let it provoke your mind.)
It seems to me that a lot [...]

About a month ago I started reading a book titled How We Became Posthuman: Virtual Bodies in Cybernetics, Literature, and Informatics. More than any other book I’ve read recently, Posthuman profoundly changed the way I think about the world and sort of put into focus some themes that I have been interested in for a [...]

For whatever reason, the topic of past lives has come up a few times in the last couple of weeks. In order to save myself the trouble of stating my viewpoint, I’ll post it here. I may go into more details at another time.
Being an atheist, I don’t believe in God or any of that [...]

(I had started writing this post literally months ago but sorta gave up so this is a super simplified version…)
Ever since taking a “Gothic American Literature” course in college, the idea of the uncanny has been one of my favorite literary themes. The idea comes from Sigmund Freud’s essay “The Uncanny.” The best way I [...]

Over at The Huffington Post, a guy named Sam Harris has a succinct, and convincing (well, for me he’s preaching to the choir, so maybe I’m not the best to judge) defense of atheism and argument against belief in God, etc. titled “There is No God (And You Know It).”
At the same time, the current [...]

Strangely enough, two of my daily reads, Salon.com and Slate, featured some “gender studies”-related articles yesterday. Reading them really made me miss college (which isn’t to difficult for me) and reminded me why I really should’ve been a women’s studies minor (which, it appears, my school has renamed to “gender studies”… there was a discussion [...]

Something I’ve been thinking a lot about lately is the idea of universal common descent. I know there has been some recent questioning of common descent, but let’s pretend for a second that common descent is indeed the model — and even if it is not, the fact that life has basically come from one [...]

Look at this awesome Nalgene bottle that my coworker got me a few weeks ago. It is a special philosophy bottle. You can get your own from Powell’s (a huge bookstore in Oregon).
The philosophers listed are: Aristotle, Plato, Augustine, Descartes, Kant, Marx, Nietzsche, Foucault. We joked that I should etch Zizek on the very top [...]