Comprised of six lectures delivered, in English, by Michel Foucault while teaching at Berkeley in the Fall of 1983, Fearless Speech was edited by Joseph Pearson and published in 2001. Reviewed by the author, it is the last book Foucault wrote before his death in 1984 and can be read as his last testament. Here, he positions the philosopher as the only person able to confront power with the truth, a stance that boldly sums up Foucault’s project as a philosopher.
Still unpublished in France, Fearless Speech concludes the genealogy of truth that Foucault pursued throughout his life, starting with his investigations in Madness and Civilization, into the question of power and its technology. The expression “fearless speech” is a rough translation of the Greek parrhesia, which designates those who take a risk to tell the truth; the citizen who has the moral qualities required to speak the truth, even if it differs from what the majority of people believe and faces danger for speaking it.
“Parrhesia is a verbal activity in which a speaker expresses his personal relationship to truth through frankness instead of persuasion, truth instead of flattery, and moral duty instead of self-interest and moral apathy.”
Editor Joseph Pearson Publisher Semiotext(e), 2001 Foreign Agents series ISBN 1584350113, 9781584350118 183 pages
Many things in the world have not been named; and many things, even if they have been named, have never been described. One of these is the sensibility -- unmistakably modern, a variant of sophistication but hardly identical with it -- that goes by the cult name of "Camp."
A sensibility (as distinct from an idea) is one of the hardest things to talk about; but there are special reasons why Camp, in particular, has never been discussed. It is not a natural mode of sensibility, if there be any such. Indeed the essence of Camp is its love of the unnatural: of artifice and exaggeration. And Camp is esoteric -- something of a private code, a badge of identity even, among small urban cliques. Apart from a lazy two-page sketch in Christopher Isherwood's novel The World in the Evening (1954), it has hardly broken into print. To talk about Camp is therefore to betray it. If the betrayal can be defended, it will be for the edification it provides, or the dignity of the conflict it resolves. For myself, I plead the goal of self-edification, and the goad of a sharp conflict in my own sensibility. I am strongly drawn to Camp, and almost as strongly offended by it. That is why I want to talk about it, and why I can. For no one who wholeheartedly shares in a given sensibility can analyze it; he can only, whatever his intention, exhibit it. To name a sensibility, to draw its contours and to recount its history, requires a deep sympathy modified by revulsion.
Though I am speaking about sensibility only -- and about a sensibility that, among other things, converts the serious into the frivolous -- these are grave matters. Most people think of sensibility or taste as the realm of purely subjective preferences, those mysterious attractions, mainly sensual, that have not been brought under the sovereignty of reason. They allow that considerations of taste play a part in their reactions to people and to works of art. But this attitude is naïve. And even worse. To patronize the faculty of taste is to patronize oneself. For taste governs every free -- as opposed to rote -- human response. Nothing is more decisive. There is taste in people, visual taste, taste in emotion - and there is taste in acts, taste in morality. Intelligence, as well, is really a kind of taste: taste in ideas. (One of the facts to be reckoned with is that taste tends to develop very unevenly. It's rare that the same person has good visual taste and good taste in people and taste in ideas.)
Taste has no system and no proofs. But there is something like a logic of taste: the consistent sensibility which underlies and gives rise to a certain taste. A sensibility is almost, but not quite, ineffable. Any sensibility which can be crammed into the mold of a system, or handled……………More Susan Sontag: Notes On "Camp"
For young would-be intellectuals in the 1980s, his books The Savage Mind and The Raw and the Cooked had a biblical status. Lévi-Strauss was the high priest of structuralism. Building on the linguistic ideas of Ferdinand de Saussure, he argued that all myth, and hence all pre-scientific thought, can be understood in terms of binary oppositions – such as, er, raw and cooked.
The strange and troubling grandeur of Lévi-Strauss lay in his insistence on the "synchronic" and contempt for the "diachronic": that is, he was interested in structures of thinking that endure over the very long term. He was apparently not interested in history, in change. Paradoxically, his ideas were of great interest to historians….
Has any major postwar American author taken as much critical abuse as Ayn Rand? Her best-known novels, The Fountainhead and Atlas Shrugged, have sold more than 12 million copies in the United States alone and were ranked first and second in a 1998 Modern Library reader survey of the "greatest books" of the 20th century. Yet over the years, Rand's writing has been routinely dismissed as juvenile and subliterate when it has been considered at all. During the height of the Cold War, she managed to alienate leftists by insisting that capitalism was not simply more productive but more moral than socialism or a mixed economy because it allowed the individual to express himself most fully. And she angered the anticommunist Right with her thoroughgoing materialism, lack of respect for tradition, and atheism. (She once told William F. Buckley he was "too intelligent" to believe in God.)
