Vivian Gornick Nothing in a professional writer’s life more resembles the life of a traveling salesman than the literary book tour. The superficial difference between writers on tour and salesmen on the road is that writers are encouraged to imagine themselves prized personae whose pitch is eagerly awaited by the anonymous crowd, whereas salesmen know… Read More Albert Camus on Tour
‘I return often to Albert Camus’s Letters to a German Friend, written clandestinely during the occupation of France in 1943–44… published after the liberation, despite Camus’s initial opposition… His opening plea hangs in the air: “I should like to be able to love my country and still love justice.” ‘ On November 9 the NYR Online published an essay… Read More Seth Anziska on Dominant Orthodoxies
First posted December 12, 2011 How to describe Kafka, the man? Like this, perhaps: It is as if he had spent his entire life wondering what he looked like, without ever discovering there are such things as mirrors A naked man among a multitude who are dressed A mind living in sin with the soul… Read More The Tremendous World I Have Inside My Head: Franz Kafka: A Biographical Essay
Before me there was no time, after me there will be none With me it is born, with me it will die Daniel von Czepko, Sexcenta Monidisticha Sapientum III, II (1655) the feeble artifice of an Argentine adrift on a sea of metaphysics . . . A word on the title: I am not unaware… Read More J. L. Borges: A New Refutation of Time
Kevin B. Anderson and Russell Rockwell, eds, The Dunayevskaya-Marcuse-Fromm Correspondence, 1954-1978: Dialogues on Hegel, Marx and Critical Theory, 2012 Reviewed by Ben Watson Raya Dunayevskaya died in 1987 aged 77, but her ideas remain alive and to-be-lived-by today, a permanent reproach to thought’s accommodation to an intolerable present. Dunayevskaya inspired and inspires a special enthusiasm, evidenced here by… Read More The Raya Dunayevskaya – Herbert Marcuse -Erich Fromm Correspondence
Michael Hardt Progressive and revolutionary movements of the 1970s, which took place across the globe, provide an inspiring and useful guide for contemporary radical political thought and action, even more than those of the 1960s. The sixties were a crucial historical turning point and we can certainly learn from those movements, both the victorious and… Read More The Subversive Seventies
In Plato’s dialogues, Socrates always pursues truth with others. Dialectics therefore is a communal inquiry that aspires to be collaborative, with various participants contributing to a better understanding of the truth. It requires people to reflect on their own point of view and then proceed to understand the viewpoint of others which hopefully leads to… Read More From the Multiversity Cave: Plato and Periagoge
This work of a lifetime presents high-octane, high-political drama – and attempts to rehabilitate the ‘bourgeois’ provisional government that preceded the Bolsheviks Blood on the Snow: The Russian Revolution 1914-1924 – By Robert Service Reviewed by Pratinav Anil This is, by my count, Robert Service’s 12th book that touches on the Russian Revolution, either substantively or… Read More Blood on the Snow: The Russian Revolution
US-Russian journalist Masha Gessen won Germany’s Hannah Arendt prize for political thought. Supporters of Gessen, who is Jewish, and whose grandfather and great-grandfather were among family members murdered by the Nazis, have been quick to point out the irony of suspending a prize awarded in memory of Arendt, the German-born Jewish-American historian, philosopher and antitotalitarian… Read More Award ceremony suspended after writer compares Gaza to Nazi-era Jewish ghettos
These professors had to finish their doctoral research, write papers, present in conferences, and yet miraculously also had time for that extra reading that a student requested, or for lunch at D-School Canteen to give a serious answer to a question. Abinash Dash Choudhury Education as the practice of freedom—as opposed to education as the… Read More An Ode to the ‘Ad-Hoc’ Teachers of Ramjas English Department
After the truth-shower 