"which piece of public art in Madison disturbs you most?"

A topic of discussion at r/madisonwi.

There are so many to choose from, but the biggest rivalry is between "Flayed Bucky by the Best Western on Highland by UW Hospital" and "The sculpture of the parents reaching out to their dead child in the cemetery on Speedway Road."

About that dead child sculpture, someone says:

I actually like that sculpture, although I'm probably not in the majority. If you ask me "how can I feel more alive?" I'd parrot Martin Heidegger, "spend more time in graveyards."

EDIT: Now that I know it's a "memorial" against abortion I don't like it anymore.

There's also "The turd on top of a pyramid on Regent Street" and the "crowning woman" and "The pale yellow man resting on the bike bridge at Jenifer Street." And "The plaques along Picnic Point that showcase monetary donations and ego over nature and historically sacred land." 

Way too many people bring up the "footballs penis" and need to be told that was excised.

It's pretty hilarious that there was such a wealth of bad public art around here to choose from. 

"Martin Heidegger was recorded to have laughed only once.... It happened at a picnic in the Harz Mountains with Ernst Jünger, who 'leaned over...'"

"... to pick up a sauerkraut and sausage roll, and his lederhosen split with a tremendous crack.' Like Heidegger, Franz Kafka (1883-1924) was not known for his lightness of spirit.... In the spirit of [that] anecdote about Heidegger, I’ve often recalled that, in his diaries, Kafka reports sitting in a bar in Prague with his friend Max Brod after they’d left an opera. Brod accidentally sprayed soda water all over Kafka, who laughed so hard that seltzer and grenadine shot out of his nose."

Writes Dwight Garner in "The Kafka You Never Knew/An unabridged volume of Franz Kafka’s diaries restores the rough edges and impulses that were buffed out of past editions" (NYT).

If that — or anything else — makes you want to read Kafka's diaries, here's the new edition (at Amazon). I bought it.

Is there a category of intellect that only gets humor in slapstick form? Is their world so dark because they're waiting to see 3-Stooges-level high jinks in real life? 

"The earliest and most sophisticated 20th Century case for renewables came from a German who is widely considered the most influential philosopher of the 20th Century..."

"... Martin Heidegger. In his 1954 essay, 'The Question Concerning of Technology,' Heidegger condemned the view of nature as a mere resource for human consumption. The use of 'modern technology,' he wrote, 'puts to nature the unreasonable demand that it supply energy which can be extracted and stored as such… Air is now set upon to yield nitrogen, the earth to yield ore, ore to yield uranium…to yield atomic energy.' The solution, Heidegger argued, was to yoke human society and its economy to unreliable energy flows. He even condemned hydro-electric dams, for dominating the natural environment, and praised windmills because they 'do not unlock energy in order to store it.'... Heidegger, like much of the conservation movement, would have hated what the Energiewende has become: an excuse for the destruction of natural landscapes and local communities. Opposition to renewables comes from the country peoples that Heidegger idolized as more authentic and 'grounded' than urbane cosmopolitan elites who fetishize their solar roofs and Teslas as signs of virtue."

From "The Reason Renewables Can't Power Modern Civilization Is Because They Were Never Meant To" (Forbes).

Peter Sloterdijk is known for "impressionistic coinages—' anthropotechnics,' 'negative gynecology,' 'co-immunism' —that occasionally suggest the lurking presence of some larger system."

"A signature theme of his work is the persistence of ancient urges in supposedly advanced societies. In 2006, he published a book arguing that the contemporary revolt against globalization can be seen as a misguided expression of 'noble' sentiments, which, rather than being curbed, should be redirected in ways that left-liberals cannot imagine. He has described the Presidential race between Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump as a choice 'between two helplessly gesticulating models of normality, one of which appeared to be delegitimatized, the other unproven,' and is unsurprised that so many people preferred the latter.... Sloterdijk’s comfort with social rupture has made him a contentious figure in Germany, where stability, prosperity, and a robust welfare state are seen as central to the country’s postwar achievement. Many Germans define themselves by their moral rectitude, as exhibited by their reckoning with the Nazi past and, more recently, by the government’s decision to accept more refugees from the Syrian civil war than any other Western country. Sloterdijk is determined to disabuse his countrymen of their polite illusions. He calls Germany a 'lethargocracy' and the welfare state a 'fiscal kleptocracy.' He has decried Merkel’s attitude toward refugees, drawn on right-wing thinkers such as Martin Heidegger and Arnold Gehlen, and even speculated about genetic enhancement of the human race. As a result, some progressives refuse to utter his name in public...."

From "A Celebrity Philosopher Explains the Populist Insurgency/Peter Sloterdijk has spent decades railing against the pieties of liberal democracy. Now his ideas seem prophetic" by Thomas Meaney (in The New Yorker).

ADDED: The term "negative gynecology" never reappears in the article, and I was curious enough to dig up "Taking Up The Challenge Of Space: New Conceptualisations Of Space In The Work Of Peter Sloterdijk And Graham Harman" by Marijn Nieuwenhuis in a journal called "continent," which I'd have advised is a terrible name — what with its medical, excretory meaning — but the subtitle is "maps a topology of unstable confluences and ranges across new thinking, traversing interstices and alternate directions in culture, theory, biopolitics and art," so get your head out of the toilet. Nieuwenhuis explains:

Sloterdijk empirically demonstrates that within the womb... it is impossible to draw an epistemological distinction between the object and the subject. This is because the foetus does neither recognise the placenta nor the “‘nobjects’ ([ie.] neither subjects nor objects) such as placental blood, intrauterine acoustics, and other medial givens… [The] child develops [therefore] an identity not by recognizing itself at a distance in the mirror but through presubjective resonances” (van Tuinen 2007: 281). This “negative gynaecology” (negative Gynäkologie), Sloterdijk argues, embodies the perfect immersion of “Being-a-pair” [Paar-Sein] in a bubble, which ultimately bursts when the natal process commences.

“In terms of its dramatic content, what one generally calls ‘cutting the [umbilical] cord’ is the introduction of the child into the sphere of ego-forming clarity. To cut means to state individuality with the knife. The one who performs the cut is the first separation-giver in the subject’s history; through the gift of separation, he provides the child with the stimulus for existence in the external media.” (Sloterdijk 2011: 388). The moment the child is “thrown-into-the-World” and has bid farewell to the placenta (“primal companion” or the Urbegleiter) is also the moment in which it will have to form new relationships and in turn create and dwell in new bubbles....

Does the New Yorker article ever talk about the womb? Only here:

“The car is like a uterus on wheels,” [Sloterdijk] says. “It has the advantage over its biological model for being linked to independent movement and a feeling of autonomy. The car also has phallic and anal components—the primitive-aggressive competitive behavior, and the revving up and overtaking which turns the other, slower person into an expelled turd.”

The return of the toilet.