“A solitary game without opponent”: mitigating the anxiety of Judge Holden
by Tom Lee In the previous post I quoted from Cormac McCarthy’s Blood Meridian. I suggested that the logic of Judge Holden and his war games was perhaps nothing other than maladapted techniques to mitigate bad affects associated with solitude. War doesn’t predict truth, in the sense that it decides the winners of history, as the Judge would have us believe. War is a romantic quest that protects one from loneliness and boredom. In this post I will consider some ideas for an alternate way to think about solitude. In his recently translated You Must Change Your Life, Peter Sloterdijk…