The publication of Anne C. Heller's Ayn Rand and the World She Made and Jennifer Burns's Goddess of the Market indicates that a belated but timely reconsideration of Rand's place in American cases for Rand's importance to the past 80 years of American intellectual and cultural life all the more convincing. That Rand's life story is in many ways more melodramatic, unbelievable, and conflicted than one of her own plots certainly helps to keep the reader's attention. As Burns puts it, "The clash between her romantic and rational sides makes [her life] not a tale of triumph, but a tragedy of sorts."
Born Alisa Rosenbaum in Russia in 1905, Rand emigrated to the United States in 1926 and thoroughly reinvented herself in real life far more successfully than Jay Gatsby ever managed to do in fiction. Moving to Hollywood ……read more
“get rid of meaning, Your mind is a nightmare that has been eating you: now eat your mind” Kathy Acker, Blood and Guts in Highschool
Tamara Straus Sunday, October 5, 2008 In this first documentary film to access the literary and countercultural legacy of writer and performance artist Kathy Acker (1947-1997), director Barbara Casper gives us a mostly adulatory picture of the experiments Acker indulged in and the controversies she generated. Born to a wealthy Jewish family in Manhattan, Acker is traced from her early forays in the New York literary underground of the 1970s with a series of experimental and sexually graphic self-published stories (informed by her gigs as a stripper and porn performer) to her heyday in the 1980s and 1990s as an admired writer, teacher and figure of punk feminism. The film is strongest when contextualizing Acker as a female artist. She is captured in interviews angrily and powerfully responding to the lack of tough female artists. (Acker believed that no previous writer had sufficiently articulated her rage against modern misogynistic, capitalistic society or presented her sexual and intellectual sensibilities.) Director Casper wisely juxtaposes Acker's interviews with those of her friends, students, lovers, supporters and critics, who parse her influences (Burroughs, Duras, Genet) and her destructive, brave and brazen behavior. "She was like a rock star whose meteoric rise was destined to fall," says her agent Ira Silverberg. "Who's Afraid of Kathy Acker" is not for everyone, but it is an important contribution to American feminist history. Read more: via Kathy Acker, The New York Times once called her books "a rock 'n' roll version of the Critique of Pure Reason by the Marquis de Sade as performed by the Three Stooges". A writer , poet , playwright, screen writer, Opera libreto composer , striper, rebel, Scholar, and a cultural Icon--she even inspired Delirium --a DC comics character based on her. She studied latin and the classics at Brandeis University. In 1965 she went to the University of California in San Diego to study under Herbert Marcuse , the Marxist psychologist and Critical Theory(Frankfurt School ) philosopher who was a major influence on the burgeoning counter- culture of the time (the pioneer linguist Roman Jakobson had been her tutor at Brandeis). Later she continued her studies in Classics and philosophy in New York. Although she could have worked as an academic she didn't want distraction from her writing so took a myriad of mindless jobs. They included a job in the sex industry. Again, there are conflicting stories. One says that to help pay for her studies at San Diego State she worked as a stripper in a vaudeville house. Another says it was on 42nd Street in New York and it was a (fake) sex show to pay hospital bills. Perhaps she did both. Kathy Acker died in Tijuana, Mexico, 30 November 1997. Also visit Mark Space's excellent page dedicated to Kathy .
Reprinted from Philosophy and Social Hope (Penguin Books, 1999).
