2 Nisan 2012 Pazartesi

Kate Millett




Writer and sculptor Kate Millett was an early member of National Organization for Women (NOW) and was the first chair of NOW’s education committee (1965-1968). She became a nationally known leader of the women’s movement after the publication of Sexual Politics
Sexual Politics analyzes misogyny in the works of several prominent male writers who present underdeveloped female characters as sexual objects. The book also includes a critique of the ways in which society has created and reinforced the artificial and dichotomous paradigms of “masculinity” and “femininity,” with power and control vested wholly in the masculine. According to Millett, this paradigm is so socially ingrained that “[m]any women do not recognize themselves as discriminated against; no better proof could be found of the totality of their conditioning.”
Millett’s deeply personal autobiographical works, including Flying (1974),Sita (1977), and A.D. (1995), reveal the difficulties she has faced in her public and private life, including the furor following her public declaration of lesbianism, which became emblematic of the split among feminists during the early 1970’s.
She has also written The Basement: Meditations on a Case of Human Sacrifice (1979), about female victims of violence and the motives of both observers and perpetrators of this violence; Going to Iran (1982), about the repression of Muslim women in Iran under Ayatollah Khomeini; The Loony-Bin Trip (1990), about mental illness and institutions; and The Politics of Cruelty: An Essay on the Literature of Political Imprisonment(1994), about political torture.



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1 Nisan 2012 Pazar

Emma Goldman




The most unpardonable sin in society is independence of thought.(Goldman)


Emma Goldman is known as a rebel, an anarchist, an ardent proponent of birth control and free speech, a feminist, a lecturer and a writer
Born in what is now Lithuania but was then Russia, in a Jewish ghetto, moved early to Königsberg and St. Petersburg, where she became involved with university radicals. Emma Goldman left for America in 1885 with her half sister Helen Zodokoff, working in the textile industry in Rochester, New York.
Briefly married in 1887, Emma Goldman moved in 1889 to New York where she quickly became active in the anarchist movement. She became one of the most outspoken and well-known of American radicals, lecturing and writing on anarchism, women's rights and other political topics. She also wrote and lectured on "new drama," drawing out the social messages of Ibsen, Strindberg, Shaw, and others.
Emma Goldman served prison and jail terms for such activities as advising the unemployed to take bread if their pleas for food were not answered, for giving information in a lecture on birth control, for opposing military conscription, and in 1908 she was deprived of her citizenship.
In 1917, with Alexander Berkman, Emma Goldman was convicted of conspiracy against the draft laws, and sentenced to to years in prison and fined $10,000.
In 1919 Emma Goldman, along with her long-time associate Alexander Berkman and 247 others who had been targeted in the Red Scare after World War I, emigrated to Russia on theBuford. But Emma Goldman's libertarian socialism led to her Disillusionment in Russia, as the title of her 1923 work says it. She lived in Europe, obtained British citizenship through marrying the Welshman James Colton, and traveled through many nations giving lectures.
Without US citizenship, Emma Goldman was prohibited, except for a brief stay in 1934, from entering the United States. She spent her final years aiding the anti-Franco forces in Spain through lecturing and fund-raising. Succumbing to a stroke and its effects, she died in Canada in 1940 and war buried in Chicago, near the graves of the Haymarket anarchists.
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31 Mart 2012 Cumartesi

Emil Michel Cioran






Born in 1911 in Rasinari, a small village in the Carpathian Mountains of Romania, raised under the rule of a father who was a Romanian Orthodox priest and a mother who was prone to depression, Emil Cioran wrote his first five books in Romanian. Some of these are collections of brief essays (one or two pages, on average); others are collections of aphorisms. Suffering from insomnia since his adolescent years in Sibiu, the young Cioran studied philosophy in the “little Paris” of Bucarest. A prolific publicist, he became a well-known figure, along with Mircea Eliade, Constantin Noïca, and his future close friend Eugene Ionesco (with whom he shared the Royal Foundation’s Young Writers Prize in 1934 for his first book, On the Heights of Despair).

