Everything we do as humans is provisional. Because of time’s eroding power, everything is revisable. There is a reason for the word “decision” being a part of our language. Not accidentally, the term derives from the Latin for “cut”; in other words, when we decide something, we make a volitional “cut” of sorts in the […]
Derrida
Posted inEquality, News/Politics
‘Decolonisation’, the new ideology
Everywhere one looks today in South Africa you find a new imperative: “Decolonise!” In certain academic quarters it has evidently already attained the level of a new ideology, where academics are expected to “decolonise” the courses they teach (and presumably the articles they submit for publication as well). What astonishes me is that academics do […]
Posted inBusiness, News/Politics
Triumph of capitalism: The new world plague
Some time ago, while working on a bigger project concerning contemporary society, I took Slavoj Žižek as my point of departure to raise the question of the state of the “ethical” today. This morning, when I was looking at Jacques Derrida’s Specters of Marx (Routledge 1994) in the context of this project, I noticed a […]
Posted inGeneral
Mirror wars
The crime novel I referred to in my last post (The diversity of individuals), Leif Persson’s Between Summer’s Longing and Winter’s End) is a real treasure trove of wisdom on life, love, good, evil, and a host of other things that really matter. It is much more than just a crime novel; it is a […]
Posted inGeneral
Einstein in new contexts
Many students who discover, for the first time, the way that a concept’s meaning can subtly change from one context to the next, are so taken with this that they jump to the relativistic conclusion, namely, that new contexts change a concept in such a manner that, in the new context, it is incomparably different […]
Posted inGeneral
What is creativity?
How does it work? Is it mere imitation, or transformation, or could it be — under rare circumstances — “pure” creation, that is, out of thin air, as it were? This last possibility is captured in the Christian doctrine of “creatio ex nihilo”, which is attributed to God — the creation of the universe out […]