The other day – as I watched George W. Bush, our Neo-Conservative, Market-Fundamentalist President announce the purchase by the US government of 250 billion dollars of equity in nine of the largest US banks – I had a near-realization. That maybe, something BIG is afoot -- not exactly a birth of something – but rather a sudden death, the terrible end of something that we never thought would end in our lifetimes. It felt more or less (although I know this is not accurate or even similar—but that’s how it felt) like the day I stood in Brandenburger Tor – beer in hand – and awestruck as the Berlin Wall was torn down by ordinary German citizens from both sides of the iconic wall that defined and symbolized an era. This brought me to Rorty’s piece and the bigger picture: Where are we today in America? Where do we want to go? Some excerpts follow: (read the complete version) (HT)
“The left's hostility is partially explained by the fact that most people who admire Nietzsche, Heidegger and Derrida as much as I do - most of the people who either classify themselves as 'postmodernist' or (like me) find themselves thus classified willynilly - participate in what Jonathan Yardley has called the 'America Sucks Sweepstakes'. Participants in this event compete to find better, bitterer ways of describing the United States. They see our country as embodying everything that is wrong with the rich post-Enlightenment West. They see ours as what Foucault called a 'disciplinary society', dominated by an odious ethos of' liberal individualism', an ethos which produces racism, sexism, consumerism and Republican presidents. By contrast, I see America pretty much as Whitman and Dewey did, as opening a prospect on illimitable democratic vistas. I think that our country - despite its past and present atrocities and vices, and despite its continuing eagerness to elect fools and knaves to high office - is a good example of the best kind of society so far invented.
The right's hostility is largely explained by the fact that rightist thinkers don't think that it is enough just to prefer democratic societies. One also has to believe that they are Objectively Good, that the institutions of such societies are grounded in Rational First Principles Especially if one teaches philosophy, as I do, one is expected to tell [5] the young that their society is not just one of the better ones so far contrived, but one which embodies Truth and Reason. Refusal to say this sort of thing counts as the 'treason of the clerks' - as an abdication of professional and moral responsibility. My own philosophical views - views I share with Nietzsche and Dewey - forbid me to say this kind of thing. I do not have much use for notions like 'objective value' and 'objective truth'. I think that the so-called postmodernists are right in most of their criticisms of traditional philosophical talk about 'reason'. So my philosophical views offend the right as much as my political preferences offend the left.”
Benjamin’s last, unpublished report on the literary situation in France. Critical reflections on the fiction, philosophy, memoirs and art criticism of the time—and on Paris, Surrealism and the logic of Hitlerism—moving constantly from the realm of letters to a world at war.
INTRODUCTION TO BENJAMIN
1940 SURVEY OF FRENCH LITERATURE
Completed in Paris six months before his death, Walter Benjamin’s final report to Max Horkheimer on the literary situation in France is published here for the first time in English. It was the third ‘literature letter’ that Benjamin had drafted for the Institute for Social Research in New York; the earlier two (3 November 1937, 24 January 1939) can be found in the Gesammelte Briefe. Almost twice as long as these, the Survey of 23 March 1940—Hitler’s troops would take Holland six weeks later—was composed during the same months as ‘On the Concept of History’. Benjamin’s personal situation was precarious: his health had not recovered from his internment as an enemy alien in Autumn 1939; back in his tiny Paris apartment, he worked in bed because of the cold.
Benjamin’s ‘apologies’ to Horkheimer for the difference between this text and his last may refer to the political and intellectual vistas of war-torn Europe it provides, which open out far beyond the pages under review. It contains perhaps his most direct reflections—via Spengler—on the Hitlerite mentality. If the tone recalls the ‘almost Chinese’ courtesy that Adorno remarked in Benjamin’s correspondence, his sensitivity to the Institute’s reactions was well grounded. ‘The Work of Art in the Age of its Technological Reproductibility’ and his great essay on Fuchs had been published in its journal shorn of their Marxian passages; Benjamin had only learnt while in the internment camp that his ‘Baudelaire’ would finally appear, after the virtual rejection of its first version by Adorno the year before. To comply with Horkheimer’s request for a further report, he set aside a planned comparison of Rousseau’s Confessions with Gide’s Journals (‘a historical account of sincerity’), and his Baudelaire: ‘closest to my heart, it would be most damaged if I had to stop after starting it again’.
It is not clear why the Institute never sought to publish the 1940 Survey. It was not included in Scholem and Adorno’s 1966 collection of Benjamin’s Correspondence, nor in the five-volume Selected Writings published in English by Harvard University Press. It first appeared—in its original French—only in 2000, in Volume VI of the Gesammelte Briefe. Yet the text stands as a striking valedictory statement on the themes central to Benjamin’s mature work: Paris, now ‘fragile’ under the threat of war, its clochards signalling the vaster tribe of Europe’s dispossesed; the twilight of Surrealism; and the vocation of cultural theory as material social critique.
Translated by David Fernbach. Reprinted from Walter Benjamin, Gesammelte Briefe, vi, pp. 403–21, with permission of Suhrkamp Verlag, Frankfurt am Main.
