Tag: Peter Sloterdijk

Klekkende Høj

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by Joshua Mostafa Regardless of what form the story will take, the question remains: where to begin? Not with an encyclopaedic mastery of the facts, but with some detail that will catalyse the creative process: an irritant, grit in the shell, an indecipherable image or an indigestible notion. The epitaph to Jim Crace’s The Gift of Stones is an excerpt from an archaeologist’s memoir: the discovery of ‘the skeletal lower arm of a child’ prompts its excavators to speculate ‘in the darkness of our tents, inventing reasons why the arm was there, and what the fate had been of that…

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“A solitary game without opponent”: mitigating the anxiety of Judge Holden

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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…

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The Lonely and Homeless Judge

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by Tom Lee Judge Holden from Cormac McCarthy’s Blood Meridian is one of the most memorable characters I’ve encountered in a work of fiction. The Judge is the brains and the brawn of a group of scalp hunters who navigate the hellish terrain of the American South West in the mid-Nineteenth Century. Holden has been convincingly compared to a devilish manifestation of Nietzsche’s Übermensch (La Shot, 2009); a god of war, trained equally in martial arts and in the sophistry required to make a case for the inherent truthfulness of the outcomes decided in combat. Holden is a fascinating character, at…

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