Category: passages

  • Passages – March 2026

    “Impure food when mixed with what is pure sometimes makes the entire mass more wholesome than a small quantity of the pure would be. “ Aristotle, Politics Book 3, 128b “We praise a man who feels angry on the right grounds and against the right persons and also in the right manner at the right…

  • Passages – August 2025 | 1

    The segmentation in Kluge’s stories, however, is not merely perspectival and cinematographic (a fifteen-minute sequence of experience juxtaposed with a paragraph foreshortening eight years); it also projects qualitative leaps into incommensurable dimensions; this particular reading experience is prolonged in Geschichte und Eigensinn, where notes on Marx’s “mode of production” (he dozed much of the day…

  • Passages – July 2025 | 3

    Passages – July 2025 | 3

    Few understood that, for him, it was a way of mourning the workers’ movement. He began this process long ago, and perhaps this was, at bottom, the meaning of his life’s work. It was not a renunciation, but a lucid break, an uprooting: to face and confront the end of a world head-on in order…

  • Passages – July 2025 | 2

    Passages – July 2025 | 2

    But if all contradictions are once and for all disposed of, we shall have arrived at so-called absolute truth — world history will be at an end. And yet it has to continue, although there is nothing left for it to do — hence, a new, insoluble contradiction. Friedrich Engels, Ludwig Feuerbach and the End…

  • Passages – July 2025 | 1

    Passages – July 2025 | 1

    Quintilian was certainly sensitive to the spell of these archaic modes. His characterization of the style of the early Roman poet Ennius foreshadows in mood and imagery the Romantic champions of medieval poetry: ‘Let us worship him, as we do sacred groves, hallowed by age, where the grand old oak trees are perhaps not as…