A lover asked his beloved, Do you love yourself more than you love me? Beloved replied, I have died to myself and I live for you. I've disappeared from myself and my attributes, I am present only for you. I've forgotten all my learnings, but from knowing you I've become a scholar. I've lost all my strength, but from your power I am able. I love myself ... I love you. I love you ... I love myself.
New York, April 2004 The Whirling Dervishes of Turkey finished their last gyration and the audience broke into applause. As we spilled out onto the New York City sidewalk, a feeling gnawed at me for failing to understand the understated magnificence of it all. The gap between my expectations of instant enlightenment and the reality of prolonged mystical deliberation stared back at me. Standing beneath a cold street light and gasping to understand over 700 years of thinking after a temporal visual whirl was futile. It eluded me and yet was one of those fleeting moments that leave an indelible ember behind. It was not the time for that specific cinder to combust but, nonetheless, the seeds of the thought had been planted. There was another encounter, one with an irresistible lure, that left at least one participant wondering of its purpose; a chance encounter took place several hundred years ago in present day Turkey.
Konya, Turkey, November 1244 Face to face stood two strangers, Maulana Jalal al-Din Muhammad Balkhi (Rumi) and Shams al-Din of Tabriz; Rumi, a young demure scholar and Shams, a spiritual wayfarer with a penchant for the uncertain. The repercussions of each word spoken at this encounter would reverberate through the fabric of spiritual and lyrical history forever. They met when both were ready --Shams to share; Rumi to seek; and both, to develop into a spiritual oneness. By the young age of forty, Rumi was a brilliant scholar. Shams, at sixty, was a free-spirited wanderer. The transformation was instant. The sheer opposition of their innate temperament may have been the flicker that caught the coal. The encounter, subsequent relationship and resulting consequences demonstrate the absolute unimaginability of fate in mythic proportions. Where does a chance encounter, a whispered conversation, a bold question to a stranger take someone on their quest of personal discovery? By some unverifiable accounts, Shams had initially noticed Rumi in Syria when the latter was 21 years old but had deemed the scholar not yet disposed for their partnership and that he chose to wait for 16 years before approaching him again.
On the streets of Konya that night, Rumi was on his path home with he came across the strange and hypnotic Shams. The latter, without any introduction, asked him pointed philosophical questions intended to fluster Rumi’s concepts of enlightenment. While Rumi responded, mustering the collective strength and wit of his years of devotion to religion and jurisprudence; the flicker in Shams’ words, his speech, mannerism and conduct compelled Rumi to explore further by inviting the wanderer along and into his home. The drifter’s words had heated dormant embers that Rumi may or may not have been aware of, and which certainly dictated his actions for time to come. From that day forward, Shams possessed him. Shams grasped Rumi’s understanding of religion and infused it with a love and devotion that elevated him from scholar to philosopher; He went into seclusion with the stranger, leaving aside all that composed his life – family, students, and disciples. This detachment lasted for three months and inspired him for a lifetime. His heart engulfed his systematic, controlled mind with the message of humanity and oneness with God, a result of his pointed discourses. Rumi’s professorial sermons were replaced with ecstatic soliloquies of God, love and humanity. Furthermore, the indelible mark of this change began filtering through; first in Rumi’s actions, evidenced in his seclusion and fanatic devotion, and secondly in his poetry which continues to enchant readers across a palette of backgrounds, cultures, and religions today.............
Reportage The Oberlin Experiment Why the failed revolution of Radical Athleticism may be the great unwritten chapter in American sports history. By Anne Trubek
Oberlin College is a Division III school better known for incubating Ph.D.s than pro athletes. Athletic events attract a smattering of fans. The sports teams lose with astounding regularly. The last time the Yeomen made national news was when the football team ended a 44-game losing streak in 2001. Academically, athletes are, taken as a whole, the weakest group on campus, according to a study of athletics at selective schools. Many varsity athletes are outliers on campus; they are generally recruited from traditional jock cultures, and often feel alienated from the rest of a student body so clichéd as a bastion of queer, vegan, hipster progressivism that Gawker dubbed it the “most annoying liberal arts college in the country.”