Influenced by the German romantics, by Schopenhauer, Nietzsche and theLebensphilosophie of Schelling and Bergson, by certain Russian writers, including Chestov, Rozanov, and Dostoyevsky, and by the Romanian poet Eminescu, Cioran wrote lyrical and expansive meditations that were often metaphysical in nature and whose recurrent themes were death, despair, solitude, history, music, saintliness and the mystics (cf. Tears and Saints, 1937) – all of which are themes that one finds again in his French writings. In his highly controversial book, The Transfiguration of Romania (1937), Cioran, who was at that time close to the Romanian fascists, violently criticized his country and his compatriots on the basis of a contrast between such “little nations” as Romania, which were contemptible from the perspective of universal history and great nations, such as France or Germany, which took their destiny into their own hands.

After spending two years in Germany, Cioran arrived in Paris in 1936. He continued to write in Romanian until the early 1940s (he wrote his last article in Romanian in 1943, which is also the year in which he began writing in French). The break with Romanian became definitive in 1946, when, in the course of translating Mallarmé, he suddenly decided to give up his native tongue since no one spoke it in Paris. He then began writing in French a book that, thanks to numerous intensive revisions, would eventually become the impressive A Short History of Decay(1949) -- the first of a series of ten books in which Cioran would continue to explore his perennial obsessions, with a growing detachment that allies him equally with the Greek sophists, the French moralists, and the oriental sages. He wrote existential vituperations and other destructive reflections in a classical French style that he felt was diametrically opposed to the looseness of his native Romanian; he described it as being like a “straight-jacket” that required him to control his temperamental excesses and his lyrical flights. The books in which he expressed his radical disillusionment appeared, with decreasing frequency, over a period of more than three decades, during which time he shared his solitude with his companion Simone Boué in a miniscule garret in the center of Paris, where he lived as a spectator more and more turned in on himself and maintaining an ever greater distance from a world that he rejected as much on the historical level (History and Utopia, 1960) as on the ontological (The Fall into Time, 1964), raising his misanthropy to heights of subtlety (The Trouble with being Born, 1973), while also allowing to appear from time to time a humanism composed of irony, bitterness, and preciosity (Exercices d’admiration, 1986, and the posthumously published Notebooks).

Denied the right to return to Romania during the years of the communist regime, and attracting international attention only late in his career, Cioran died in Paris in 1995.


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Arthur Schopenhauer





Among 19th century philosophers, Arthur Schopenhauer was among the first to contend that at its core, the universe is not a rational place. Inspired by Plato and Kant, both of whom regarded the world as being more amenable to reason, Schopenhauer developed their philosophies into an instinct-recognizing and ultimately ascetic outlook, emphasizing that in the face of a world filled with endless strife, we ought to minimize our natural desires for the sake of achieving a more tranquil frame of mind and a disposition towards universal beneficence. Often considered to be a thoroughgoing pessimist, Schopenhauer in fact advocated ways  via artistic, moral and ascetic forms of awareness  to overcome a frustration-filled and fundamentally painful human condition. Since his death in 1860, his philosophy has had a special attraction for those who wonder about life's meaning, along with those engaged in music, literature, and the visual arts.


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Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzche





Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche (1844–1900) was a German philosopher of the late 19th century who challenged the foundations of Christianity and traditional morality. He was interested in the enhancement of individual and cultural health, and believed in life, creativity, power, and the realities of the world we live in, rather than those situated in a world beyond. Central to his philosophy is the idea of “life-affirmation,” which involves an honest questioning of all doctrines that drain life's expansive energies, however socially prevalent those views might be. Often referred to as one of the first existentialist philosophers along with Søren Kierkegaard (1813–1855), Nietzsche's revitalizing philosophy has inspired leading figures in all walks of cultural life, including dancers, poets, novelists, painters, psychologists, philosophers, sociologists and social revolutionaries.




Works:


  • The Case of Wagner. 
  • The Birth of Tragedy and The Case of Wagner. 
  • Daybreak: Thoughts on the Prejudices of Morality.
  • Ecce Homo: How One Becomes What One Is
  • The Gay Science, with a Prelude of Rhymes and an Appendix of Songs.
  • Human, All Too Human: A Book for Free Spirits.
  • Nietzsche Contra Wagner.
  • On the Genealogy of Morals 
  • Morals and Ecce Homo. 
  • Philosophy and Truth: Selections from Nietzsche's Notebooks of the Early 1870's. 
  • Philosophy in the Tragic Age of the Greeks.
  • Thus Spoke Zarathustra.
  • Twilight of the Idols.
  • Untimely Meditations
  • Beyond Good and Evil
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