Marx | ZETEO

A Syrian man holds lifeless body of his son, killed by Syrian Army, Aleppo, Syria, October 3, 2013, photo by Manu Brabo - AP

Sontag, Hell, Thinking, Politics

December 20, 2016 by William Eaton

To designate a hell is not, of course, to tell us anything about how to extract people from that hell, how to moderate hell’s flames. Still, it seems good in itself to acknowledge, to have enlarged, one’s sense of how much suffering caused by human wickedness there is the world we share with others. Someone who is perennially surprised that depravity exists, who continues to feel disillusioned (even incredulous) when confronted with evidence of what humans are capable of inflicting […]

Categories: William Eaton, ZiR • Tags: Aleppo, Camus, Donald Trump, Freud, Goya, hell, Hillary Clinton, La Fontaine, Marx, politics, Susan Sontag, Sympathy for the Devil, war

Lynch Mobs

January 3, 2016 by fritztucker

Shortly after posting my previous week’s article about Donald Trump, fascism, and communal violence, the New York Times published footage of a woman being lynched in Kabul, Afghanistan. The preceding disclaimer did not prepare me for the video’s contents; though I can’t think of anything that would have. It was definitely the worst thing I’ve ever seen in my life. I don’t necessarily recommend the reader watch it. I would recommend it, however, for those who genuinely think that Trump’s followers are in danger […]

Categories: Fritz Tucker, ZiLL • Tags: African-Americans, books, crime, death, History, literature, Marx, New York Times, politics, race, reading, writing

Massacres, Slow Violence, Solidarity

December 6, 2015 by Ed Mooney

The massacres in Paris or Beirut, the stabbings and instant “justice-by-cop” in Israel, unabated slaughter in Syria or Yemen, or the crystal clear framing here in Zeteo of centuries of suffering attributable to brutal class warfare — if faced unblinkingly, all this can induce paralysis. Then we learn, within days, that three are murdered in Colorado Springs, and fourteen in San Bernadino. Slow-burning or explosive, the catastrophes seem to go on and on. Sad to say, if there’s a tropism […]

Categories: Ed Mooney, ZiR • Tags: capitalism, class warfare, crime, Marx, massacres, philosophy, solidarity

Film, Marxism: Tanner, Berger, Jonas

October 13, 2015 by William Eaton

If now largely ignored, Alain Tanner and John Berger’s 1976 film Jonas qui aura 25 ans en l’an 2000 (For Jonas Who Will Be 25 In The Year 2000), remains warm, charming, lovable.[1] And the movie is particularly hard not to like now when the hopes and “Marxist humanist” analysis underlying it have come to seem a Romantic pipe dream. “[A]lles Heilige wird entweiht, und die Menschen sind endlich gezwungen, ihre Lebensstellung,” Marx and Engels wrote in the not-Marxist-humanist […]

Categories: William Eaton, ZiLL • Tags: Alain Tanner, capitalism, dreams, film, Frederic Jameson, French, Jean-Luc Godard, John Berger, Marx, Marxism, politics

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How does the good become good?

June 4, 2015 by William Eaton

Two disparate analogies to help us begin thinking about how the process works. A drug company tests its latest concoctions—e.g. statins—to see what effects they have. Discovering something one of these concoctions can do—lower high LDL cholesterol—the company engages its public relations and advertising arms in trumpeting the value of doing this thing. Lowering LDL cholesterol becomes something essential to prolonging human life. (And this in a time when, for example, obesity and poverty are much more life-threatening than LDL […]

Categories: William Eaton, ZiR • Tags: ethics, Jean-Paul Sartre, journalism, Marx, Thoreau

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Idiotic Holiday

March 29, 2015 by Ed Mooney

Well, it’s Spring Break, or Spring Break is just over, and if it’s over, then Florida beaches may return to normal for this time of year. A friend, in a stroke of genius, remembered an apt line from Nietzsche. If not “found-art,” then in a relevant sense, “found-philosophy.” Here it is, from Morgenröte (The Break of Day or Dawn): The only thing that cannot be refused to these poor beasts of burden is their “holidays”—such is the name they give to […]

Categories: Ed Mooney, ZiR • Tags: Hilary Putnam, holidays, Marx, Nietzsche, spring break, Thoreau, vacation

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How to get published after you’re dead?

April 20, 2014 by William Eaton

In a footnote on page 609 of Alfred Habegger’s My Wars Are Laid Away in Books: The Life of Emily Dickinson, I find: In 1903, traveling in Europe with Sue [Emily’s sister-in-law], Martha [one of Emily’s nieces] married Captain Alexander E. Bianchi, supposedly of the Imperial Horse Guard of St. Petersburg. The captain accompanied his bride to America, ran through her money, cooled his heels in a New York jail, and vanished. After this costly misadventure, Martha took a keen […]

Categories: William Eaton, ZiR • Tags: Emily Dickinson, Henry James, Kant, Marx, poetry

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The “P” word: mediated pornography

January 27, 2014 by Alexia Raynal

My friend was a little upset that Margret Grebowicz did not include graphic evidence of her research in her book Why Internet Porn Matters. I, on the other hand, was a little relieved. Reading a book about pornography without the images seemed less daunting than reading an illustrated version of it. Granted, there is descriptive narrative in the book, but Grebowicz seems to focus more on language and power than the visuals. This is what I found most interesting in the first two […]

Categories: ZiR • Tags: capitalism, Marx, philosophy, pornography, reading, sexuality

Wittgenstein and Darwin’s Crab Soup

May 1, 2013 by William Eaton

[print_link] [email_link] Do you know, is the crab soup vegetarian? And of what uses are words if their meanings are bent by their use? And could comic philosophy be our last best hope? By William Eaton It could be teasing to begin this way, but . . . The last few months I have been working now and again on an essay about sex and philosophy, and it has seemed to me that the word “pleasure,” if not […]

Categories: Essay, Spring 2013 Issue • Tags: Darwin, evolution, Marx, meaning, Orwell, philosophy of language, Plato, vegetarianism, Wittgenstein