I was a varsity athlete at Oberlin some 20 odd years ago. I can prove it to you by showing you the team photo on the walls of Philips Gymnasium. There I am, second row, third from left, varsity women’s soccer, 1984. I am a freshman, and my first year in college was also the first year there was women’s varsity soccer at Oberlin. I am proud of that fact, that bit of Title IX history. I am also proud that my teammates and I were not conventional jocks: We had somehow decided to play soccer, perhaps because we had lived in enclaves with lots of international residents or were just fast and coordinated and preferred kicking to spiking. Athletics were lower on the Oberlin ledger in those days; our coach was a philosophy professor. Some of us had never played the game before we joined the college team. We lived in co-ops and smoked pot and won more than we lost — we won, in fact, more than the .....Read more
by Susan Sontag, edited by Paolo Dilonardo and Anne Jump, with a foreword by David Rieff
Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 235 pp., $23.00
Susan Sontag was that unimaginable thing, a celebrity literary critic. Most readers of The New York Review probably would have been able to recognize her on the street, as they would not, say, George Steiner. An icon of braininess, she even developed, like Einstein, a trademark hairdo: an imperious white stripe, reminiscent of Indira Gandhi, as though she were declaring a cultural Emergency. Most readers probably know a few bits about her life, as they do not of any other critic: the girl Susan Rosenblatt—Sontag was her stepfather—in her junior high class in Arizona, with Kant, not a comic book, hidden behind her textbook. Her teenaged marriage to Philip Rieff that was her entry into highbrow society. ("My greatest dream was to grow up and come to New York and write for Partisan Review and be read by 5,000 people.") Her trip to Hanoi in 1968. The mini-skirted babe in the frumpy Upper West Side crowd and her years as the only woman on the panel. The front-page news in 1982 when, after years of supporting various Marxist revolutions, she declared that communism was "fascism with a human face." Her months in Sarajevo in 1993, as the bombs fell, bravely or foolishly attempting to put on a production of Waiting for Godot. Her struggle with cancer. Her long relationship with the glamour photographer Annie Leibovitz. We even know—from Leibovitz's grotesque "A Photographer's Life" exhibition and book—what Sontag looked like in the last days of her life and after her death.
At thirty, she had indeed become a regular contributor to Partisan Review, as well as The New York Review. At thirty-three, she collected her essays into Against Interpretation (1966), surely the best-known book of cul-tural criticism of its time, a dizzying, intimidating, simultaneous celebration of asceticism (Simone Weil) and absurdism (Eugène Ionesco), suicidal suffering (Cesare Pavese), physical self-loathing (Michel Leiris) and physical delight (Norman O. Brown), the criminal (Jean Genet) and the transgendered (Jack Smith), the minimal (Nathalie Sarraute) and the maximal (happenings, Marat/Sade), the films New York intellectuals were talking about (Godard, Resnais, Bresson) and the films French intellectuals were talking about (The Incredible Shrinking Man, The Rise and Fall of Legs Diamond). The book ended with a declaration of a "new sensibility," first proclaimed in the pages of Mademoiselle magazine, most of which sounded like the manifestos of a half-century before:
Art today is a new kind of instrument, an instrument for modifying consciousness and organizing new modes of sensibility. And the means for practicing art have been radically extended.... Painters no longer feel themselves confined to canvas and paint, but employ hair, photographs, wax, sand, bicycle tires, their own toothbrushes and socks. Musicians have reached beyond the sounds of the traditional instruments to use tampered instruments and (usually on tape) synthetic sounds and industrial noises.
The new sensibility is rooted in "new sensations such as speed," the new crowds of people, and the proliferation of material things. It blurs the distinction between high and low art, refuses to be sentimental, views the artwork as an object and not an "individual personal expression," and does not believe it should be a vehicle for meaning or moral judgment. "The new sensibility understands art as the extension of life."
Against Interpretation was a bombshell partially because, cloaked in a familiar and unthreatening critical discourse, it finally brought the tenets of Dadaism and Futurism and Surreal-ism to Riverside Drive, where the modern had been Joycean and Eliotic, a territory patrolled by New Critical, Freudian, and Marxist exegetes. What was missing in the book was any sense that Sontag was raising the revolutionary banner in a very tiny kingdom. When, in a famous sentence—the entire last section of her title essay—she declared, "In place of a hermeneutics we need an erotics of art," the first-person plural reflected how isolated that kingdom was. It was already forty years after the first Surrealist manifesto or, closer to home, seven or eight years after "Howl" or On the Road. "We" could have taken the subway downtown.
