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The Galaxies Within
The mind-bending fiction of Mircea Cărtărescu.
- Will Self
- The Nation
In his celebrated 1873 essay “On Truth and Lies in an Extra-Moral Sense,” Nietzsche argued that the problem with human understanding is that humanity can never truly understand itself.
Even our very language is suspect to the highest degree, born as it is not out of some loftily universal capability, but rather deriving from the messy contingencies of our bodily reality.
“What is a word?” Nietzsche hectors us.
“The image of a nerve stimulus in sounds.”
Reason and its compliant mistress, rhetoric, are also…