Avoiding the Subject: Media, Culture and the Object

Front Cover
Amsterdam University Press, 2004 - Social Science - 216 pages
What can Roger Rabbit tell us about the Second Gulf War? What can a woman married to the Berlin Wall tell us about posthumanism and inter-subjectivity? What can DJ Shadow tell us about the end of history? What can our local bus route tell us about the fortification of the West? What can Reality TV tell us about the crisis of contemporary community? And what can unauthorized pictures of Osama Bin Laden tell us about new methods of popular propaganda? These are only some of the thought-provoking questions raised in Avoiding the Subject, which highlights the feedback-loops between philosophy, technology, and politics in today's mediascape.
 

Other editions - View all

Common terms and phrases

Popular passages

Page 203 - Nothing contained in the present Charter shall authorize the United Nations to intervene in matters which are essentially within the domestic jurisdiction of any state or shall require the Members to submit such matters to settlement under the present Charter; but this principle shall not prejudice the application of enforcement measure under Chapter VII.
Page 189 - It not only stands with its feet on the ground, but, in relation to all other commodities, it stands on its head, and evolves out of its wooden brain grotesque ideas, far more wonderful than if it were to start dancing of its own accord.
Page 96 - A vast confusion of vows, wishes, actions, edicts, petitions, lawsuits, pleas, laws, proclamations, complaints, grievances, are daily brought to our ears. New books every day, pamphlets, currantoes, stories, whole catalogues of volumes of all sorts, new paradoxes, opinions, schisms, heresies, controversies in philosophy, religion, &c.
Page 99 - As apothecaries we make new mixtures every day, pour out of one vessel into another; and as those old Romans robbed all the cities of the world, to set out their bad-sited Rome, we ekim off the cream of other men's wits, pick the choice flowers of their tilltd gardens to set out our own sterile plots. Castrant alias ut libros suos per so gracilea olveno odipe sujfiircicmt (so * Jovius inveighs). They lard their lean books with the fat of others
Page 53 - If my body is no longer felt as the instrument which can not be utilized by any instrument— ie, as the synthetic organization of my acts in the world— if it is lived as flesh, then it is as a reference to my flesh that I apprehend the objects in the world.
Page 111 - I stand on the end platform of the tram and am completely unsure of my footing in this world, in this town, in my family.
Page 61 - And if they were in the habit of conferring honors among themselves on those who were quickest to observe the passing shadows and to remark which of them went before, and which followed after, and which were together; and who were therefore best able to draw conclusions as to the future, do you think that he would care for such honors and glories, or envy the possessors of them? Would he not say with Homer, " Better to be the poor servant of a poor master," and to endure anything, rather than think...
Page 201 - One concept that escapes the antinomy of the universal and the particular has long been familiar to us: the example. In any context where it exerts its force, the example is characterized by the fact that it holds for all cases of the same type, and, at the same time, it is included among these. It is one singularity among others, which, however, stands for each of them and serves for all.
Page 192 - ... him; for, at the edge of the wood, or in the ditch by the road leading to Saint-Nicolas, they would play the familiar game called 'curdled milk.
Page 53 - In my desiring perception I discover something like a flesh of objects. My shirt rubs against my skin, and I feel it. What is ordinarily for me an object most remote becomes the immediately sensible; the warmth of air, the breath of the wind, the rays of sunshine, etc.; all are present to me in a certain way, as posited upon me without distance and revealing my flesh by means of their flesh.

About the author (2004)

Justin Clemens lectures in cultural theory, aesthetics, and literature at Deakin University in Australia. Dominic Pettman is currently teaching in the Masters of Digital Media Program at the Polytechnic University, Brooklyn.

Bibliographic information