"Thinking, as an activity, does not belong to some rarefied world of professional philosophers. 'Intellectual,' she said, was a hateful word. She held that everyone was capable of engaging in self-reflective critical thinking, and that doing so was necessary if one is to resist the tide of ideological thought and claim personal responsibility in the face of fascism. (10)" - Hill, Samantha Rose. Hannah Arendt. Reaktion Books, 2021.
------------------------------------------------------------
Just as every culture has its own signs to represent the same mathematical numbers, so too it has its unique way of representing the blend of the sacred and the profane, visible and invisible, that underpins reality. A Greek nymph, an Egyptian god and a Persian angel are just different manifestations of the same infinite essence. Hence the ease with which the Romans welcomed foreign divinities into their pantheon and combined their mythological discourses.
This intuition which constitutes the core of the Mediterranean imagination, found a masterful expression in the philosophical system of Neoplatonism. Founded in the third century by the Egyptian philosopher Plotinus, Neoplatonism treated reality as a complex realm composed of multiple dimensions. Only a fraction of it can be experienced through the senses and classified by human languages; beyond this fragment, an infinite dimension yawns, surpassing any sense of concept. This arcane dimension sustains the existence of everything that is manifest in the world, yet humans can refer to it only through imprecise and insufficient terms, such as 'God,' 'pure existence,' or, in Plotinus' vocabulary, the 'One.' The 'One' is the Being of each being, the Life of anything living, the Presence of anything present. While remaining always the same, it takes on the infinite forms allowed by the world, thus appearing in different guises to different peoples or creatures. Hence the paradoxical nature of the world, which is at the same time one and many: infinitely varied in its appearance, yet one in its essence and in its existence.
To illustrate this vision, let us imagine the world as a glass prism, which is traversed by the light of an external realm beyond space and time. Neither the transparent glass nor the colourless light is visible on its own. But as soon as they meet, they bring about an explosion of colours. Each beam of coloured light, like the mythology of each religion, is just one of countless possible manifestations that result from the encounter between time and eternity, language and ineffability, the profane and the sacred.
According to Salutius, this was precisely what the Christians had failed to understand. The Christians wished to destroy the prism of the world and to retain only the colourless light of their God. The result, however, was the complete obfuscation of reality: they were blind to the colours of the world, yet they were still unable to see the essence of God's light.
Salutius did not hate the Christians. He believed their mistakes stemmed from ignorance rather than malice, echoing Plato's view that 'is someone were to know what is good and bad, then ... intelligence would be sufficient to save a person.' With his book [On the Gods and the World], he wished to rescue them from their error and expose them to a wider metaphysical vision. Even though the Christians were a danger to the empire and themselves, they had to be helped and forgiven. As their Messiah had said, 'they know not what they do (138 - 140).'
Campagna, Frederico. Otherworldly: Mediterranean Lessons on Escaping History. Bloomsbury, 2025.
--------------------------------------------------------
Alexander, Travis. "Power and Flesh." Aeon (October 31, 2025) ["The reigning biopolitical disputes hinge on deceptively simple questions: what is the body for? What should we do with it? Are there levels of biology where a difference of degree becomes a difference of kind? If a human body changes (or is changed) beyond a certain point, does it stop being an altered human body and become, instead, something else? There’s no shortage of modern artists and thinkers wrestling with these questions. The choreographer Meg Stuart pushes bodies to extremes of movement; the multimedia artist ORLAN and the transgender artist Cassils use performance to test the boundaries of flesh and identity; another performance artist, Stelarc, stages the body as machine, grafted with prosthetics. Patricia Piccinini’s sculptures imagine hybrid anatomies, while the films of Julia Ducournau – director of the body horror Titane (2021) – and Claire Denis probe bodily desire and transformation. In scholarship, Yuval Noah Harari tracks the future of the human species, Kate Crawford critiques the bodily costs of AI, and Paul B Preciado theorises on gender transition and pharmacopolitics. And yet, few voices have been as persistent – or as transformative – as David Cronenberg’s. Since the 1970s, he has been cinema’s great anatomist, staging dramas of growth, decay and mutation. Over the decades, his vision has shifted: from a romantic belief that altered bodies deserve celebration, to a more careful insistence that people should be free to alter themselves only if they choose. The arc feels natural, but it is also urgent right now. At a moment when the fight over bodies threads through disputes on everything from vaccines to elder care, Cronenberg offers a framework we need: a way to affirm bodily autonomy without stoking the panic that casts every transformed body as a threat. His cinema points toward a politics of protection – one that secures the vulnerable while refusing to weaponise their difference, and that shows how the defence of bodies can be a form of solidarity rather than a spark for fear."]