Against Interpretation also contained, of course, "Notes on 'Camp'," which remained Sontag's best-known shorter essay, and the one cited in nearly all the obituaries. It has dated badly, especially as the word "camp" (let alone "to camp") has long since reverted to its summer leisure connotations, and its subtleties,
On July 5, I posted a little piece on Martin Heidegger’s cabin in the woods, located outside of Freiburg, drawing on a wonderful essay written by Leland de la Durantaye, a Harvard philosophy professor, in Cabinet Magazine. In it, Durantaye notes that Heidegger was very fond of hiking allusions, and he cites several, but he missed the significance of one which is very important—the reference to the handful of deep thinkers who live scattered on mountain tops—which was of course drawn from the poetry of Heidegger’s fellow Swabian, Friedrich Hölderlin.
Just as Heidegger can be marked by his “Waldhütte,” Hölderlin can be defined with his tower—a very sad spot down by the river Neckar in the ancient university town of Tübingen where he spent much of his final days in internment. After a brilliant period of productivity, Hölderlin went crazy (how inelegant–the Germans have such a poetic expression for this: er ist in die Umnachtung gegangen, they say, as if he were enshrouded by the darkness of night). He was locked up in this little tower for 36 years while he struggled with sanity. Hölderlin was, of course, Nietzsche’s favorite poet, and Nietzsche followed his path—also falling into the clutches of mental darkness.
Hölderlin’s Tower on the Neckar River in Tübingen
In the meantime, I have received a number of notes from readers asking me what, specifically, I was thinking about. The poem in question is called “Patmos.” It dates to 1803, and it is certainly one of Hölderlin’s greatest works—perhaps indeed his greatest. The poem may have the most famous opening of any poem in the German language not by Goethe; it is haunting. (“God is near/Yet hard to seize./Where there is danger,/The rescue grows as well.”) It involves the manipulation of extremely powerful images, it draws very heavily on the classical Greek of the Gospels, and it is filled with the concepts that Heidegger brilliantly develops elsewhere: starting with a fascinating series of juxtapositions of space, time and deeds.
Heidegger has picked up on these concepts and played them out in a way that seems to me to be true to Hölderlin to a certain extent—though there is surely much to distinguish the two.
Start by remembering that Hölderlin, like his fellow students at the Tübingen Stift, read classical Greek fluently and was extremely well read in the classics of antiquity as well as religious texts. I posted earlier this week on another educational institution of the little duchy of Württemberg–the Karlsschule–but the school in Tübingen was still more famous and equally prolific in the training of genius. Consider that one of Hölderlin’s roommates was Hegel.
Jürgen Habermas writes an obiturary for American philosopher Richard Rorty
The American philosopher Richard Rorty passed away on Friday. Rorty, whose work ranges over an unusually broad intellectual terrain, was the author of many works, including "Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature" (1979), "Consequences of Pragmatism" (1982), and "Contingency, Irony, and Solidarity" (1989).
Richard Rorty. Photo: Suhrkamp Verlag
....One small autobiographical piece by Rorty bears the title 'Wild Orchids and Trotsky.' In it, Rorty describes how as a youth he ambled around the blooming hillside in north-west New Jersey, and breathed in the stunning odour of the orchids. Around the same time he discovered a fascinating book at the home of his leftist parents, defending Leon Trotsky against Stalin. This was the origin of the vision that the young Rorty took with him to college: philosophy is there to reconcile the celestial beauty of orchids with Trotsky's dream of justice on earth. Nothing is sacred to Rorty the ironist. Asked at the end of his life about the "holy", the strict atheist answered with words reminiscent of the young Hegel: "My sense of the holy is bound up with the hope that some day my remote descendants will live in a global civilization in which love is pretty much the only law."..............
The article originally appeared in German in the Süddeutsche Zeitung on June 11, 2007.
Jürgen Habermas, born in 1929, is one of Germany's foremost intellectual figures. A philosopher and sociologist, he is professor emeritus at the Johann Wolfgang Goethe University in Frankfurt and the leading representative of the Frankfurt School of Critical Theory. His works include "Legitimation Crisis", "Knowledge and Human Interests", "Theory of Communicative Action" and "The Philosophical Discourse of Modernity."
If you read Kurt Vonnegut when you were young — read all there was of him, book after book as fast as you could the way so many of us did — you probably set him aside long ago. That’s the way it goes with writers we love when we’re young. It’s almost as though their books absorbed some part of our DNA while we were reading them, and rereading them means revisiting a version of ourselves we may no longer remember or trust.
