A historian of the Swirling Surface, Foucault was not really a philosopher -- in fact, he completely rejected the concept of philosophy. His work is historiographic; he wrote histories of madness, of the medical clinic, of the modern prison, of sexuality. Yet, at the risk of angering his ghost, we mu

Cultural studies/new historicism, Deconstructive, Event, Flux, Funny, Homoerotic, Political, Poststructuralism, Power

"Nothing is worse," Nietzsche once said, "than the smell of an ill-constituted soul." For this professor of Classics and son of a Protestant minister, things were not hidden, there were no secrets: the world revealed itself. From this base of materialism and realism, Nietzsche assaulted Christianity,

Bombast, Clever, Discourse as event, Dramatic, Epic, Euphoric, Flux, Joyful, Melancholy, Overflowing, Philosophy, Poststructuralism, Profane, Surface, Witty

From a small town in Sicily called (prophetically?) Chaos, there emerged one of the comic geniuses of modern European drama. Luigi Pirandello was always ahead of his time, scandalizing hoi polloi with ultra-Modernist experiments in structure, narrative, and staging. The grandfather of the absurd '- I

Absurd, Anxiety, Flux, Layered, Theater of the grotesque (italy)

As an artist, a gay man, an AIDS victim, and a Cuban American, Felix Gonzalez-Torres roamed the periphery of our culture. But who put him there? Whose agenda draws the lines between marginal and mainstream? And once those lines are drawn, how does one lodge protest? In his poignant, political Install

Enigmatic, Flux, Minimal, Sardonic, Spectral