SIGNALS///noise (2026)

01/11/2024

ON THE AFTERMATH AND ITS PRECURSORS [NOTE: The following essay is cross-posted to I will gradually be moving content to Substack from this site, which will eventually be discontinued.] These formulæ are intended to facilitate (for myself no less than for others) some purchase on reality, the one to which we now belong, the one that led us here, and the one(s) toward which we may be headed....

ON THE AFTERMATH AND ITS PRECURSORS [NOTE: The following essay is cross-posted to I will gradually be moving content to Substack from this site, which will eventually be discontinued.] These formul…

12/11/2021

"The bourgeois lives in the finite, he is afraid of the expanse of the infinite." (Nikolai Berdyaev)

The next entry in our series of transcriptions is excerpted from Nikolai Berdyaev’s Slavery and Freedom, translated from the Russian by Reginald Michael (R. M.) French. Berdyaev’s philo…

06/10/2021

"...the primary goal of the worldwide computer system is not to inform or entertain the cybercitizens of a programmed society, but rather to make machines communicate with other machines..." (Jaime Semprun)

About a third of the way into his Défense et illustration de la novlangue française, in the wake of a litany of examples demonstrating the proliferation of technology-driven (or, more precisely, te…

15/01/2021

Transcriptions ② /// GÜNTER EICH: SOME REMARKS ON "LITERATURE AND REALITY"

The second entry in our series of transcriptions, this one from German poet and dramatist Günter Eich. Some Remarks on “Literature and Reality” was originally published in the 1981 coll…

13/10/2020

"The relationship science has forged w/ living & nonliving matter... is that of the psycho killer w/ his victims... It makes every dealing with doctors & their cures more agonizing." (Guido Ceronetti, Postscript to THE SILENCE OF THE BODY)

Transcription is often a sort of drudgery, but like other exercises in monotony it can also be a salutary and even sacred labor. Those who pray or meditate will, through repetition, transform their…

19/08/2020

Ellul & Charbonneau /// Directives for a Personalist Manifesto ①: "We are revolutionaries in spite of ourselves."

In the early 1930’s, several somewhat interrelated revolutionary movements, all of which favored some form or other of political decentralization—and all of which deplored the dominant totalitarian…

08/08/2020

Denis de Rougemont /// Atomic Homeopathy: "...only the very smallest of things has come apart."

God says: “I am the One who is.” But the Devil, always eager to imitate God—even in reverse, since he sees everything from below—tells us as Ulysses told the Cyclops: “My name is No One, there is n…

20/08/2017

Denis de Rougemont /// Conversation with a Brownshirt

http://www.signals-noise.com/2017/08/20/denis-de-rougemont-conversation-with-a-brownshirt/

Between 1935 and 1936, the Francophone Swiss intellectual Denis de Rougemont (L’Amour et l’Occident) was a guest lecturer at the Johann Wolfgang Goethe University in Frankfurt where, in…

20/06/2017

"1933 I hardly dare write the year..." Robert Desnos /// Second Book of Prophecies, translated by

http://www.signals-noise.com/2017/06/20/robert-desnos-second-book-of-prophecies/

In the café, amid the din of voices, amid the bright lights and the bustle, Robert Desnos has only to close his eyes and speak, and there among the steins and saucers the whole Ocean collapses into…

17/03/2017

Bernard Charbonneau /// Political Ecology (THE YEAR 2000, translated and introduced by )

http://www.signals-noise.com/2017/03/17/bernard-charbonneau-political-ecology/

The further one goes, the fewer questions one asks. At the furthest point—a light that eclipses all questioning. Vincent La Soudière, Brisants Let’s indulge in a morsel or two of apoca…

04/12/2016

JLG /// What's the Scenario? (Happy Birthday Jean-Luc Godard) "No one knows what he knows"

http://www.signals-noise.com/2016/12/03/jlg-whats-the-scenario/

Jean-Luc Godard is 86 today. Back when a person still rented VHS tapes, a friend of mine borrowed our local video store’s entire Godard collection and announced a marathon screening session. I sat …

30/11/2016

On election night we posted a translation of Nicolas Grimaldi's foreword to The Twilight of Democracy, his 2014 essay on the fragility of the least worst form of government. What follows is the update to our original introduction, which we thought it made sense to re-post separately. The results are in [ 884 more words ]

http://www.signals-noise.com/2016/11/30/election-postmortems/

On election night we posted a translation of Nicolas Grimaldi’s foreword to The Twilight of Democracy, his 2014 essay on the fragility of the least worst form of government. What follows is t…

SIGNALS///noise