Jack Zipes in Tribune:

Ernst Bloch was born in Ludwigshafen, Germany, in 1885. His parents were assimilated, well-to-do Jews, who had clear, but narrow expectations for Bloch and his future. At that time, however, during his youth he was more bothered by the void in his own life. His home was characterised by what he called “musty” — dreariness, lack of love, understanding, and stimulation. The Jewish religion played a minor role in his life and was meaningless in his family. He could only compensate for the gaps between him, his family, and their beliefs by filling the void with daydreams, voracious reading of fairy tales, popular literature, classics, philosophy, music and visits to the opera house and theater as well as letter-writing to eminent philosophers, rebellion against traditional schooling, and concern for social democratic politics.

To make up for the lack in his home and in Ludwigshafen, Bloch left in 1905 to study philosophy and German literature at the University of Munich and then at the University of Würzburg, where he focused on experimental psychology, physics, and music and took an interest in the Kabbala and Jewish mysticism. After receiving his doctorate in philosophy in 1908, he moved to Berlin to study under the renowned sociologist Georg Simmel, and it was in Simmel’s seminar that he made the acquaintance of Georg Lukács, the great Hungarian political theorist, who became one of his best friends and later one of his foremost philosophical antagonists.

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Isabella Weber in Global Perspectives:

China is found both to be neoliberal and to provide an alternative to neoliberal development. To illuminate the origins of this contradiction, this paper analyzes China’s relationship with neoliberalism from a historical and economic theory perspective. Neoliberal economic thinking became relevant to China with the beginning of reform and opening up in 1978, when the Communist Party moved from Maoism to an economic determinist outlook on socialism. This ideological shift opened the door for exchanges with the World Bank and foreign economists, including neoliberals. Yet an analysis of Milton Friedman’s speeches in China reveals a critical divide: the Chinese reformers embrace the market but deny that the market requires universal private property. Thus, China is integrated into the global market while the Chinese state reserves its rights to control the economy.

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Parul Sehgal at The New York Times:

Kierkegaard commonly complained that he was misunderstood (he also complained that he was not misunderstood in the right ways). But few philosophers have wanted so keenly to be of use, according to a new biography, “Philosopher of the Heart,” by Clare Carlisle. Not for Kierkegaard the abstractions of philosophy — he saw the discipline as performing the painful, prosaic work of becoming human: “We must work out who we are, and how to live, right in the middle of life itself, with an open future ahead of us,” Carlisle summarizes his approach. “Just as we cannot step off the train while it is moving, so we cannot step away from life to reflect on its meaning.” There are famous challenges to telling the life of Kierkegaard. He died at 42, in Copenhagen, seemingly exhausted after an extraordinary burst of productivity that gave us a flotilla of philosophical texts masquerading as sermons, dialogues, found documents, book reviews.

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John Adamson at Literary Review:

The House of Habsburg has a plausible claim to having been the most successful ruling dynasty in world history. For a thousand years, from the dynasty’s emergence as feudal warlords in northern Switzerland in the 10th century to their ousting as emperors of Austria in the early 20th, they reigned at one time or another in most European countries (including, briefly, England and Ireland), and over colonial possessions that reached across the globe, from Peru to the Philippines (the one nation that still bears the name of a Habsburg king).

Their legacy is tenacious. Throughout Europe, it lingers in the placement of borders, in patterns of confessional belief, in styles of architecture, even in ideas of national and supranational sovereignty, the second of which the English common law mind finds so baffling and strange.

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Rafia Zakaria in The Baffler:

“IT’S LIKE WE’RE AT THE CENTER of a nuclear radiation zone,” Professor Liu Liang says of performing an autopsy on a Covid-19 patient. Dr. Liang, a soft-spoken man who specializes in forensic science at Huazhong University of Science and Technology in Wuhan, China, is one of the first pathologists to undertake this dangerous task, opening up a human body that has succumbed to the virus and is likely releasing the virus from all its tissues. These bodies continue to secrete infectious fluids, and any “aerosol generating procedures,” such as the use of an oscillating bone saw, can release the virus into the air. In a small autopsy room, the doctor says, the distance between doctor and patient, the living and the dead, is rather small.

Such is the nature of the virus; it transforms the body into something deadly, radiating disease in tiny unseen droplets and particles. As more and more pictures of what is inside the dead emerge, Covid-19 is no longer something inchoate or invisible. In the organs of the Covid dead, it is fully and visibly present. In some it is in the blood clots that caused strokes or in the blockages that caused heart attacks. It is in lungs that are heavy and hard; it is in the viscous fluid that often covers the lungs when bodies are opened up for autopsy. A journey through another set of autopsy pictures, published in a preliminary study by a group of Louisiana-based medical pathologists and biomedical engineers, examines organs of patients from New Orleans. A week before it was released, a data analysis conducted in southeast Louisiana found that New Orleans had the highest death rate per capita of any hard-hit city in the United States. The recovered organs depicted in the study belonged to four men and women (the numbers of each are not disclosed) all between the ages of forty-four and seventy-six; like a disproportionate number of the victims of Covid-19 in the United States, they were all African American. In death and now on cold steel tables, there are no names.