Not that Vonnegut is mainly for the young. I’m sure there are plenty of people who think he is entirely unsuitable for readers under the age of disillusionment. But the time to read Vonnegut is just when you begin to suspect that the world is not what it appears to be. Read More
Reflections on Kurt Vonnegut, a Man of Funny Fearlessness
In memory of Kurt Vonnegut, the novelist, socialist and humanist whose friendship and late-in-life peace activism should inspire us all.
My friendship with Kurt Vonnegut blossomed in the last years and months of Kurt's life, after 9/11. He was a dedicated friend, all his friends knew it, and he taught me about the creativity of friendship, with his careful postcards and his rhythm of gifts. His first gift was always the funny fearlessness.
He encouraged us to sing and preach in Union Square in the week after 9/11. "Go! Just go!" Or he would tell us to "Go down to Ground Zero and preach the First Amendment!" And we'd say, "You come with, Kurt -- we'll send a car!" And he'd say, "I'll be with you in spirit. I'm tired." But he never seemed that tired to me. He had powerfully mixed feelings about ending life. As a child of a mother who took her life, he always talked about death as a choice.
But then, as he grew older and older, he was busily creative all the time. When he came to our shows, he would make up names for gods and saints with us. He thought hard about what post-religious worship was and would surprise us with disconcertingly basic questions. I see they unearthed his prayer to "Our Lady of Perpetual Astonishment" -- reprinted in the New York Times yesterday. Read More
Listen: You diedyesterday after falling weeks ago. You were one of the most important writers of the 20th century. I miss you already. And I'm sorry.
I interviewed you almost 12 years ago, when I was in college, and got to follow you around for a day while you met with people on campus. You were 73 then. I was 19. The university's student activities committee paid you $10,000 to come speak; it was practically their whole budget for the year. I wrote a long profile to advance the event, assuming as so many college journalists do that whatever they have just discovered is news and that they have to bring everyone else up to speed on it. I don't recommend rereading the whole thing, but here's a good excerpt:
What he learned, of course, is that public support doesn't have much to do with American foreign policy. It's a nice thing to have, but our leaders can get along without it. And it really would be ridiculous for any writer to expect that a well-crafted novel could actually change their priorities.
So Vonnegut has a different goal: to catch young people before they become corporate leaders and politicians and, as he puts it, to "poison their minds with humanity."
Take this opportunity to be poisoned. There are few authors, dead or alive, whose work so skillfully marries criticism and compassion, who have so comfortably combined intelligent ideas and a lucid style, and even fewer who have written as seriously and as humorously at the same time.
I meant it then, and still do. You are still one of my favorite writers. More importantly, you influenced which writers would become my other favorites - Thomas Hardy, Donald Barthelme, Laurence Sterne, Saul Bellow. I can trace my appreciation for many of them back to my reading and re-reading of your books. Read More
The truth is that when I made this post back in April -- I wanted to do so much more for the film. well, now i can so I am reposting it with a new life and a new birth date. HT.
To me Kundera has always been a philosopher using the novel form to address his philosophical concerns. He has said that his books "lose their essential qualities in the process of being made into movies, leaving only the accessory stories to produce any intrigue" However, Kundera served as an active (but uncredited) consultant during the making of the film. In fact, the poem Tomas whispers into Teresa's ear as she is falling asleep was written specifically for the film by Kundera. In this case the accessory stories are intriguing enough to create one of my favorite movies of all time.
Here is what Roger Ebert had to say in his original review from 1988....... "In the title of Philip Kaufman's "The Unbearable Lightness of Being," the crucial word is "unbearable." The film tells the story of a young surgeon who attempts to float above the mundane world of personal
responsibility and commitment to practice a sex life that has no traffic with the heart, to escape untouched from the world of sensual pleasure while retaining his privacy and his loneliness. By the end of the story, this freedom has become too great a load for him to bear. The surgeon's name is Tomas, and he lives in Prague; we meet him in the blessed days before the Russian invasion of 1968. He has an understanding with a woman named Sabina, a painter whose goal is the same as his own - to have a physical relationship without an emotional one. The two lovers believe they have much in common, since they share the same attitude toward their couplings, but actually their genitals have more in common than they do. That is not to say they don't enjoy great sex; they do, and in great detail, in the most erotic serious film since "Last Tango in Paris." One day the doctor goes to the country, and while waiting in a provincial train station his eyes fall upon a young waitress, Tereza. He orders a brandy. Their eyes meet. They go for a little walk after she gets off work, and it is clear there is something special between them. He returns to Prague. One day she appears in the city and knocks at his door. She has come to be with him. Against all of his principles, he allows her to spend the night, and then to move in.
