words

a charming book by enrique vila-matas, consisting entirely of footnotes about writers of the No: that is, all the writers who have decided it was better – for whatever reason – not to write. fn 9) If Plato thought that life was a forgetting of the idea, Clément Cadou spent his whole life forgetting that he once had the idea … Read More

by robert d. kaplan two passages strike me, each within a page from one another. have been thinking lately of Belley’s lecture about corporate totalitarianism: when efficiency/rationality overrides all other values, individual liberties start to fray… “It’s nonsense to think that Americans are individualists,” Dennis Judd, an urban affairs professor at the University of Missouri’s St. Louis campus, told me. … Read More

The first public reaction to the idea of reactualizing Lenin is, of course, an outburst of sarcastic laughter. Marx is OK – today, even on Wall Street, there are people who still love him: Marx the poet of commodities, who provided perfect descriptions of the capitalist dynamic; Marx of Cultural Studies, who portrayed the alienation and reification of our daily … Read More

amazing how incomprehensible one can be even when using relatively simple language. I’m reading Hegel’s the Philosophy of Right for my sustainable development class (don’t ask), and am currently in possession of two translations–I thought that somehow if I didn’t understand one, the other could help (hmm, sort of like civil code translations?). ahem. kinda getting stuck on Morality. Knox … Read More