Imprint: Dead Letter Office
Published: 08/08/2014
Benjamin Christensen’s 1922 Swedish/Danish film Häxan (known under its English title as Witchcraft Through the Ages) has entranced, entertained, shocked, and puzzled audiences for nearly a century. The film mixes documentary with fantasy, history with theatrics, religion and science, the medieval past and modern culture. This uncanny content is compounded by the film’s formal strangeness,[…]
Imprint: Dead Letter Office
Published: 02/21/2014
Could there have been television without California? California without television? The one shows the other: the ostentatiously novel singularity of the place and the seemingly self-effacing transparency of the medium. Yet if television and California both promise again and again to offer us something new, young, immaculate in its transience — a pure surface that[…]
Imprint: Dead Letter Office
Published: 09/05/2013
In this far-reaching essay, historian Michael Edward Moore examines modernity as an historical epoch following the end of the medieval period — and as a “messianic concept of time.” In the early twentieth century, a debate over the meaning and origins of modernity unfolded among the philosophers Ernst Cassirer, Hans-Georg Gadamer and Hans Blumenberg. These[…]
Imprint: Dead Letter Office
Published: 03/13/2014
The Non-Library is a non-standard expression for life that is lived without mediation from words, images, or even ideas. While a thing called “the Library” continues to terrorize humanity even as it enters its last stages as a consequence of cataclysmic climate change and late capitalism, the Non-Library is a strictly performative, ahistorical immanence that suspends[…]
Imprint: Dead Letter Office
Published: 06/04/2013
What is a problem? What’s asked in that question, and how does one even begin to take its measure? How else could one begin, except as one does with any other problem—by way of its impulsion. Of Learned Ignorance: Idea of a Treatise in Philosophy is about philosophy because philosophy is about problems: philosophy, in[…]
Imprint: Dead Letter Office
Published: 10/06/2013
Access interactive companion web-book here. Gaffe/Stutter is a dead letter to Deleuze’s Logic of Sense. It began as a series of diagrams, two-dimensional memory palaces that sketch the vectors of each chapter’s paradox; it became an elaborate plan for a web-based diagrammatic (r)e(n)dition of Logic of Sense, built on zoomable, annotatable high-resolution scans of these diagrams. Conceived[…]
Imprint: Dead Letter Office
Published: 06/28/2013
Dialectics Unbound: On the Possibility of Total Writing re-imagines figures of ontological totality, in and out of writing, first by exploring some lineages of the dialectic, and second by engaging thinkers such as Theodor Adorno and his assertion of nonidentity, Julia Kristeva and her positing of a fourth term of the dialectic, and Fredric Jameson’s[…]
Imprint: Dead Letter Office
Published: 05/23/2013
A Sanctuary of Sounds is an aural rewriting of William Faulkner’s novel Sanctuary (1931). A polyphonic object. A garden — assemblage of blooms, of affects, of sounds, of meaning. An invitation to rethink appropriation ethically, aesthetically, and epistemologically. The appropriation of a body of work, of a physical body, of an idea, of data. The[…]