Eventually they even get married. He has betrayed his own code of lightness, or freedom. The film tells the love story of Tomas and Tereza in the context of the events of 1968, and there are shots that place the characters in the middle of the riots against the Russian invaders. Tereza becomes a photographer and tries to smuggle pictures of the uprising out of the country. Finally the two lovers leave Prague for Geneva, where Sabina has already gone, and then Tomas resumes his sexual relationship with Sabina, because his philosophy, of course, is that sex has nothing to do with love.
Crushed by his decision, Tereza attempts her own experiment with free love, but it does not work, because her heart is not built that way. Sabina, meanwhile, meets a professor named Franz who falls in love with her so urgently that he decides to leave his wife. Can she accept this love? Or is she even more committed to "lightness of being" than Tomas, who tutored her in the
philosophy? In the middle of Sabina's indecision, Tereza appears at her door with a camera. She has been asked to take some shots for a fashion magazine, and needs someone to pose nude. Sabina agrees, and the two women photograph each other in a scene so carefully choreographed that it becomes a ballet of eroticism. By this point in the movie, a curious thing had happened to me, as a viewer. I had begun to appreciate some of the life rhythms of the characters. Most films move so quickly and are so dependent on plot that they are about events,not lives. "The Unbearable Lightness of Being" carries the feeling of deep nostalgia, of a time no longer present, when these people did these things and hoped for happiness, and were caught up in events beyond their control. Kaufman achieves this effect almost without seeming to try. At first his film seems to be almost exclusively about sex, but then we notice in countless individual shots and camera decisions that he does not allow his camera to become a voyeur. There is a lot of nudity in the film but no pornographic documentary quality; the camera does not linger, or move for the best view, or relish the spectacle of nudity. The result is some of the most poignant, almost sad, sex scenes I have ever seen - sensuous, yes, but bittersweet. The casting has a lot to do with this haunting quality. Daniel Day-Lewis plays Tomas with a sort of detachment that is supposed to come from the character's distaste for commitment. He has a lean, intellectual look, and is not a voluptuary. For him, sex seems like a form of physical meditation, rather than an activity with another person. Lena Olin, as Sabina, has a lush, voluptuous body, big-breasted and tactile, but she inhabits it so comfortably that the movie never seems to dwell on it or exploit it. It is a fact of nature. Juliette Binoche, as Tereza, is almost ethereal in her beauty and innocence, and her attempt to reconcile her love with her lover's detachment is probably the heart of the movie.
The film is based on the novel by the Czech novelist Milan Kundera, whose works all seem to consider eroticism with a certain wistfulness, as if to say that while his characters were making love they were sometimes distracted from the essentially tragic nature of their existence. That isthe case here. Kaufman, whose previous films have included "The Right Stuff" and a remake of "Invasion of the Body Snatchers," has never done anything like this, but his experiment is a success in tone. He has made a movie in which reality is asked to coexist with a world of pure sensuality, and almost, for a moment, seems to agree.
The film will be noticed primarily for its eroticism. Although major films and filmmakers considered sex with great frankness and freedom in the early and mid-'70s, films in the last decade have been more adolescent, more plot- and action-oriented. Catering to audiences of adolescents, who are comfortable with sex only when it is seen in cartoon form, Hollywood has also not been comfortable with the complications of adult sexuality - the good and the bad. What is remarkable about "The Unbearable Lightness of Being," however, is not the sexual content itself, but the way Kaufman has been able to use it as an avenue for a complex story, one of nostalgia, loss, idealism and romance. "
The film is strongest when contextualizing Acker as a female artist. She is captured in interviews angrily and powerfully responding to the lack of tough female artists. (Acker believed that no previous writer had sufficiently articulated her rage against modern misogynistic, capitalistic society or presented her sexual and intellectual sensibilities.) Director Casper wisely juxtaposes Acker's interviews with those of her friends, students, lovers, supporters and critics, who parse her influences (Burroughs, Duras, Genet) and her destructive, brave and brazen behavior. "She was like a rock star whose meteoric rise was destined to fall," says her agent Ira Silverberg. "Who's Afraid of Kathy Acker" is not for everyone, but it is an important contribution to American feminist history. 
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