Outside of the obvious, 9/11 is also the day when I lost my friend and mentor, Marshall Berman (1940-2013). Maybe another time I’ll share some more personal thoughts about Marshall, but for now, I thought I’d share a book chapter that I wrote about his work. It’s in Jennifer Corby’s excellent volume, Adventures in Modernism: Thinking with Marshall Berman, and in many ways, it’s the piece of writing of which I’m most fond. And I’m fond of it because I know that my writing style isn’t like Marshall’s style, but this piece is probably as close as I’ve ever come. His spirit was not only in the content but the style foo, and I think he’d really have loved that.
Read MoreIf numerology were acceptable evidence in academic circles, today would be the day that proves my work right, because it was on May 5 that both Søren Kierkegaard (1813) and Karl Marx (1818) were born. Two of my most important intellectual forebears, I’ve long thought that they were really two sides of the same coin, and that together they provide a comprehensive account of freedom and selfhood. But if numerology isn’t convincing, I thought I’d share a short excerpt from my book, exploring the idea of revolutionary subjectivity.
Read MoreI just saw Boots Riley's Sorry to Bother You. Midway through it, I was reminded of something that Marshall Berman once mentioned about Friedrich Nietzsche's generation of intellectuals. This generation was living at the tail end of one of the most peaceful centuries in European history (if you focus on European rather than international wars). With the exception of relatively minor wars like the Crimean and the Franco-Prussian wars, Europe hadn't seen continent wide conflict since the Napoleonic wars. And this made many intellectuals hungry for conflict - they were bored. So, as much as the will-to-power might explain the world war to come, it wasn't the product of war but of peace, expressing the hunger of a generation. And then, when the shit finally did hit the fan, the interwar years were anything but boring, as they gave us some of the most exciting cultural products of the past few centuries.
Read MoreWith a book on Marx coming out soon, as well as on that other rebel who shares today as his birthday, Søren Kierkegaard, I thought I'd share some personal reflections on my own discovery of Marx. I never much liked him. Other philosophers I did, and often quite immediately. I loved Plato and Nietzsche from the very start, and I still do. I fell for Hobbes, and was thrilled by Rousseau. Freud, Arendt, Foucault, all struck a chord, not to mention my enduring love of Camus. And I could go on and on. Even Aristotle, who never much excited me, really got me going when I visited his logic a bit later in life. But Marx? Nothing. I didn't dislike him, and I even wanted to like him, as I generally want to like everyone I read. But he never got much of a response from me.
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