Sunday, February 27, 2005

CD update

I have made a few updates to the Critical Dictionary. If you haven't seen it before its a fairly eclectic list of definitions and quotes. Eg:

Art, and politics

'The limitations of art proclaim the limits of politics' (Adorno)

'The bourgeois want art voluptuous and life ascetic; the reverse would be better' (Adorno)

Novelty

All novelty depends upon the prior elimination of the stereotypical attitude to which we have all grown accustomed, and which seemed to us to be reality itself. Any new form of conversation, like all original painting and music, must always appear exhausting. It is based on figures of speech with which we are not familiar, the speaker appears to us to be talking entirely in metaphors; and this wearies us, and gives us the impression of a want of truth. (After all, the old forms of speech must also in their time have been images difficult to follow, when the listener was not yet cognisant of the universe which they depicted. But for a long time it has been taken to be the real universe, and is instinctively relied upon. " (Proust)


Most of the terms and definitions are from Zizek, Hegel, Lacan, Adorno and Deleuze.

The Critical Dictionary has a coherence and organisational rigour similar to Borges' Chinese Encyclopedia.