Articles by: Justin Clemens

Simone Weil today. If there was one thing Simone Weil couldn't bear, it was Simone Weil. So she did every - thing she could not to be - to not be. In the brief course of her existence - Weil was dead by the age of thirty-four - she submitted to at least three different means to this paradoxical end, each roughly corresponding to a different phase of her life.

'Hannah Arendt' the biopic, and Hannah Arendt's legacy In his controversial 2003 polemic 'Les penchants criminels de l'Europe democratique' (The Criminal Inclinations of Democratic Europe) - still scandalously untranslated into English - French linguist Jean-Claude Milner examines the implications of a very particular nominal decision. When modern Europeans discussed 'the Jews', Milner reminds us, they would enter the debate according to one of two modalities, proposing to confront either 'the Jewish question' or 'the Jewish…

John Milton, 'Paradise Lost' and miningIn his incomplete - and probably incompletable - 'Pandaemonium: The Coming of the Machine As Seen by Contemporary Observers, 1660-1886', a book which takes its title and orientation from John Milton's own neologism for the City of Hell, the English documentary filmmaker Humphrey Jennings asserts that 'Pandaemonium is the Palace of All the Devils. Its building began c. 1660. It will never be finished - it has to be transformed…

From the ancients to us: slavery, torture and digital cultureNovember 2012 was yet another decisive month for digital revelations. The new CIA Director David Petraeus, a self-professed 'scholar-monk' and Obama's Iraq hero, was caught out in an adultery scandal with - surprise! - his 'embedded' biographer Paula Broadwell. Alex Hern was right onto it in The New Statesman with the raunchy header 'Two Generals, Agent Shirtless and 30,000 Pages of Sexts: The Scandal that Keeps…

Review(s) of: Naked clay: Drawing from Lucian Freud, by Barry Hill, (Shearsman Books, Bristol, 2012).