Given the box office success of Ridley Scott's epic NAPOLEON, I am reminded of the following thought from the guiding spirit of this blog, William James. The essay is "The Importance of Individuals," one of a pair of essays in which he defends a sort of extended-Carlylean conception of history. I've discussed that conception in this blog before and will not go into it in particular now. Just the one quick quote. James writes, "Some organizing genius must in the nature of things have emerged from the French Revolution; but what Frenchman will affirm it to have been an accident of no consequence that he should have had the supernumerary idiosyncrasies of a Bonaparte?" Let us contemplate that thought without a lot of commentary from me: I'll let Ridley Scott do the commenting. I will only borrow from a dictionary a definition of supernumerary: "being in excess of the normal or requisite number." Presumably Bonaparte had more idiosyncra...
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Donald Trump is the President-elect of the United States. The markets have been gobsmacked by this. They clearly didn't see it coming. Neither, as it happens, did I. In fact I consider it more than a bit scary. But allow me to try to intellectualize a bit as a defense mechanism. A few days before the election, I noticed this: Click. "Superstar Marxist Philosopher Just Endorsed Trump" runs the headline to which you come if you do click that. Somehow this doesn't surprise me. As I believe I've mentioned here before, Zizek is the sort of Marxist who tries to get behind Marx chronologically and conceptually, to get himself back in touch with the original Hegelian inspiration. This is a not uncommon move among the intellectuals of the continent, motivated perhaps by the fact that understanding the distinctive post-Hegel aspects of Marxism, the stuff that Marx himself studied for long days in the library of the British Museum to master as he poured over the...
My recent reading includes BECOMING STEVE JOBS by Brent Schlender and Rich Tetzeli. I am struck by the following passage, from a discussion of Jobs' time with Pixar. A power struggle had forced him out at Apple, and Pixar was his corporate Elba. Or one of them. The first-person pronoun "I" in this book generally refers to Brent Schlender, due to the long personal relationship with Jobs.. That said, I'll let the following speak for itself. When people list the many industries that Steve is said to have revolutionized, they often include the movies, since Pixar brought a whole new art form to the big screen. I'm not of that mind. John Lasseter and Ed Carmull are the men who brought 3-D computer graphics to the movies, and revived the art of animated storytelling. That said, Steve did play a critical role in Pixar's success. His influence was constrained, because Carmull and Lasseter were the ones shaping Pixar, not he. But that constraint, ironically,...