Lucan’s Civil War: Last Thoughts
The last two and a half books of Civil War, while seemingly adrift and lacking the cumulative direction of the first seven, don’t make me think any less of the epic as a whole. Lucan’s talent was an...
View ArticleGilbert Ryle on Heidegger’s Being and Time
Arch-analytic Gilbert “Category Mistake” Ryle reviewed Heidegger’s Being and Time sympathetically on its publication in 1928. It is a beautifully clear statement of the methodological parting of the...
View ArticleThe Criticism of Christine Brooke-Rose
Novelist and critic Christine Brooke-Rose passed away recently. Chicago Blog has a good round-up of the many tributes to her. I had earlier reviewed Xorandor critically, but with great respect for what...
View ArticleThe Profoundest Profundities Ever Propounded
Just to contrast with Christine Brooke-Rose’s criticism.Language can only begin with the void; no fullness, no certainty can ever speak; something essential is lacking in anyone who expresses himself....
View ArticleWittgenstein on Freud
Laura Quinney, in her book Literary Power and the Criteria of Truth, mentions some of Wittgenstein’s perspicacious remarks on Freud. Since I’d earlier talked about Ernest Gellner’s criticism of Freud...
View ArticleGeorge Kennedy on Comparative Rhetoric
George Kennedy is a brilliant scholar of Greek and Latin rhetoric, but he also wrote a slim book, Comparative Rhetoric, that makes a better go than most studies at being a genuinely comparative...
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“Obscene abuse of a randy old hag”: Horace’s Epode 8 in Translation
Coarsely abusive sexual language is an early iambic tradition.Daniel GarrisonBesides being Augustus’s favored poet and composing immaculate and subtle Odes, Horace wrote some rougher-hewn pieces in his...
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Gilbert Ryle’s Plato
Plato’s Progress is not just for philosophers. It is a detective story, and a very entertaining one. Mid-century arch-analytic philosopher Gilbert Ryle skillfully constructed it as such, and it’s a...
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Advertisement for Myself (and Others)
In connection with my Anonymity as Culture articles on Triple Canopy, I will be speaking with Gabriella Coleman and James Grimmelmann this Wednesday the 23rd at 7pm in Brooklyn about internet culture,...
View Article“We Are All Anonymous” Video
Thanks to Punkcast, video is now available of the Triple Canopy discussion with Gabriella Coleman, James Grimmelmann, and me, discussing Anonymity as Culture and Our Weirdness is Free. Thanks to all...
View ArticleAbsolutism in the French Enlightenment
This letter is from the June 8 TLS, in response to a review of Jonathan Israel’s Democratic Enlightenment. It’s a far more substantive review than Darin MacMahon’s silly dismissal, but it makes the...
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Cargo 200: Blurred Spaces
Russian director Aleksey Balabanov is a fascinating and discomfiting filmmaker, responsible for one of the very few successful Kafka adaptations, The Castle, to which Balabanov boldly appended his own...
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The Turin Horse
BERNHARD: Because everything’s in ruins. Everything’s been degraded, but I could say that they’ve ruined and degraded everything. Because this is not some kind of cataclysm, coming about with so-called...
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Novalis: Monologue
The excellent piece on Novalis in this week’s TLS quoted a bit of his brilliant Monolog, and it’s short enough I figured I’d just post the whole thing here:Speaking and writing is a crazy state of...
View ArticleJan Assmann on Auschwitz and Guilt
I don’t study ethics much because there is already such a high bar in reaching a minimal level of human decency, so slicing and dicing moral principles feels like buying a fuzzy sweater for a dead dog....
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Jacob Burckhardt on Amateurism
Peter Blegvad, “Observed, Imagined, Remembered”When it comes to scholarship and criticism, I prefer Jacob Burckhardt’s amateur/specialist dichotomy to Isaiah Berlin’s fox and hedgehog:The word...
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The Binding of Isaac and the Binding of Symbols
In The Stupidity of Computers, I discussed how computers require rigidly defined ontologies, which are then enforced on us. What happens in the collision between slippery life and a fixed ontology?...
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Middlemarch and Mary Garth
People often forget Mary Garth in George Eliot’s Middlemarch. She is the third heroine of the book, not as idealistic as Dorothea and not as shallow as Rosamond, but wittier and probably smarter than...
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Heidegger’s Theology of Being
Heidegger’s Philosophy of Being, Herman Philipse (Princeton, 1998) Herman Philipse makes very fine tombstones. Recently he published a book, God in the Age of Science?, criticizing much modern...
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Gore Vidal on Henry Miller
Gore Vidal was before my time. Yet he was notorious as a name, and certainly I was taught that being on the opposite side of William F. Buckley and Norman Mailer was a good thing.But as a youth, the...
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