Doctor Faustus

  The Coming of the Third Reich by Richard J. Evans In the popular imagination, the rise of Nazism was a spectacular, incomprehensible, sudden event. Yet in reality it was hardly an anomaly, considering the circumstances. The Weimar Republic , situated upon, from the beginning, uncomfortable grounds, slowly (rather than suddenly) descended onto a tyranny well before the Nazis, through the process of Gleichschaltung , established a totalitarian one-party society. Now, it must be noted that Evans clearly does not condone the idea that it was foretold in the stars. He makes it clear that chance has lead Germany to become a Nazi dictatorship, but chance wasn't alone in this regard - the foundation was already laid, in many regards. It could have gone differently - it would not be entirely unwise, in my opinion, to compare the conditions that Germany dealt with after WWI with the conditions France dealt with after the Franco-German war of 1870-1871 - both were established after a hum...

  Capitalist Realism: Is There No Alternative? by Mark Fisher " It is easier to imagine the end of the world than an end to capitalism. "  That's the key sentence that sums up, very broadly, the idea of what "capitalist realism" really is. If, at the past, certain political and economic orders needed to employ vast amounts of propaganda to justify themselves (Liberal Capitalism, too, did so quite until fairly recently, " The American Dream " and the like) nowadays Capitalism requires no such thing. Paradoxically, it employs a certain cynicism and anti-utopian sentiments to maintain its entrenchment. The reason it can do that is because, instead of competing for our sympathy, Capitalism, and in particular Neoliberal Capitalism (characterized by a totalizing market that pervades all spaces, including in the private sphere, or what Fisher himself termed "Business Ontology") simply occupies everything that the eye can see, stretching from one hor...

  Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity by Judith Butler It is quite extraordinary how relevant this book remained today though it was originally published 30 years ago. Of course, discussions about gender and sex in the general ( cishet ) public is probably doomed to remain infantile as always, but also in feminist circles, it appears there are still very vocal remnants of an antiquated, essentialist sort of 'feminism' that still occupies influential positions in the media, in particular those of the Anglosphere , frequently abusing this power more in the service of harming trans people than helping cis women. But even beyond that, even transgender people frequently tend to fall onto essentialist fallacies, and not just of the " transmedicalist " variety. Mind you, I'm not referring to the "born in the wrong body" cliché, as I doubt there's a single trans person that doesn't express that idea only to make gender dysphoria remo...

  Prisoners of Geography: Ten Maps That Tell You Everything You Need to Know About Global Politics by Tim Marshall "Prisoners of Geography" is a very valuable book to read, not necessarily as an ultimate treatise (if you'd call it that) about a supposed deterministic nature of global politics but rather, more than anything, what it implies about the mindsets governing our governments. First and foremost, I believe I'll start with the chronological starting-point - the past. Marshall doesn't merely illustrate the conflicts of interest, energy needs, and geographic obstacles as they are today and their contemporary impact but also retroactively uses this political logic handling these aspects in their modern form as the motivators behind past political policies as well as the nature of diplomacy throughout the ages. I'll only note that as a historical hypothesis I don't believe it holds up to scrutiny because it implies the same values and even cosmological ...