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Peter Rainer in The Christian Science Monitor:

Of the films of the great Indian director Satyajit Ray, the Japanese master Akira Kurosawa once said that not having seen them “is like never having seen the sun or the moon.” I completely agree. For me, Ray is perhaps the finest of all film artists. The humanism of his vision, and the lyricism he brings to it, is overwhelming. No other director has so consistently expressed what it means to be alive. No other filmmaker, male or female, has explored with such profound grace and understanding the inner lives of women. I had the honor in the fall of 2008 to be invited to Kolkata, India, to lecture to local students and film societies about his work. As a white Westerner, I was wary of coming across like some sort of postcolonial know-it-all. I needn’t have worried. Our shared love for Ray dissolved any barriers. I was accompanied by a member of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences who was instrumental in the ongoing restoration of Ray’s films, many of which were in a state of disrepair. (Ray was awarded an honorary Oscar in 1992, shortly before his death.)

…Trying to whittle down the director’s oeuvre to a couple of movies is like picking out a couple of plays by Shakespeare. I’ve seen most of Ray’s 29 feature films, and I’m not being sentimental or starry-eyed when I say that he has the highest batting average of any major film director. The vast majority of his output is extraordinary but I will highlight here his most famous contribution, The Apu Trilogy. I consider it the finest linked series of films ever made. (Ravi Shankar composed the beautiful music.) They stand on their own but for maximum effect must be seen in order. Never having directed a movie before, Ray began his career in 1955 with “Pather Panchali (Song of the Little Road)” (unrated), derived from a classic novel about rural Bengali life and its impoverishments. The focus is on little Apu and his family, and it conveys like no other movie the sense of liberation one gets from breaking free, however momentarily, from the restraints of such a world. A sequence where Apu and his older sister Durga race across the fields to glimpse a distant train – a symbol of a faraway realm – takes you to the limits of feeling.

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A Mayfly

A mayfly taking off from a spike of mullein
would blunder into Deichtine’s mouth to become Cú Chulainn,
Cú Chulainn who had it within him to steer clear
of a battlefield on the shaft of his own spear,
his own spear from which he managed to augur
the fate of that part-time cataloguer,
that cataloguer who might yet transcend the crush
as its own tumult transcends the thrush,
the thrush that’s known to have tipped off avalanches
from the larch’s lowest branches,
the lowest branches of the larch
that model themselves after a triumphal arch,
a triumphal arch made of the femora
of a woman who’s even now filed under Ephemera.

by Paul Muldoon
from Poetry International Web
______________________________

Editor’s Note: In Irish mythology, Deichtine or Deichtire was the sister of Conchobar mac Nessa and the mother of Cúchulainn, a hero of ancient Ulster and the Old Irish literary saga An Táin.  

Mark Hoipkemier in The Hedgehog Review:

In ordinary times, the common good is like liberalism’s cranky old uncle: You wouldn’t deny his existence outright, though you don’t usually mention him and his foibles in polite company. But on occasion the common good, like Uncle Orlo, has a role to play in our liberal societies, and the current coronavirus pandemic is such a time. It certainly forces citizens to consider dimensions of our common life that we normally prefer to ignore. While the common good is on center stage, we might profitably reflect on its ongoing relevance for less turbulent times as well.

To be sure, the concept of the common good is a slippery one, subject to contestation and interpretation from all points of the political spectrum. This is a feature, not a bug. That said, most of the contending views draw on a core meaning articulated most clearly by Aristotle and the tradition of thinkers follow him. On this view, the good that members of a community share consists of the flourishing of that community—whether it is a nation, a town, a school, a religious body, or even a family. Irreducibly social goods of this kind are necessary for the flourishing of the “political animal,” yet totally inaccessible apart from the communities with which those goods are bound up. You cannot enjoy the goods of quarterbacking without a football team, nor those of higher education apart from a university system. These communities flourish when their members justly share in the benefits and burdens of pursuing common ends together. When common ends such as knowledge or gridiron glory are achieved with justice, the irreducibly social excellence of the community is a common good in which the members share. The main point of the­­­ “common good” is to name this shared flourishing and use it as a way to evaluate the use of political authority.

At present, away from the crowded wards of busy hospitals and a few mostly urban global hotspots, what we are facing is not the COVID-19 virus itself but the vast social anticipation of its spread, coordinated with varying degrees of competence by the directives of political authorities at different levels of government. Broad compliance with their mandates, it is worth noting, is itself evidence that contemporary society has not become as atomized or individualistic as some critics of liberal democracy claim.

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Lulu Garcia-Navarro at NPR:

In the new book How to Feed a Dictator, journalist Witold Szablowski tracks down the chefs who served these five men, to paint intimate portraits of how they were at home and at the table.

“When I read about Pol Pot, when I was researching for the book, I read somewhere that he liked the heart of cobra,” Szablowski says. “So I felt like this is the very dictatorship-ish story. But then I went to the chef and she told me that it never happened. He didn’t like the snakes, like, he was eating chicken and fish.”

