Richard Rorty’s provocative pragmatism reached an audience far beyond academic philosophers. A new biography unfortunately ends before he ascends to that larger stage.
Mark Greif
Mark Greif is a founding editor of n+1 and an assistant professor of literary studies at the New School.
Posted inBooks, Arts and Culture
Dying Did Not Become Her
David Rieff’s memoir of the terminal illness of his mother, Susan Sontag, shows the consolations of philosophy deserting her and the denial of truth sustaining her as death approached.
Posted inFeatures
Life After Theory
Not long ago, I watched a panel of noted literary scholars conclude a conference at Yale. The professors were just putting away their papers and wrapping up when, somehow, they started passionately debating the case of James Yee, the Guantanamo Bay chaplain accused of espionage. To explain the government’s charges, they hauled out whatever lingering […]
Posted inBooks, Arts and Culture
A Pretty Business
The Substance of Style: How the Rise of Aesthetic Value Is Remaking Commerce, Culture, and Consciousness By Virginia Postrel, HarperCollins, 237 pages, $24.95 Virginia Postrel’s The Substance of Style joins David Brooks’ Bobos in Paradise in a new kind of conservative cultural criticism. The recipe is simple: Charmingly describe a new cluster […]
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End of the Line
Firing Back: Against the Tyranny of the Market By Pierre Bourdieu, Translated by Loïc Wacquant, New Press, 112 PAGES, $14.95 At the time of Pierre Bourdieu’s death in January 2002, he stood as the dominant intellectual in France, if not in Europe. Only Jürgen Habermas in Germany, now age 74, is of the […]
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Bonfire of the Verities
Cosmopolis By Don DeLillo, Scribner, 224 pages, $25.00 Either Don DeLillo has written his worst book or he’s done something so sneaky I can’t see it yet. Cosmopolis‘ tale of a new-economy billionaire who reduces the world’s currency markets to rubble while crossing Manhattan to get a haircut relies on a premise no weaker than […]
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The Banality of Irving
The libel suit historian David Irving waged against professor Deborah Lipstadt turned on the question of whether it was correct to call him a “Holocaust denier.” The Holocaust occurred, Irving says; it just wasn’t what everybody says it was. For example, it didn’t include gas chambers, especially not at Auschwitz, and it involved no custom-built […]
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Between Hard Rock and a Place
No doubt there are sun worshippers in Jutland, vegetarian barbecue chefs, male readers of Women’s Day. But Josh Scandlen–of Phoenix, Arizona, and Charles Schwab and Company–is a libertarian advocate of hard-core punk rock, possibly the most entirely leftist subgenre of youth popular music outside of folk, and that puts him in a funny position. It’s […]
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Wreaking Ruckus
I n a cloud of dust, high in the Malibu hills, the column of protesters surged forward. The Ruckus Society, trainers of activists, had chosen this empty field of stubble for the first march of the Democratic convention, still 25 miles away and a month distant. It was a drill. In a shimmer of mid-July […]