Reporter | Xu Luqing
Edit | Yellow Moon
1 "Full Immersion in the Doomsday Script"
Zhai Yongming
One page folio Liaoning People's Publishing House 2022-3
"My eyes look at you like two wounds in pain." "I, a rhapsody, full of the charm of the abyss." "Whoever stands at the hands of his mother will eventually die of birth." In 1984, Zhai Yongming was known to the poetry circle for the "Woman" group of poems, when she worked in state-owned enterprises and institutions, wore jeans, read poetry, and was incompatible with her surroundings. After "Woman" was written, she and her well-connected colleagues secretly mimeographed 20 copies of the booklet in the unit printing room, and the ink was stained with hands, because the paper of the unit did not dare to print too much. 40 years later, Zhai Yongming is considered one of the founders of Chinese feminist poetry and a representative poet of the intellectual poetry group.
"Full Immersion in the Doomsday Script" includes Zhai Yongming's new poetry works from 2015 to 2021, she pays attention to different art forms, brings in the experience of creating cross-border art in the poems, and a play and a painting have become poetry inspiration. Her poems interrogate the future from the dilemmas of the present, and topics include technology and artificial intelligence, the universe and the end, space, singularities, and machinery. She said that a large number of her poems are related to reality, and in the face of the new crown epidemic in 2020, she wrote: "I can't use the uncontrollable passion / to chant the victory or defeat of the 'war' / I can't rush to the aid of the infected city / I can only sit with my eyes closed / The mind lurks with a giant beast / It seems to squirm out of a barbarism." ”
The Spirit of Science Fiction
[Chile] Roberto Polanio by Hou Jian, translated
Century Wenjing, Shanghai People's Publishing House, 2022-3
Bolaño writes novels, and his life is like a novel. Born in Chile, his family moved to Mexico at the age of 15 and returned to Chile at the age of 20 to join the socialist revolution. Arrested and nearly killed in Chile, he fled back to Mexico and together with friends promoted the "Infrarealism" movement, which blended surrealism, Dadaism, and street theater, with the aim of inspiring a love of life and literature among young Latin Americans. He left Mexico in 1977 and traveled abroad alone, spending a year traveling through France, Spain and North Africa, and traveling around the Mediterranean coast. At that time, he earned money by doing odd jobs, washing dishes, picking grapes, picking up garbage, tending campsites, working as a dock worker, and running a small shop. He used his free time to write poems, and his business card was printed: "Roberto Polanio, Poet and Tramp".
Bolaño was left behind with ten novels, four collections of short stories, and three collections of poems. The Spirit of Science Fiction is an early work of his, a novel that reflects on the mexican years that have passed. Jan and Reymo are like Bolaño's self-projections, wandering the poetry lecture halls on college campuses, the dimly lit streets of Mexico City, the bars where drunks and poets haunt, the small bookstores where they often steal books... Hou Jian, the translator of this book and a teacher at Xi'an University of Foreign Chinese, believes that there are two Bolaño: "One is Bolaño, who wrote "The Spirit of Science Fiction" and "Wilderness Detective", this Bolaño has dreams, is brave and fearless, even if he fails repeatedly; the other is Bolaño, who wrote "Chile Night" and "2666", this Bolaño saw through the essence of human nature and recorded the evil of mankind like the recorder of the final trial. ”
"Hot Milk"
Deborah Levy by Li Yan, translated
New Classic Culture: Sichuan Literature and Art Publishing House, 2022-3
Sophia, an anthropology student, interrupted her doctoral studies due to her mother's illness and worked in a café. However, she later discovered that her mother's paralyzed leg disease was imagined by herself, a net that tried to tie her. She saw from her illness that she and her mother were interdependent and destructive. The complex and subtle mother-daughter relationship strings together the emotional rope of "Hot Milk", and the protagonist Sophia says more than once: "My love for my mother is like an axe, it is deeply cut." ”
Born in South Africa, British writer Deborah Levy has been twice shortlisted for the Booker Prize short list for her novels "Swimming Home" and "Hot Milk", and her writing focuses on intimacy and individual dilemmas, which often go hand in hand. As the book writes about Sophia's trip to Spain with her mother, which marked the shattering and restart of her life, when she walked into the cool sea full of poisonous tentacle jellyfish, she reflected on her twenty-five years of life: her mother's illness trapped her, but it also allowed her to indulge in daily life without thinking about the pain of the unknown, and became a shield in the face of the collapse of meaning.
The Vanishing Reality: The Ideological Dilemma of Modern Society
Jin Guantao
CITIC Publishing Group 2022-3
Jin Guantao was an important intellectual in the 1980s, and together with the scholar Liu Qingfeng, he proposed the theory of "the super-stable structure of China's feudal society", starting from the relationship between the continuation of China's feudal society for more than 2,000 years and the outbreak of a major upheaval every two or three hundred years, the study pointed out that in China's history, the super-stable system had strong control over society politically and ideologically, and did not allow institutional reform and the growth of new social organizations, but corruption was irresistible, so the dynasty always went to the end of being destroyed by corruption. Jin Guantao, who was also the editor-in-chief of the "Toward the Future" series, emphasized "enlightenment" and "ideological nature", which represented the forefront thinking of China's ideological emancipation at that time and had a great influence on scholars in the 1980s and 1990s.
Jin Guantao, currently the Nanshan Chair Professor at the China Academy of Art and a senior honorary researcher at the Institute of Chinese Culture at the University of Chinese in Hong Kong, pointed out in his new book "The Vanishing Truth" that under the new crown epidemic, the world turmoil and regional conflicts have intensified, the tide of nationalism and anti-globalization has surged, and people's thinking seems to have returned to the nineteenth century, behind which is the chaos of the value base of modern society and the decline of the humanistic spirit, and today's philosophical research must dare to face up to the ideological dilemma brought about by historical regression. In the book, he proposes the concept of the "philosophy of authenticity", from the three revolutions of the 20th century — the rise of globalization, the scientific revolution, and the linguistic turn of philosophy — to explore the essence of the separation of science and humanity in modern society, trying to answer the question of why the real mind has gradually disintegrated with the development of modern science and technology.
Arendt: The Origins of Politics
Zhang Nian
Nanjing University Publishing 2022-3
Hannah Arendt's work covers important themes in political philosophy, most widely influenced by her exploration of the nature of power and totalitarianism. She contrasts National Socialism with Stalinism, judges the "banal evil" made by the Nazi war criminal Eichmann, and points out that bureaucracy, "not to think too much" and "mediocrity" reflected in the unthinking execution of the murder plans of their superiors in the Holocaust are widespread phenomena in modern society. She called the lack of reflection of the executors "criminals at the desk" and argued that no one has the right to blindly follow.
Zhang Nian, a professor of philosophy at the School of Humanities of Tongji University, wrote the book Arendt: The Origin of Politics, which depicts the outline of are the "sense of politics" emphasized by Arendt on the intricate ideological base. This book discusses several controversial theoretical difficulties in Arendt's political thought, including the origin of political science and politics, the political understanding of identity issues, the rise of sociality and the fall of political sense, and the absence of cosmopolitan and public, which are still of great reference to the current social reality.
The Cultural History of Paper
[de] Rothal Muller by He Xiaoyi, Song Qiong, translated
Chuangmei Factory, Guangdong People's Publishing House, 2022-2
In 1932, the French writer Paul Valéry described the relationship between civilization and paper in which we live in a speech: "Paper has penetrated into every capillary of human civilization, and social institutions and daily operations are inseparable from paper. He described a world without paper: no more paper money, no bonds, no case files, no codes, no poetry, no newspapers. 40 years later, the philosopher Derrida spoke of the decline of paper in an interview with media science report magazine: "We are experiencing the kind of decline that Balzac described in his novel The Donkey Skin. Just as the miraculous donkey skin with Arabic writing on it kept shrinking, so did the paper shrink and fade. ”
The Cultural History of Paper discusses the ubiquity of paper in human civilization, covering not only the white paper used by writers and scholars, but also the correspondence and bookkeeping techniques of merchants. On the other hand, the book proceeds from the decline of paper, and flashbacks present the development of paper and the establishment of dominance: how did paper become a basic element of Western civilization as a technology? And how did it occupy a key place in what we know as the "Gutenberg era"? Paper is also a common metaphor, from the philosopher Locke's metaphor of human thought to a blank piece of paper, to the linguist Saussure's interpretation of the duality of linguistic symbols through the positive and negative sides of paper, the metaphor of paper has always been throughout the history of science and thought.
Aesthetics of Photography
[French] François Surage by Chen Qing, translated by Zhang Hui
Houlang Shanghai People's Fine Arts Publishing House 2022-3
Photography was born in 1839, although the inventor Daguerre simply wanted to invent a recording medium, but the emergence of photography not only threatened the art of painting that was still pursuing realism at that time, provoking stylistic innovation, but also challenging the artistic threshold, making it no longer the privilege of the nobility and the court. When photography entered contemporary art and took center stage in the spotlight, a discussion of photographic aesthetics arose: What is the relationship between photography and reality? What are the characteristics of photography? Why is the art of photography at the heart of contemporary art, or even at the heart of contemporary art itself?
In The Aesthetics of Photography, the art critic and aesthetic scholar François Surage described photography as "the opportunity of the poet, the opportunity of the artist, the privilege of the average person", and he questioned why and how photography is an art. Starting from the production mechanism of photographs, he listed the works of photographers such as Gatinoni, Anna Fox, Tono Stano, Salgado, etc., in an attempt to construct a photographic aesthetic based on reason. The book has been reprinted several times in France since 1998, and today's new edition incorporates the discussion of digital photography and selfies.
Fermat's Last Theorem: A Mystery That Puzzled the World's Wise Men for 358 Years
Simon Singh by Schmidt, translated
Shanghai Beibeit Guangxi Normal University Press 2022-2
After Wang Er in Wang Xiaobo's novel "Red Breeze Night Run" proved Fermat's Last Theorem, he became a "human Rui" in the system, no longer daring to think about right and wrong, and gradually becoming a boring person. But in real history, the process of proof of Fermat's Last Theorem has been the integration of tens of thousands of interesting ideas. The proof of this mathematical theorem spanned three centuries, and around 1637, the French scholar Fermat, while reading the Latin translation of Diophantu's Arithmetic, wrote next to proposition 8 in volume 11: "It is impossible to divide a cubic number into the sum of two cubic numbers, or a fourth power into the sum of two fourth powers, or to divide a power higher than the second into the sum of two identical powers in general." I am sure that I have found a wonderful proof of this, but unfortunately the blank space here is too small to write. Since then, generations have been fascinated by this wonderful mathematical puzzle until the Hands of the British mathematician Andrew Wiles was completely solved.
Fermat's Last Theorem: A Mystery That Puzzled the World's Wise Men for 358 Years chronicles the historical and mathematical challenges associated with Fermat's Last Theorem: from the failed but valuable attempts to prove in the 17th, 18th, and early 20th centuries, to the arduous journey of Andrew Wiles's success after nearly 10 years of severe testing. At the same time, "The Language of Mathematics: Turning the Invisible into the Visible" explores the fundamental question of "what is mathematics for", mathematics is not just a problem-solving technique, it allows us to see the invisible structure in nature, making the invisible visible.