Criticism and Pop Culture


This quote illustrates the problem with criticism and art today, especially when it comes to pop culture critics.

https://dorkforty.files.wordpress.com/2014/02/chiang-wonder-woman-2.jpg?w=640
Wonder Woman, by Cliff Chiang

The comic book critic Kelly Thompson dropped Wonder Woman after issue #7, and explained herself in her article “Is the Destruction of the Amazons The Destruction of Feminism in DC Comics?”  Basically, the writer of Wonder Woman, Brian Azzarello, has returned the titular character Wonder Woman to ancient Greek mythological roots. However, Greek mythology is much more bloodthirsty and savage than their previous incarnations, notably expressed by George Perez in the mid 80s. The Olympians of Perez seemed closer to the stoic figures of Roman mythology: certainly noble but mostly detached from the affairs of mortals. Continue reading Criticism and Pop Culture

World as Will and Representation: Appendix

Appendix: Critique of Kantian metaphysics

Statue of Kant in Kaliningrad, Russia

Schopenhauer devoted the final section of the first volume to a thorough critique of Kantian metaphysics. The critique was intended in order to highlight the greatness of Kant and the quote by Voltaire said it all: It is the privilege of true genius, and especially genius who opens up a new path, to make great mistakes with impunity. Plato and the Hindu are the other intellectual muses, but Kant is the chief golden calf Schopenhauer genuflects before in the majority of The World as Will and Representation, but by the end of the book, he wields the hammer of Uru to clear away the rusty flakes. It is much easier to point out the faults and errors in the work of a great mind than to give a clear and complete exposition of its value. (WWR p. 415) Continue reading World as Will and Representation: Appendix

philosophical critique of philosophy

The Philosophers by Masters of the Judgment of Solomon
The Philosophers by Masters of the Judgment of Solomon

Philosophy is notorious for subjecting itself to withering criticism, and that is precisely where philosophy progresses. For some philosophers, the critique of philosophy is also the very essence of philosophy. Jean Hyppolite interprets Hegel by saying “philosophical discourse contains its own criticism within itself.” Then, philosophical critique is inescapable, or, the discourse of philosophy cannot be isolated and insulated from a critique of any kind.

Jacques Derrida, in his seminal Of Grammatology: “Operating necessarily from the inside, borrowing all the strategic and economic resources from the old structure, borrowing them structurally, that is to say without being able to isolate their elements and atoms, the enterprise of deconstruction always in a certain way falls prey to its own work.” (P. 24) The deconstruction of philosophy merely unpacks the methods and logic and propositions employed by philosophers, yet this unpacking is always already unpacking, that is, rearrange the methods and reformat the logic and re-institute the propositions.

Since philosophy is self-referential, then the effort to define the founding conditions of philosophical truth from a purely objective position outsie of philosophical discourse is necessarily doomed to fail. Derrida inspects what the structures of philosophical texts contains in order to trace the hidden/excluded/repressed history/folks/concepts of western philosophical discourse as its founding conditions of possibility.