Author: Alan N. Shapiro

  • L’importance de Baudrillard pour l’avenir

    L’un des meilleurs commentateurs de Baudrillard est Gary Genosko, l’auteur du Baudrillard and Signs, un livre qui place Baudrillard dans le contexte de la sémiotique et de la pataphysique. Genosko écrit: «Baudrillard est l’inventeur d’un langage sophistiqué décrivant les capacités de simulation les plus avancées des systèmes d’information.»

  • Daniel Defoe’s Robinson Crusoe

    The basic situation of Robinson Crusoe’s early life was that of a young man who did not want to get a job. Robinson was born in the year 1632, in the city of York, of a good family. His father was a successful businessman, a trader in “merchandise.”

  • Cultural Citizenship in Contemporary America

    In one terminology, cultural citizenship is a process which takes place in the context of a specific historical relationship between the individual and the social. In what may be the most highly socialized society that ever existed, Americans tend to almost completely deny that there exists a social or cultural realm.

  • Charles A. Lindbergh’s The Spirit of St. Louis

    We think of Lindbergh as the far-right most prominent speaker at rallies of the “America First” movement in the early 1940s, an isolationist precursor of the unilateralist Donald Trump and his horrible MAGA movement. I present here an alternative existentialist view of Lindbergh’s pioneering 1927 flight.

  • “Outer space is a blank canvas” — Interview with Forty Two Magazine

    Wir alle leben Science-Fiction, und die Zukunft ist utopisch – zumindest könnte sie das sein, würden wir sie uns bloß richtig vorstellen? Im Gespräch mit 42 Magazine argumentiert Alan N. Shapiro dafür, dass wir verstehen müssen, dass Science-Fiction keine Zukunftsmusik ist und wir uns letztlich von der Idee verabschieden müssen, alles wissen zu können.

  • Body, Self, and Code in Hypermodernism

    This is the text of the speech that I gave at the Schaubühne theater in Berlin on 23. February 2020, at an event in the “Streitraum” series led by Carolin Emcke.