The Mourning Cloak
transformation & rebirth
recent posts
- Unconvinced.
- The Subversion of Morality: Reading Tang Wengming’s “Secret Subversion I: Mou Zongsan, Kant, and Early Confucianism.”
- Literature Strikes Back: A Reading of Cate I. Reilly’s “Psychic Empire: Literary Modernism and the Clinical State.”
- Birthquake: The Literary After-Shocks of the Great Kantō Earthquake in Arthur M. Mitchell’s “Disruptions of Daily Life.”
- Looking Good: A Review of Yasuda’s Beauty Matters.
about
Category: Uncategorized
-
Remember, remember the 5th of November, gunpowder, treason, and plot. On November 5, 2024 the people of the United States of America went to the polls. Representative democracy offers, perhaps, the illusion of choice more than actual empowerment, but in this particular election there seemed to be a very clear right and wrong answer to…
-
Works Reviewed. Tang Wenming Secret Subversion I: Mou Zongsan, Kant, and Early Confucianism. Routledge Studies in Contemporary Philosophy. Routledge, 2022. Mou Zongsan (牟宗三 12 June 1909 – 12 April 1995) was a Chinese philosopher and translator who sought both to synthesize Kantian philosophy with the Neo-Daoist, Confucian, and Buddhist traditions of China, but also to…
-
Works Reviewed. Cate I. Reilly Psychic Empire: Literary Modernism and the Clinical State. Columbia University Press, 2024, 331 pages. “What does a scientific picture of the head show?” Or, again, what remains of the mind when the brain’s territory has been painstakingly and assiduously mapped; neuron by neuron, dendrite by dendrite? The map, Korzybski has…
-
Works Reviewed: Arthur M. Mitchell Disruptions of Daily Life: Japanese Literary Modernism in the World. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2020. 266 pages. The power of modernist fiction, contends Arthur M. Mitchell, lies in its ability to “make us aware of the discursive structures that undergird the imaginative relationship we have to our social world.” The…
-
Anri Yasuda’s Beauty Matters: Modern Japanese Literature and the Question of Aesthetics 1890-1930. New York: Columbia University Press, 2024 Of the three transcendentals of classical philosophy, which one has suffered, at the hands of modernity, as beauty has suffered? Immanuel Kant famously clipped the wings of the imagination, afraid that her fecundity should compromise the…
-
Republication of Review from The Chaleur Bay Review. This is one of my previous reviews, from an older iteration of the site, under the name The Chaleur Bay Review of Books. It was one of my favourites, and I thought it might be nice to reintroduce it to the new site. Works Reviewed. Kotowicz, Zbigniew. Gaston Bachelard:…
-
On Music as Material Practice of Vibration. Works Reviewed. Marcus Boon The Politics of Vibration: Music as a Cosmopolitical Practice. Durham, Duke University Press, 2022. 279 pages. In the song “Johnny Was,” the great Bob Marley paints us a picture, in sound, of a grieving mother whose son has been caught in the crossfire of…
-
Works Reviewed. Garry Dorrien In a Post-Hegelian Spirit: Philosophical Theology as Idealistic Discontent. Waco, Texas: Baylor University Press, 2020. Theology, particularly in its contemporary iterations, is always involved in the process of salvage work, in the sense that it must both recuperate and reinvent a way forward out of the fraught legacy of its history.…
-
Antiopia’s Kitchen Party ~Joshua Paetkau. One of my favourite quotes, from Charles Peguy, goes something as follows: “Nothing is as old as today’s news. If you want to read something new go to the Odyssey and the Iliad of Homer.” Our age of fast food and fast news is unsatisfying to the storied souls of…
-
What makes a human human? Descartes famously offered cogitation as a solution to the question of existence, but as we began to develop thinking machines, new questions began to emerge. “Can machines think?” Alan Turing asked, in the 1950s and proposed that, thought being such a difficult concept, we could try to answer the question…
The Mourning Cloak 