Anderson, Ellie and David Peña-Guzmán. "Masculinity." Overthink (September 23, 2025) ["Performative males, hustle bros, sissies, and manfluencers. In episode 140 of Overthink, Ellie and David discuss masculinity. What does it mean to be a man, and how has the concept of masculinity changed over time? They look at the male loneliness epidemic, the current influx of male influencers spreading right-wing rhetoric on the manosphere, and some of the main features of masculinity. Is masculinity rooted in violence and homophobia, or is it possible to have a healthy model of masculinity? In the Substack bonus, your hosts get into the mythopoetic men's movement and the connection between haircuts and masculinity."
Robert Brannon and Deborah Sarah David, The Forty-nine Percent Majority: The Male Sex Role
Pierre Bourdieu, La domination masculine
R.W. Connell, Gender and Power
Bell Hooks, The Will To Change
James W. Messerschmidt, Hegemonic Masculinity
Joseph Pleck, The Myth of Masculinity
Todd W. Reeser, Moderating Masculinity in Early Modern Culture
Frans de Waal, Chimpanzee Politics: Power and Sex Among Apes]
Bellar-Tadier, Luna. "The Lesbian Allure and Colonial Unconscious of Todd Field’s Tár." Another Gaze (January 25, 2023) ["Tár is a rare film for this reason. Lydia’s type of appeal is not one that is depicted often, consisting as it does of the attractiveness and the desire that belong to a self-assured, powerful older woman who possesses no stereotypical feminine charm, but only the imposing matter-of-factness of her accomplishment, and a masculinity subtle enough to be invisible to an untrained or uninterested eye. Furthermore, Tár promises to deal precisely with the deep ambivalence which stems from the way such a figure both troubles and upholds existing modes of power. This appeal remains largely illegible in our heteronormative world (and in fact its general illegibility is an important part of its experience). It’s thrilling to see someone like this on the big screen, and to know that a straight audience is being made to understand that a young and conventionally attractive woman would pursue her (“Can I text you?” asks red bag woman, grasping Lydia’s hands when their flirtation is cut short by Francesca’s agitated intervention). Moreover, inasmuch as Tár echoes the plethora of contemporary “#MeToo” narratives, depicting this appeal is crucial to telling this story responsibly, for to not give the viewer a window into her desirability – sexual or otherwise – would render the women that flock to her mere dupes."]
Charman, Helen. "After the Hunt." Another Gaze (November 4, 2025) ["After the Hunt mistreats its material. Eva Victor’s sensitive, funny Sorry, Baby (2025) offers a useful counterpoint. In this film, too, the audience is told about but never shown the sexual assault of a graduate student, Agnes, by her professor. But rather than constructing a game of ‘he said, she said’, Sorry Baby makes a feminist choice: it takes Agnes at her word. She discloses what happened to her best friend and fellow student, who believes her immediately and completely without requiring specifics: the act itself is named only as ‘the bad thing’. Victor’s camera remains steady on Agnes’s face as she describes as much as she can of what has happened to her, in her own time. Rape does not need to be described to be identified, especially in an institutional context littered with historical and cultural examples of such abuses of power. Throughout Victor’s film, Agnes’s right to refuse to describe her experience is defended against the many cultural and institutional imperatives to do so, whether in the courtroom, the bedroom, or the doctor’s office."]
Chawlisz, Claudia. " Fixing Democracy: Citizens’ Assemblies." Past Present Future (September 21, 2025) ["David talks to Claudia Chwalisz, founder and CEO of Democracy Next, about how citizens’ assemblies could help fix what’s wrong with democracy. Where does the idea of a jury of citizens chosen at random to answer political questions come from? What are the kinds of contemporary questions it could help to settle? How does it work? And what would encourage politicians to listen to citizens’ assemblies rather than to their electorates?"]
Freedman, Sam. " Fixing Democracy: TikTok, Disinformation and Distraction." Past Present Future (October 19, 2025) ["In our penultimate episode in this series David talks to writer Sam Freedman about whether democracy can cope with the demands of the social media age. Are we really more vulnerable to disinformation than we have ever been? Is the bigger problem our ever-shrinking attention spans or our ever-divided politics? What happens to democracy as visual communication squeezes out the written word? And what might make things better?"]
