Duncan Reyburn

The evil of banality On the consequences of unseeing our inheritance “A peculiar characteristic of our times is the combination of significant scenes with insignificant actors. … Yet one must concede the zeitgeist an infallible hand in picking out [so many trivial men]—if we consider it in just one of its possible aspects, that

The prejudice against prejudice On reclaiming language and speaking the truth Every object of knowledge demands a method of knowledge proper to it. In other words, the way to understand anything is to take every object of study on its own terms. Accept the given as it gives itself and allow it to exist

The obliteration of subjectivity On the destruction of inwardness in noiseworld In his 1958 essay Individuality and Modernity, the ever-astute Richard Weaver observes that much of our happiness is dependent upon our ability to maintain a delicate tension between our inner lives and the outer world. He assumes that our attention is, or at

The paranoid style of American precrime On the necessity of transcending leftard schizotemporality In Storm of Steel, his vividly gripping account of his experiences as an officer in the Great War, Ernst Jünger writes about a fellow soldier named Eisen, a plump little man who was always shivering in the trenches. To fight the cold, he

The metaphysics and politics of coffee My coffee has gone cold and so now I must contemplate the entire universe Every time you make yourself a cup of coffee, maybe while standing nearly lifeless (or half dead) in front of that coffee pot on a particularly dismal Monday morning, it is not difficult to take it

Hunting the white stag On the inevitability of hierarchies In the first of his Arthurian Romances, Chrétien de Troyes tells a rather odd story. At least, it is odd by modern standards; and modern standards should not necessarily be trusted. The story goes that a bunch of men, led by King Arthur, go out

Metamodernism A quick peak under the mask of the will to oscillate Charlie Kaufman’s 2008 film Synecdoche, New York is possibly the quintessential postmodern film. It makes use of all the stuff we intuitively associate with postmodernism: irony, deconstruction, pastiche, relativism, and, of course, the rejection of big stories as

The psychopolitics of mimicry On the destruction of the human being and the plague of identities Recently, a TikTokker showed how limb lengthening surgery made it possible for him to go from being five feet five inches tall to six feet tall. Mary Harrington perceptively and hilariously suggests that the TikTokker in question is

Conspiratorial realism A rather rough speculation on why conspiracy theories might turn out to be true It is remarkable that very young children, without ever being taught, will realise that absolutely nothing in the world explains itself. This is what’s behind that infamous why phase. Kids will ask why until grownups,

Lazy Jack An exegesis of a folk tale Consider your life as a question. How will you, as this live hermeneutical forcefield, as this mode of perception irregularly used by strangers, be an answer to this world that questions you; and how will you allow the world to answer the question of

God's been sacked A memo to all staff “I am afraid we are not rid of God because we still have faith in grammar.” Friedrich Nietzsche, Twilight of the Idols (1889). To all staff, To curb rumours, we want to bring to your attention a matter of some importance. As you are already

The question concerning AI Thinking about inhuman pseudo-intelligence with Martin Heidegger “We look into the danger and see the growth of the saving power. Through this we are not yet saved. But we are summoned to hope in the growing light of the saving power. How can this happen? Here and now and in

Digging craters to catch the rain A brief guide to thinking in four directions “In the form in which it comes, a thought is a sign with many meanings, requiring interpretation or, more precisely, an arbitrary narrowing and restriction before it finally becomes clear. It arises in me—where from? How? I don’t know. It

The zombification of therapy On chatbot psychologists for unworlded selves Recently, as large language models have improved—meaning that they have become more deceptive—there’s been a bit of a push to use AI chatbots to take on the role of the therapist. This amounts to replacing the therapist with a philosophical zombie:

Doom Further thoughts on the war on reality The nominalist revolution and its consequences have been a disaster for the human race.1 If so many people hadn’t succumbed to a fringe philosophical development in the middle ages, the world would look very different. If nominalism had not sprung up,

Decline A brief introduction to the history of consciousness “No, listen,” I say. “Imagine this. You’re in an old aeroplane, the altimeter reads 5000 meters, you’ve lost a wing, you’re going down like a tumbler pigeon, and on the way, you’re going over your schedule: Tomorrow from

The art of descandalisation On outrage porn, mimesis, and forgiveness One of the signs of our time is the almost overwhelming prevalence of so-called outrage porn. That colloquialism refers to things that provoke shock or indignation, whether by design or default. And, my goodness, there’s a lot of it around. Probably we did

The great discarnation The ontology of the work of AI and its hermeneutical insignificance “I dont have nothing only words to put down on paper. Its so hard. Some times theres mor in the emty paper nor there is when you get the writing down on it. You try to word the big

The incoherence of rights Thinking about ethics with Marshall McLuhan “A friend of mine who tried to teach something about the forms of media in secondary school was struck by one unanimous response. The students could not for a moment accept the suggestion that the press or any other public means of communication could