The Future of Notre Dame in Paris
by Clarisse Godard Desmarest

TheDrouth

Should we be worried about ‘Will’ and its manipulations? – ‘the settled will of the people’? The notion of will is inextricably connected to the operations of power, control, intention, desire, instigation and determination… In the age of Modi, Trump, Salvini and Brexit and their reaching through media with all their manipulations into our personal and social lives, it must be time to examine what is ‘will’ and how does it work?

21st March 2020
Published by TheDrouth

The Future of Notre Dame in Paris
by Clarisse Godard Desmarest

The tragic slowness of our reaction to the coronavirus and the putting of systematic safety measures in place has contrasted with the relatively swift and mature reaction of the French (and other nations) to this emergency. But is it a sign of a wider conservative and sclerotic inability to act that has taken hold of our society? How could we measure these things? Clarisse Godard Desmarest sets the ball rolling with a description of the terrible fires at both Notre Dame in Paris and Glasgow School of Art, and the reaction of the authorities in each case.
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2nd March 2020
Published by TheDrouth

A Contest of Will : Who wrote Shakespeare? Queen Victoria, Aurelia’s Aunt, Mr Welbecker or Malvolio?
by Owen Dudley Edwards

Taking inspiration from James Shapiro’s Contested Will Owen Dudley Edwards takes a wry look at the absurdist snobbery and the sheer daftness of the ‘who really wrote Shakespeare?’ tradition.
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20th February 2020
Published by TheDrouth

Aesthetics, Technological Politics and the Video Age
by Ravi Sundaram

In an age of surveillance capitalism is it no longer viable to put hope in the creative possibilities Walter Benjamin believed were opened to humanity through technological advances in media? –Or can a new poetics of infrastructure disrupt the sinister operations of corporate power? Ravi Sundaram surveys the will in the media.
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6th February 2020
Published by TheDrouth

Beethoven 250
by Iain Matheson

It’s a quarter millennium this year since the birth of THE Romantic hero, the Thunderer himself, Beethoven, who claimed to have taken ‘fate by the throat’ and would never ‘let it bend me completely to its will’. Iain Matheson picks his way through Beethoven’s will and his work.
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31st January 2020
Published by TheDrouth

Does the estate have its own will? Dwelling upon the last will.
by Agnieszka Kilian

In a world proliferating in riches and injustice there seems, for the moment anyhow, little relief in the notion of generations. For Nietzsche the contract was a ‘memory of the will’, but there are other modes of control of future distribution of goods. The question here, for Agnieszka Kilian, with the last will, is who or what bequeaths, and what actually is the bequest?
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