That was the Atlantic, which overlooks the Elbe, and was used in the James Bond film ‘Tomorrow Never Dies’. ![]() If the sense was that most of the summer’s prospective audience were focused on the Premier League rather than this, you wouldn’t have guessed it from the scene around the Uefa hotel. It just might take a while to feel that way given the odd timing of the draw. It may offer momentum for the exacting and evenly-matched games against Hungary and Switzerland. They have the worst possible opening game against the hosts but the fact it is the opening game of the whole tournament means they are involved in the sort of event that you can only be thrilled about. Unlucky for him in who he got, but also maybe inspiring. He had joked to English media beforehand: “I hope to stay far away from you guys!” In Han’s book Absence 6, he explained that in Eastern philosophy, writing is viewed as a “subjectless happening (Han 77).Albania’s coach Sylvinho was still actually beaming. The writer has to accept that sometimes ideas move in unpredictable ways beyond their control. ![]() Writing an insightful and condensed sentence could take hours after multiple drafts. On the other hand, “letting words come to you” is more demanding than writing run-ons. And when writers forget to grow out of the habit, they end up filling up hundreds of pages with little substance. Teachers assign us “word counts” we have to hit, so we resort to waffling and purple prose when we fall short. This way of writing contrasts with how schools taught us to write. “I don’t claim authorship of my books: that’s why the words in them are wiser than I am,” he said, “they have to interview my books, not me. Han prefers to “receive thoughts” without forcing them. Maybe I write three sentences a day, which then becomes a book.” And then, maybe I sit at my desk for an hour. I work in the garden most of the time and play the piano. When his mind drifted to his writing process, he confessed that he “writes little”: He showed up to the interview 15 minutes late on a bike, refused a typical Q&A format and rambled about whatever came to his mind. The recent EL PAÍS interview 5 with Byung-Chul Han in October painted him as a “somewhat eccentric guy” and a “proudly lazy thinker”. Because his genius doesn’t lie in his ideas alone, but in his articulations of them. So, in this post, I would like to draw from two interviews with Byung-Chul Han (the guy rarely accepts interviews so these are solid gems) and write a case study on his philosophy of writing. Inaccessibility becomes a badge of honour at the expense of the life-affirming power of ideas. Academically minded people tend to place their pride before the readers’ understanding. In this age where academic and technical writing can’t seem to reach the public, Han is the exemplar of how complex ideas should be articulated. During a commencement speech 4, Han confessed that he has a “bad habit” of condensing his sentences so much that his readers are “forced to underline each and every sentence”. This is an excerpt from Byung-Chul Han’s The Burnout Society : a groundbreaking work that didn’t go beyond 50 pages. The ideas in this paragraph are so clear that we almost feel guilty when we understand them. ![]() Twenty-first-century society is no longer a disciplinary society, but rather an achievement society (Han 8) 3. It has long been replaced by another regime, namely a society of fitness studios, office towers, banks, airports, shopping malls, and genetic laboratories. Today’s society is no longer Foucault’s disciplinary world of hospitals, madhouses, prisons, barracks, and factories. On the other end of the extreme, you’ll end up with a philosopher who writes like this: “A man who on the evidence of his many admired books finds it difficult to write intelligibly and impossible to write well.” The judges even went as far as to say that Jameson was Its author Fredric Jameson won The Bad Writing Contest 2 (sponsored by the Philosophy and Literature Journal ) in 1997. That was one sentence that ballooned into a paragraph from The Political Unconscious. This is how we end up with prose like this:Īs for periodization, its practice is clearly enveloped by that basic Althusserian conceptual target designated as "historicism" and it can be admitted that any rewarding use of the notion of a historical or cultural period tends in spite of itself to give the impression of a facile totalization, a seamless web of phenomena each of which, in its own way, "expresses" some unified inner truth-a world-view or a period style or a set of structural categories which marks the whole length and breadth of the "period" in question (Jameson 12) 1. Most philosophers are convinced that if their ideas are good enough, then the writing will simply take care of itself. The field of philosophy is full of bad writing.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |