To subscribe to Afterall journal, starting with this issue, please click here.
All back issue texts, excluding some from the two most recent issues, are available to view online.
Every individual is on one hand the
subject of cognition, that is to say, the complementary cognition
of the possibility of the whole objective world, and on the other a
single manifestation of that same Will, which objectifies itself in
each thing. But this duplicity of our being is not founded in a
unity existing for itself: otherwise we should be able to have
consciousness of ourselves through ourselves and independently of
the objects of cognition and willing: but of this we are utterly
incapable; as soon as we attempt to do so, and, by turning our
cognition inwards, strive for once to attain complete
self-reflection, we lose ourselves in a bottomless void, find
ourselves resembling the hollow glass ball out of whose emptiness a
voice speaks that has no cause within the ball, and, in trying to
grasp ourselves, we clutch, shuddering, at nothing but an
insubstantial ghost.
- Schopenhauer, The World as Will and Idea
[The Subject without properties is] the
philosophical figure for what becomes, with increasing literalness
throughout the nineteenth century, the global ubiquity of the white
European. His domination is virtually self-legitimating since the
capacity to be everywhere present becomes a historical
manifestation of the white man's gradual approximation to the
universality he everywhere represents.
- David Lloyd, Race Under Representation
I am everyone, and no one. I am
everywhere, yet nowhere.
- Darkman
*
Patrick Bateman, the protagonist of Bret Easton Ellis's novel American Psycho, may stand as the most