Category: Thinkers

Only Impossible Exchange Is Possible, by Aurel Schmidt (translated by Alan N. Shapiro)

Impossible exchange is an impossible subject. In Jean Baudrillard’s book Impossible Exchange (2001), the matter is treated in such a way that one is better off with an associative and meditative interpretive approach than with a discursive reading. Much of the book transported me into a state of wonder, other parts I found irritating.

April 15, 2010
In Search of the Child’s Innocence, by Caroline Heinrich (translated by Alan N. Shapiro)

I begin with a quotation. “The child is innocence and forgetfulness, a new beginning, a sport, a self-propelling wheel, a first motion, a sacred Yes”, writes Nietzsche in Zarathustra. The child is innocent because s/he starts all over again from scratch. S/he starts from the space of emptiness that the lion has carved out.

April 15, 2010
Adolf Portmann on the New Biology, by Gianna Maria Gatti (translated by Alan N. Shapiro)

This action, offering light to the plant, enables the latter to externalize its ‘interiority’. A fascinating interpretation that, deriving from an unusual vision of the artwork, instills in it a deeper and certainly original value. Suggesting this original meaning is the theory developed around the time of the 1960s by the Swiss biologist Adolf Portmann.

April 15, 2010
Merleau-Ponty and Marx on Nature and Art, by Gianna Maria Gatti (translated by Alan N. Shapiro)

Man places between himself and nature those signs useful to denote and represent it, sanctioning the beginning of the autonomous differentiation of the phenomenal world. In the Upper Paleolithic, the figurations of wild animals drawn on the walls of caves, between magic and the practice of the satisfaction of vital needs and control over nature.

April 15, 2010
Consumer Culture and Naming the Animals, by Alan N. Shapiro

In his famous essay “Myth Today,” published in 1957, Roland Barthes added a second dimension to the semiotic analysis of Ferdinand de Saussure, to the insight of the Swiss linguist that language is a social institution. Barthes added a social theory of culture to the social theory of language.

April 14, 2010
Richard Rorty on Radicalism, Liberalism, and Poetic Language

I was very impressed reading something that Richard Rorty wrote about revolutionaries in his essay “The Contingency of Community” ( in the book “Contingency, irony, and solidarity”). Rorty argues very cogently for a kind of “impossible” deconstructive synthesis of radicalism and liberalism.

April 13, 2010