The trouble with each “new” year is the enforced starting over. Twelve months into its maturation, and just as a certain fondness forms out of familiarity (but just before familiarity breeds contempt), the “reset” button is pressed. Therein lies the crux: objective time is demarcated rationally while subjective time – the time of Augustine – proceeds on an entirely different rhythm. This is precisely why we find displaced narratives, the rupturing of linear time – “Memento”, “Irreversible”, “Boomtown” – concurrently disconcerting and compelling.
Reading is terminally difficult; only the inanimate can withstand changes in the meaning-constructing subject. The good ones always come unexpectedly from odd places. Out of a deceptively simple book about Hegel and language emerges one of the better expositions of speculative philosophy – Hegel’s Speculative Good Friday: The Death of God in philosophical perspective. Deland Anderson, take a bow.
6 January:
