Part One: Preliminary Remarks on the Red Army Faction It has oft been said that there is an unbridgeable chasm within the Left between reform and revolution, one that forms the line demarcation between the Left and the far-Left, but what the debate boils down to is not a question of assimilation or refusal. Rather, …
Continue reading “To Talk About the Weather: An Essay on the Red Army Faction”
There is a certain irony to the French Revolution in that one of, primarily, two historical events that came to serve as the basis for the beaux ideals of Liberalism was, perhaps, the genesis of modern dictatorship and that it became notorious for its ritualistic and ostensibly self-purifying use of the guillotine. In the …
Paweł Pawlikowski’s Cold War begins with a fictionalized ethnographic account. We see the Polish peasantry perform folk music in threadbare clothing, the soulful glimmer in their eyes and occasional glance into the camera, an awareness in naïve anticipation of their status as a subject beneath the microscope, the odd smile and heartfelt auditions, the film …
Continue reading “Love Without Hope: A Review and Essay on Paweł Pawlikowski’s Cold War”
For such a monumental historical film, little explanation is given for the escalation of violence within The Battle of Algiers. We see only the oblique terror of an archaic execution, the black robes of the men beside the guillotine before the stark prison walls, the beginnings of a haphazard revolt, a series of assassinations that …
Continue reading “On Political Will: An Essay on the Battle of Algiers”
Yukio Mishima’s graphic depiction of ritual suicide, Patriotism: The Rite of Love and Death, serves as a testament to the banality of violence and the cessation of Fascist ideology in Nihilism. The act of seppuku plays out as if it were in an Italian horror film. Mishima’s own suicide four years later only adds to …
Continue reading “Enter the Mirror: A Critique of Yukio Mishima’s Patriotism”
Hamlet is a proto-Existential play. The play’s lengthy deliberation upon suicide and murder calls into question the nature of madness and disinters what death does to thought. Hamlet is confronted by the absurdity of the human condition which he capriciously avoids by taking solace in cynical philosophical pessimism. His confrontation with the Absurd leads to …
Continue reading “This Machine: An Existential Analysis of Hamlet”
The Writings of Zadimus