Author: The Rev. Joshua Paetkau
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Imago Animae: Strangers in a Strange Land.
Works Reviewed. Kristeva, Julia. Strangers to Ourselves. Translated by Leon S. Roudiez. New York: Columbia University Press, 2024. Harbouring the Stranger, Michael Sweerts, 1649. People are strange, when you’re a stranger. Faces look ugly, when you’re alone. When you’re strange, faces come out of the rain, when you’re strange…. People are Strange, The Doors, 1967.…
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Imago Animae: Misperceptions of a man.
Imago animi sermo est. ~ Seneca. Speech is the mirror of the mind, says Seneca, and I feel as if this quote is mine, and at the same time as if it is not. What kind of mirror am I supposed to be, and what does it mean to mirror back the myriad words and…
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The Chrysalis of Justice: A Series on Generative and Transformational Conceptions of Justice.
In Mourning Becomes the Law, the late Gillian Rose makes a trenchant case against the “despairing rationalism without reason” of postmodernism. Mourning is not despair, and the purpose of challenging injustices within the social structure must not lead to a perpetual suspicion of all authority and institution, but rather to a remaking that is more…
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Unconvinced.
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…
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The Subversion of Morality: Reading Tang Wengming’s “Secret Subversion I: Mou Zongsan, Kant, and Early Confucianism.”
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…
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Literature Strikes Back: A Reading of Cate I. Reilly’s “Psychic Empire: Literary Modernism and the Clinical State.”
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…
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Birthquake: The Literary After-Shocks of the Great Kantō Earthquake in Arthur M. Mitchell’s “Disruptions of Daily Life.”
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…
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Looking Good: A Review of Yasuda’s Beauty Matters.
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…
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Unanchored Reason: Gaston Bachelard and Surrealist Philosophy.
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:…
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(Positive) Vibrations
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…