Author: KB
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Empathy: Seeing Myself as The Other Sees Me [3]
Empathy [1] | Empathy [2] In the previous two posts I’ve been trying to get to grips with the roots of empathy with the other, and the location of our fears of engaging the other. I’ve radically summarised Levinas and Zizek by saying that the former would locate our fears in the enigma of the…
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Empathy: Seeing Myself as The Other Sees Me [2]
I’m interested in this short series in trying to reflect on the best ground for our attempts to empathise with ‘the other.’ In the first post I ended by suggesting that it would be fruitful to consider where our fears of engaging the other lie. So here we go: It seems to me that Levinas…
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Empathy: Seeing Myself as The Other Sees Me [1]
One of the themes I have been wrestling with in the new writing I am doing (firm news on that soon, I hope) is around the subject of empathy for ‘the other.’ Philosophical lines appear to have been drawn between thinkers like Levinas on the one hand, and Hegel/Zizek/Lacan on the other. I personally felt…
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New Poem: Beaten Tracks
Beaten Tracks On the sleepers between Forest Hill and Brockley broken rails are lain down, flanked by the tidy parallels of clean-humming steel tracks. They are tensile failures, pieces and fractures, all angles and rough edges, serving brittle punishment for going out of line and giving in when the wheels rolled their backs. © KB…
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Zizek vs Milbank | Christianity as the Death and Resurrection of God
A very interesting, if complex, debate at the ICA last night between Slavoj Zizek – atheist, Marxist – and John Milbank – ‘radical orthodox’ theologian. Both are clearly fearsome intellects, though doubtless Zizek has the better jokes. It would be an impossible task (actually, Thomas Lynch does a great job here!) to even attempt a…
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Let’s Talk About the Weather… | ‘Metereoethics’
In the conversation menu for The School of Life dinner I attended earlier in the week there were a number of aphorisms and quotations to get people thinking, and a few rules too. One rule was based on Oscar Wilde’s famous quote: Conversation about the weather is the last refuge of the unimaginative. I actually…