Reviews and News:
What happened to the negative review? “The general tone and tenor of the contemporary book review is an advertisement-style frippery. And, if a rave isn’t in order, the reviewer will give a stylized summary of sorts, bookended with non-conclusions as to the book’s content.”
The article that Newsweek executives tried to kill (firing two editors and a reporter in the process) has been published. It is about the financial ties between Newsweek and Olivet University currently under investigation by the Manhattan district attorney’s office.
The enduring outrage of Hannah Arendt’s Eichmann in Jerusalem.
Carson McCuller was a difficult woman who led a difficult life. When she died—broke, widowed, and bedridden—she left behind a body of work that captures what it feels like to never quite belong.
Patrick Deneen’s intriguing new book Why Liberalism Failed continues to spark discussion. At National Review, Richard Reinsch argues that the problem with America today is not so much liberalism itself, with its emphasis on rights and freedom, as it is the limited scope of reason. In First Things, Timothy Fuller critiques what he sees as Deneen’s mild utopianism: “Deneen visualizes a world purged of its current defects. This may appeal in the abstract, but historical change seldom produces gains without losses. Deneen says that “a five hundred–year philosophical experiment” has run its course, that we can build “anew and better.” Over the last century and a half, we have heard numerous such claims, but the results are not reassuring. Deneen invokes ancient tradition—in order to advocate a radically different and untested future. It is worthwhile to assess the advantages and disadvantages of liberalism, but we should be attentive to both, not forgetting our achievements.”
Commonweal has found a few articles that W. H. Auden wrote under the pen name Didymus. Read them here.
Essay of the Day:
In The New Yorker, Thomas Meaney visits the German philosopher-provocateur, Peter Sloterdijk, whose railings against “the pieties of liberal democracy” now seem prophetic:
“In Germany, where academic philosophers still equate dryness with seriousness, Sloterdijk has a near-monopoly on irreverence. This is an important element of his wide appeal, as is his eagerness to offer an opinion on absolutely anything—from psychoanalysis to finance, Islam to Soviet modernism, the ozone layer to Neanderthal sexuality. An essay on anger can suddenly plunge into a history of smiling; a meditation on America may veer into a history of frivolity. His magnum opus, the Spheres trilogy, nearly three thousand pages long, includes a rhapsodic excursus on rituals of human-placenta disposal. He is almost farcically productive. As his editor told me, ‘The problem with Sloterdijk is that you are always eight thousand pages behind.’
“This profligacy makes Sloterdijk hard to pin down. He is known not for a single grand thesis but for a shrapnel-burst of impressionistic coinages—‘anthropotechnics,’ ‘negative gynecology,’ ‘co-immunism’—that occasionally suggest the lurking presence of some larger system. Yet his prominence as a public intellectual comes from a career-long rebellion against the pieties of liberal democracy, which, now that liberal democracy is in crisis worldwide, seems prophetic. A signature theme of his work is the persistence of ancient urges in supposedly advanced societies. In 2006, he published a book arguing that the contemporary revolt against globalization can be seen as a misguided expression of ‘noble’ sentiments, which, rather than being curbed, should be redirected in ways that left-liberals cannot imagine. He has described the Presidential race between Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump as a choice ‘between two helplessly gesticulating models of normality, one of which appeared to be delegitimatized, the other unproven,’ and is unsurprised that so many people preferred the latter. Few philosophers are as fixated on the current moment or as gleefully ready to explain it.
“Sloterdijk’s comfort with social rupture has made him a contentious figure in Germany, where stability, prosperity, and a robust welfare state are seen as central to the country’s postwar achievement. Many Germans define themselves by their moral rectitude, as exhibited by their reckoning with the Nazi past and, more recently, by the government’s decision to accept more refugees from the Syrian civil war than any other Western country. Sloterdijk is determined to disabuse his countrymen of their polite illusions. He calls Germany a ‘lethargocracy’ and the welfare state a ‘fiscal kleptocracy.’ He has decried Merkel’s attitude toward refugees, drawn on right-wing thinkers such as Martin Heidegger and Arnold Gehlen, and even speculated about genetic enhancement of the human race. As a result, some progressives refuse to utter his name in public. In 2016, the head of one centrist party denounced him as a stooge for the AfD, a new far-right party that won thirteen per cent of the vote in last year’s federal elections.”
Photos: Farming in France without machines
Poem: Dick Allen, “Don’t Tell Me There’s No Hope”
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