The chefs were complex characters, he adds. “Sometimes they are very easy to like, but sometimes they are very easy to hate. Like, they are not easy characters, because it wasn’t an easy job.”

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Kenan Malik in Pandaemonium:

Last week, in Oxford, the first volunteers in the first European human trial were injected with a potential coronavirus vaccine. At the same time, Pakistan’s National Institute of Health received an offer from the Chinese pharmaceutical firm Sinopharm International Corp to take part in a trial of another potential coronavirus vaccine.

The two events reveal twin aspects of the global process of drug trials and development. On the one hand, there is the ingenuity and drive that allow a potential vaccine to emerge in a fraction of the time it would normally take, as well as the courage and selflessness shown by the volunteers risking their health to test it. On the other, the increasing use of poorer nations as testing grounds for new medicines, in trials in which the subjects often have, because of poverty and lack of access to health provision, little choice about whether to take part.

The details of the proposed Chinese trial are still unclear, but it is part of what many call the ‘globalisation of clinical trials’. Until the end of the last century, virtually all clinical trials by Western pharmaceutical companies were conducted in Europe or America. The majority still are. Over the past 20 years, however, US, European and, increasingly, Chinese companies have taken to offshoring trials to low- and middle-income countries.

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Bonaventure Soh Bejeng Ndikung at Artforum:

THERE IS A CERTAIN PROFUNDITY—a profundity that can only be qualified and quantified as tautology—a deep profundity in Santu Mofokeng’s work, which thrusts the viewers, if they are willing to listen to the images carefully, into a space of timelessness. A timelessness that speaks of the elasticity of time beyond time, beyond geography. A deep time. Not in the geological, Huttonian sense of deep time, but as in time’s transience and transcendentality. A time beyond the temporality of the lived imagination. I have found myself in this time-space often when looking at and listening to Santu’s photographic series, particularly “Landscapes,” 1988–2010; “Poisoned Landscapes,” 2008; “Townships,” 1985–87; “Child-Headed Households,” 2007; “Train Church,” 1986; “Landscapes of Trauma,” 1997–2004; “Chasing Shadows,” 1996–2006; and “Ishmael,” 1984–2005.

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Mayukh Sen in The Atlantic:

In 1986, when the director Mira Nair was scouting for her film Salaam Bombay! at the National School of Drama in New Delhi, she fixed her gaze on a young man from Jaipur. “I noticed his focus, his intensity, his very remarkable look—his hooded eyes,” she later recalled of seeing Irrfan Khan. Though she cast him, she soon decided that he was too towering at more than six feet, that he seemed too well fed to convincingly play a malnourished child. To Khan’s dismay, Nair pared his role down to scraps. “I remember sobbing all night when Mira told me that my part was reduced to merely nothing,” the actor told the Indian magazine Open in 2015. “But it changed something within me. I was prepared for anything after that.”

The film would go on to be nominated for an Oscar, but Khan’s role in it as a professional letter writer was confined to just one scene. He made an impression anyway, vanishing into the character as though he really did spend his days composing letters on the streets of Mumbai. The setback didn’t blur Khan’s focus but instead revealed it. His dogged work ethic, combined with his striking command of his craft, would make him a star unlike any India had known before. Khan walked the tightrope between commercial and art-house Hindi cinema with ease, helping viewers imagine a future in which such a binary didn’t exist. Even more impressively, he accomplished this while making major inroads in English-language films, appearing in such big-ticket titles as Slumdog Millionaire (2008), Life of Pi (2012), and Jurassic World (2015). He toiled tirelessly throughout his career, thereby cementing himself in popular memory.

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Robert Pippin at The Point:

Although the nineteenth-century philosopher G.W.F. Hegel is known as a defender of bourgeois society and so of what came to be known after him as capitalism, I think the evidence suggests that his answer to these questions is far more negative than is widely recognized, and this in a distinctive sense that remains relevant today. I want to try to explain this counterintuitive claim. Hegel, of course, writing in Germany in the early nineteenth century, had no idea of the full scope of the industrial capitalism to come, but he certainly saw that a largely agricultural and artisanal/craft/predominantly homebound economy was changing into a wage-labor economy, and his worries about that alone are apposite. What makes him especially worth returning to in our present circumstances, however, is that while material inequalities and the resulting systematic unfairness were important to him, Hegel’s principal focus was on the experiences of ourselves and others inherent in the ordinary life required by such a productive system. These issues are often misleadingly marginalized as “psychological,” but as recent events have shown, they are crucial to the possibility of the social bonds without which no society can survive.

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Gil Redelman Sidi in Nature Reviews:

Windy Evening

This old world needs propping up
When it gets this cold and windy.
The cleverly painted sets,
Oh, they’re shaking badly!
They’re about to come down.

There’ll be nothing but infinite space.
The silence supreme. Almighty silence.
Egyptian sky. Stars like torches
Of grave robbers entering the crypts of kings.
Even the wind pausing, waiting to see.

Better grab hold of that tree, Lucille.
Its shape crazed, terror-stricken.
I’ll hold on to the barn.
The chickens in it are restless.
Smart chickens, rickety world.

by Charles Simic
from A Wedding in Hell
Harcourt, 1994