Glied, Sherry and Paul Starr. "Health Insurance in America." Throughline (February 27, 2025) ["Millions of Americans depend on their jobs for health insurance. But that's not the case in many other wealthy countries. How did the U.S. end up with a system that's so expensive, yet leaves so many people vulnerable? On this episode, how a temporary solution created an everlasting problem." Guests: Sherry Glied, Dean of the Robert F. Wagner Graduate School of Public Service at New York University; Paul Starr, professor of sociology and public affairs at Princeton University."]
Gretton, Dan. "Desk killers: the psychology of committing crimes against humanity." History Extra Podcast (November 21, 2022) ["Author Dan Gretton discusses his book I You We Them, which examines the psychology of individuals who organised and implemented some of the worst crimes against humanity, from the Holocaust to human rights violations in Nigeria. In conversation with Rachel Dinning, he introduces the concept of the ‘desk killer’ – a perpetrator who is responsible for murder without taking an active role in the killing."]
Harman, Elizabeth. "The Ethics of Abortion." The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (May 14, 2025) ["Abortion is the intentional termination of a pregnancy, either via surgery or via the taking of medication. Ordinary people disagree about abortion: many people think abortion is deeply morally wrong, while many others think abortion is morally permissible. Philosophy has much to contribute to this discussion, by distinguishing and clarifying different arguments against abortion, distinguishing and clarifying different responses to those arguments, offering novel arguments against abortion, offering novel defenses of abortion, and offering novel views about the relevant issues at stake."]
Harper, Shaun. "You Didn’t See What You Saw: Lessons for students on Renee Good’s death and the politization of facts." Inside Higher Ed (January 12, 2026) ["Just as people around the world are listening to dueling interpretations of what happened to Good, so too are students in K–12 schools and on college campuses across America. Those who have scrolled social media platforms or watched news with their families in recent days have likely seen at least one video showing the ICE agent firing his gun into Good’s vehicle. Their government leaders are telling them that they don’t see what they see. This is noteworthy for at least three reasons. First, it teaches students how to heartlessly politicize the loss of life. Defending the federal government’s actions is seemingly more important than is empathy for Good, her wife and children, and those in her community who witnessed what happened on a snowy Minnesota street that day. The lesson for students is that partisan loyalty and the advancement of a White House administration’s policy agenda (in this case, the mass deportation of immigrants) justify cruel responses to a citizen’s death. Also, they are learning that just about anything rationalizes the relentless pursuit of a partisan mission, regardless of who gets hurt and what crimes are committed."]
Hedges, Chris. "America the Rogue State." Films for Action (January 5, 2025) ["Can anyone seriously make the argument that the U.S. is a democracy? Are there any democratic institutions that function? Is there any check on state power? Is there any mechanism that can enforce the rule of law at home, where legal residents are snatched by masked thugs from our streets, where a phantom “radical left” is an excuse to criminalize dissent, where the highest court in the land bestows king-like power and immunity on Trump? Can anyone pretend that with the demolition of environmental agencies and laws — which should help us confront the looming ecocide, the gravest threat to human existence — there is any concern for the common good? Can anyone make the argument that the U.S. is the defender of human rights, democracy, a rule based order and the “virtues” of Western civilization? Our reigning gangsters will accelerate the decline. They will steal as much as they can, as fast as they can, on the way down. The Trump family has pocketed more than $1.8 billion in cash and gifts since the 2024 re-election. They do so as they mock the rule of law and tighten their vice-like grip. The walls are closing in. Free speech is abolished on college campuses and the airwaves. Those who decry the genocide lose their jobs or are deported. Journalists are slandered and censored. ICE, powered by Palantir — with a budget of $170 billion over four years — is laying the foundations for a police state. It has expanded the number of its agents by 120 percent. It is building a nationwide complex of detention centers. Not solely for the undocumented. But for us. Those outside the gates of the empire will fare no better with a $1 trillion budget for the war machine."]
Hirschhorn, Sara Yael, et al. "The Rise of the Right Wing in Israel." Throughline (October 12, 2025) ["This week, we’re bringing you the story of the rise of right wing politics in Israel and President Benjamin Netanyahu’s political career."]
