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Robert Assaye
Robert Assaye is a writer and critic living in London.

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Issy Wood, When You I Feel

Art Review

December 2017

Robert Assaye

Art Review

December 2017

At the centre of Issy Wood’s solo exhibition at Carlos/Ishikawa is a room-within-a room. The division of the gallery into two viewing spaces –...

Art

April 2017

'Learning from Athens'

Robert Assaye

Art

April 2017

The history of Documenta, a quinquennial contemporary art exhibition founded in the German city of Kassel in 1955, is...

Worthwhile philosophy is like building matchstick galleons When Lewis says that all possible worlds are just as real as this one, or Chalmers says that a thermostat is conscious, or Parfit says that there is no persistent self, or Plantinga says that belief in God is no more unreasonable than belief in other minds, these are assertions of fantastic intellectual audacity – but only because they have been raised up out of close reasoning and incremental advancements   In general, continental philosophers prefer to operate outside these constraints, and are therefore also denied these satisfactions They have sex before marriage, so they don’t get a wedding night The closest thing to audacity that continental philosophy can ever manage now is when, for instance, Žižek says something tasteless about Josef Fritzl, and even then no one is genuinely offended, because they already know and love Žižek   But one exception has recently emerged   ‘What is it that happened 456 billion years ago? Did the accretion of the earth happen, yes or no?’ That shouldn’t be an electrifying question, but it is, at least in the context in which it is posed: a short book by a brilliant new philosopher who is also a practising Frenchman Let’s assume that we respond to it with what Quentin Meillassoux would call an ancestral statement: ‘Yes, the accretion of the earth did happen I wasn’t there myself, but it definitely happened’ As Meillassoux writes in After Finitude, ‘What distinguishes the philosopher from the non-philosopher in this matter is that only the former is capable of being astonished by the straightforwardly literal meaning of the ancestral statement’ If you’re not quite sure how anyone, even a philosopher, could be astonished by ‘The accretion of the earth did happen’, then you obviously haven’t spent much time reading continental philosophy (My warmest congratulations on your good fortune) In continental philosophy, that statement about accretion would be regarded as naïve, obtuse, old-fashioned, meaningless, and/or fascistic For example, here is one writer’s response ‘Let’s pretend it’s the late 19th century and phrenology is accepted as a science And someone like Meillassoux comes along and

Contributor

August 2014

Robert Assaye

Contributor

August 2014

Robert Assaye is a writer and critic living in London.

New Communities

Art

January 2017

Robert Assaye

Art

January 2017

DeviantArt is the world’s ‘largest online community of artists and art-lovers’ and its thirteenth largest social network. Its forty million members contribute to a...
The Land Art of Julie Brook

Art

Issue No. 4

Robert Assaye

Art

Issue No. 4

Julie Brook works with the land. Over the past twenty years she has lived and worked in a succession of inhospitable locations, creating sculptures...

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fiction

January 2014

Vertical Motion

Can Xue

TR. Karen Gernant and Chen Zeping

fiction

January 2014

We are little critters who live in the black earth beneath the desert. The people on Mother Earth can’t...

feature

Issue No. 19

Editorial

The Editors

feature

Issue No. 19

‘A crisis becomes a crisis when the white male body is affected,’ writes the philosopher Rosi Braidotti, interviewed in...

feature

October 2013

Enjoy His Symptoms?

Michael Sayeau

feature

October 2013

We lack the philosophers that we require for an era marked by agitation and occupation. From the UK student...

 

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