AnnabelBabel, Beauty, BarbarityBabel’s works are built on contrasts: the tranquility and beauty of nature, immediately negated– though perhaps also sublated– by the…Jan 6Jan 6
AnnabelMayakovsky and Biblical MythmakingIn Mystery-Bouffe, Mayakovsky reshapes Biblical myths into his own worldly utopia. First, his Flood represents a socialist revolution, a…Dec 31, 2023Dec 31, 2023
AnnabelThe Original Synthetic Unity of Apperception as the Principle of All ThoughtHaving by now discussed sensibility, the faculty through which objects are given, Kant shifts his focus in the Transcendental Logic to…Dec 13, 2023Dec 13, 2023
AnnabelThe Synthetic A Priori in Kant’s First CritiqueUnsatisfied with the conclusions reached by both the Continental rationalists and the British empiricists on the origins and limits of…Dec 11, 2023Dec 11, 2023
AnnabelThe Hero’s Journey in Utopian Myths and Dystopian ApocalypsesOne constant has persisted through every moment of human existence, an organic creature of inspiration and imagination that has repeated…Dec 8, 2023Dec 8, 2023
AnnabelTolstoy and DefamiliarizationStare at something long enough, and it blurs into mere shape. Listen to something again and again, and it withers into meaningless sound…Nov 30, 2023Nov 30, 2023
AnnabelKant and the Non-Spatiality of Things in ThemselvesWithin just the first section of his General Observations on Transcendental Aesthetic in the Critique of Pure Reason (1787), Kant…Nov 22, 2023Nov 22, 2023
Annabel“To Communist Station!”: The Revolutionary Train in Stalin’s Soviet ProjectIn his 1850 Class Struggles in France, Marx declared that “revolutions [were] the locomotives of history” that drove society forward…Nov 17, 2023Nov 17, 2023
AnnabelAutocracy and Nationality: Fate, Necessity, and WillWhile nationalism had already been emerging in Russia in the late 18th century as a belief that society was united by a core group of moral…Nov 16, 2023Nov 16, 2023