Hudson, David. "Oliver Laxe’s Sirât." Current (November 11, 2025) ["“The resilience of this group,” writes Filmmaker editor Scott Macaulay, “their small-scale collectivism, and the way in which dance, and drugs, are a kind of social and even spiritual practice, as opposed to simple escapism, made me think of the late Mark Fisher’s final unfinished work, ‘Acid Communism,’ and his thinking here is an analogue to the movie’s techno-scored hedonic flow: ‘The crucial defining feature of the psychedelic is the question of consciousness, and its relationship to what is experienced as reality. If the very fundamentals of our experience, such as our sense of space and time, can be altered, does that not mean that the categories by which we live are plastic, mutable?’”"]
Ioannidis, John. "How Profit and Politics Hijacked Scientific Inquiry." Capitalisn't (September 18, 2025) ["Why does a podcast about capitalism want to talk about science? Modern capitalism and science have evolved together since the Enlightenment. Advances in ship building and navigation enabled the Age of Discovery, which opened up new trade routes and markets to European merchants. The invention of the spinning jinny and cotton in the 18th century spurred textile production. The United States’ Department of Defense research and development agency helped create the precursor to the internet. The internet now supports software and media industries worth trillions of dollars. On the flip side, some of America’s greatest capitalists and businesses, including Thomas Edison, Henry Ford, and Bell Labs, gave us everything from electricity production to the transistor. Neither science nor capitalism can succeed without the other. However, science’s star is now dimming. Part of this is due to political intervention. In the U.S., the federal government has cut funding for scientific research. The Covid-19 pandemic diminished the public’s trust in scientific experts, which social media has exacerbated through misinformation. Restrictions on immigration may further hamper scientific research as some of the world’s brightest minds lose access to funding and state-of-the-art facilities. But so too has capitalism played a hand in science’s struggles. While corporations sponsor a significant portion of funding for scientific research, this funding too often comes with undisclosed conflicts of interest. Or corporate pressure may influence results in other ways. Stanford University professor John Ioannidis is a physician, writer, and one of the world's most-cited scientists. He studies the methodology and sociology of science itself: how the process and standards for empirical research influence findings in ways that some may find inaccurate. His 2005 essay "Why Most Published Research Findings Are False" is one of the most accessed articles in the history of Public Library of Science (PLOS), with more than three million views. Ioannidis joins Bethany and Luigi to discuss the future of the relationship between capitalism and science, how both will have to respond to contemporary politics, and how one even conceptualizes robust measurements of scientific success."]
Jilani, Seema. "A War Zone Pediatrician on What Comes After the Horrors of a Gaza Emergency Room." Literary Hub (March 5, 2025) ["In trying to fathom the unfathomable scenes of human tragedy in Gaza, I have turned to women whom I knew would not offer performative allyship or suggest moderating my tone of anger; nor would they diminish my tears or silence my voice as so many do. They have, not coincidentally, also been prominent women whose identities have been sculpted by Western colonialism. I have leaned on Fatima Bhutto, a writer and novelist who hails from one of South Asia’s most intriguing political dynasties, the Bhutto family of Pakistan. I have confided in Najla Said, actor, playwright and daughter of the Palestinian American intellectual Edward Said. His work implored the West to leave behind exotified images of Asia and the Middle East, seeing them as mirages which exist only to justify Western colonial aspirations. Said had a transformative influence on the humanities with his landmark book, Orientalism, which upended the prism through which postcolonialism would be studied. People like myself, Fatima, and Najla are daughters born of colonization. We have been forced to face a deep reckoning with the silencing of our voices on Gaza, enduring threats to our livelihood, our families, and even our own safety. Model minorities and children of refugees like us are the forgotten corollaries to dead empires. We are exotified, tokenized, sexualized, and lauded as consummate children of the diaspora."]
Kretser, Michelle de. "'I ask you—I beg you—to join us in speaking out for Palestine.' From her acceptance speech for the 2025 Stella Prize." Literary Hub (May 23, 2025) ["Recently, two groups of women have been on my mind. In the first group are Jo Case, Sophie Cunningham, Monica Dux, Christine Gordon, Foong Ling Kong, Rebecca Starford, Louise Swinn and Aviva Tuffield: the founders of the Stella Prize. My respect and gratitude to those eight women, who rejected business as usual, who decided to make the world a more equitable place, and whose activism resulted, against the odds, in the Stella Prize and the transformation of our literary landscape. Even if I knew the names of everyone in the second group, there wouldn’t be time to read them out, for they’re the women and girls of Gaza. They’re the women and girls murdered, maimed, starved, raped, tortured, terrorised, orphaned, bereaved, incarcerated, dehumanised, displaced, in business as usual for Israel’s genocide and ethnic cleansing—war crimes for which Australia provides material and diplomatic support. That complicity has had serious consequences for Australian democracy. We’ve seen scholars, creatives and journalists silenced, their funding revoked and their contracts cancelled for expressing anti-genocide views. We’ve seen precious rights eroded and authoritarian laws rushed in on the flimsiest of pretexts. We’ve seen our institutions and our media betray the principles they’re supposed to uphold. We’ve seen language suffer Orwellian distortions. We’ve seen our leaders pander to the anti-Arab racism of that global bully the United States. And all of this damage has been done to prop up Israel: a brazenly cruel foreign power, whose leaders are internationally wanted criminals."]
