Sublime

The concerns of the twenty-first century are no longer the same as those of the late twentieth century: perhaps we are inclined to look for something different in philosophy these days.

So without knowing what the greatest and most important things are, without unifying ideas, without infallibly coherent ideologies, what is to be done? What are people going to have, as we say, in common, or what are they going to want to have in common? And when, to paraphrase Kafka, we have so little in common with ourselves; why we have so littl

'every performance is also a creative act, there is no distinct separation between performer and creator' (Goody

The neoliberal imperative of optimization and performance does not allow for any completion. Everything is provisional and incomplete; nothing is final and conclusive. It is not only computer software that is subject to the compulsion of optimization. All areas of life are subordinated to its dictates, even education. Life-long learning does not in

More often what one intends to preserve is a public personage, a permanently veiled selfhood.

We live in an era of wealth and overabundance, but how bleak it is. There is “neither art nor philosophy,” Fukuyama says. All that’s left is the “perpetual caretaking of the museum of human history.”

He distrusted simplistic narratives of good and evil. He rejected the idea that anybody could be defined by virtue of the group to which they belong. He was deeply worried about the way in which prevailing discourses exerted power over every single member of society. And he hated the

there is always a fundamental distinction between the way one relates to friends, family, neighbourhood, people and places that we actually know directly, and the way one relates to empires, nations and metropolises, phenomena that exist largely, or at least most of the time, in our heads. Much of social theory can be seen as an attempt to square t