Welcome to the divine curation, a (currently somewhat dormant) blog about philosophy, culture, and media. If I were to summarise its overarching theme, I would say it aims to apply developments in contemporary philosophy—particularly (but not exclusively) post-Kantian analytic pragmatism—to draw out insights from 20th century post-Marxist and post-structuralist thought that were perhaps not fully appreciated the first time around, and to apply them to the present moment.

Yet this is a framing that appeared late on and can only be applied retroactively. The reality is that the blog started as an attempt to add a critical component to an otherwise sprawling arts practice, which then grew and swallowed it up completely. The more chaotic style of some of the earlier posts are reflective of this, and projects in other media, collected on the Pieces page, offer some documentation of that general milieu. Over this time I’ve tried to engage with any other strands of thought I’ve found in the wild that I thought could offer some productive frictions, and have published one or two pieces on other platforms—these are collected on the Writings page.

This blog is also representative of a battle I’ve fought with sadness and disillusionment. I’m happy to report from the other side that this a battle I seem to have won, and in this regard the main drivers of this project are no longer active. If the underlying project here has been to answer the question of what to do with myself, or of how to practice self-creation in a world that presents a rather unique and specific set of obstacles to this task, then the single post which best analyses this question and attempts to offer an answer to it is Baudrillard’s Subject. This post is a culmination of everything on the blog that precedes it, and is something of a manifesto (not a short one, I’ll admit). The form of practice I’ve settled on can be summed up as something like “disappearing loudly,” and that is more or less what I’m up to now. These days I’m mostly just reading Hegel and science fiction novels, and any posts that do appear will likely be sporadic and related to these topics.

I’m mainly working on music at the moment—this output can be found on my Soundcloud. If you would like to contact me I can be emailed at divinecurationsite [at] gmail [dot] com. I really will try to reply but it may take me years. I’m most active on Instagram, and this is probably the best place to get me for a more immediate connection. Do come and say hi.

Sam

This is a static site created using Jekyll that runs on Github Pages. This is great because it has zero ads, costs zero pesos, runs zero javascript, collects zero stats, and gives me complete control of the functionality, structure, and appearance of the site. I use jekyll-scholar to manage citations and global bibliography, which to be honest is great because otherwise there’s no way in hell I’d be doing it at all.