Laing, Olivia. "What did Pasolini know? Fifty years after his brutal murder, the director’s vision of fascism is more urgent than ever." The Guardian (November 1, 2025) ["I think Pasolini was right, and I’m certain that the warnings he kept uttering were why he was killed. He saw the future we’re now in long before anyone else. He saw that capitalism would corrode into fascism, or that fascism would infiltrate and take over capitalism, that what appeared benign and beneficial would corrupt and destroy old forms of life. He knew that compliance and complicity were lethal. He warned about the ecological costs of industrialisation. He foresaw how television would transform politics, though he was dead before Silvio Berlusconi came to power. I do not think the ascent of Trump, a politician formed in Berlusconi’s mould, would have surprised him very much."]
Marriot, James. "The Dawn of the Post-Literate Society." Cultural Capital (September 19, 2025) ["As Postman pointed out, it is no accident, that the growth of print culture in the eighteenth century was associated with the growing prestige of reason, hostility to superstition, the birth of capitalism, and the rapid development of science. Other historians have linked the eighteenth century explosion of literacy to the Enlightenment, the birth of human rights, the arrival of democracy and even the beginnings of the industrial revolution. The world as we know it was forged in the reading revolution. ... Now, we are living through the counter-revolution. More than three hundred years after the reading revolution ushered in a new era of human knowledge, books are dying. Numerous studies show that reading is in free-fall. Even the most pessimistic twentieth-century critics of the screen-age would have struggled to predict the scale of the present crisis."]
Moran, Dan and Mike Takla. "The Beast: A Film by Bertrand Botello." Fifteen Minute Film Fanatics (November 10, 2025) ["Have you ever felt that you keep making the same mistakes or that you have fallen into a pattern that could be Exhibit A as proof of reincarnation? The Beast (2023) uses all kinds of world-building and three different timelines to explore these ideas–and does so while faithfully adapting a 1903 story by Henry James. It’s the kind of film in which one could be lost in the red arrows that point out movie Easter eggs all over YouTube, but the real draw of the film is its incredible performances and how it combines intricate plotting with emotional weight."]
Nestle, Marion. "The Money Behind Ultra-Processed Food." Capitalisn't (May 23, 2024) ["Critics of the food industry allege that it relentlessly pursues profits at the expense of public health. They claim that food companies "ultra-process" products with salt, sugar, fats, and artificial additives, employ advanced marketing tactics to manipulate and hook consumers, and are ultimately responsible for a global epidemic of health ailments. Companies are also launching entirely new lines and categories of food products catering to diabetes or weight management drugs such as Ozempic. Marion Nestle, a leading public health advocate, nutritionist, award-winning author, and Professor Emerita at New York University, first warned in her 2002 book "Food Politics" that Big Food deliberately designs unhealthy, addictive products to drive sales, often backed by industry-funded research that misleads consumers. This week on Capitalisn't, Nestle joins Bethany and Luigi to explore the ultra-processed food industry through the interplay of four lenses: the underlying science, business motives, influencing consumer perceptions, and public policy."]
Ryan, David. "Satirizing Horror and Spellbinding the Social Contract: Weapons (2025)." Film International (November 18, 2025) ["As a follow-up to Zach Cregger’s horror drama Barbarian (2022), Weapons explores the recursive relationship between personal antagonisms and the erosion of civic trust, staging what Robin Wood identifies as horror’s central tension—the destabilization of the social order….”"]
Further Reading:
The Burnout Society by Byung-Chul Han (2015)
Psychopolitics: Neoliberalism and New Technologies of Power by Byung-Chul Han (2017)
The Society of the Spectacle by Guy Debord (1967)]
No comments:
Post a Comment