Anjum Altaf in The South Asian Idea:

The thought of any connection between Osama bin Laden and Gandhi would not have occurred to me were it not for a remark in the much talked about biography of the latter by Joseph Lelyveld. At one point in the book, am I told, Lelyveld writes that “it would be simply wrong, not to say grotesque, to set up Gandhi as any kind of precursor to bin Laden.” The remark piqued my curiosity especially given the fact that it was written before the recent discovery and elimination of Osama. Clearly, Lelyveld was not cashing in on a coincidence. So what was it that provoked the comparison even if it were to be dismissed?

Let me state my conclusion at the outset: the personalities bear no comparison but the contextual similarities highlight major political issues that bear exploration and attention.

The word ‘precursor’ suggests clearly that it is the contextual similarity that prompts Lelyveld’s remark. To spell it out: the existence of a foreign oppressor; the emerging resistance to the oppression; the impotence of lawful resistance; the transition to mass agitation; its reliance on the wellsprings of religious humiliation; the ensuing conflict; and the resulting blowback.

More here.

From The Independent:

This week in the magazine, Malcolm Gladwell writes about the creation of the computer mouse. As the creation story goes, Steve Jobs got the idea for the modern mouse after visiting Xerox PARC in 1979. Within a few days, he met with Dean Hovey, who was one of the founders of the industrial-design firm that would become known as IDEO. Hovey described the meeting to Gladwell from his old office in downtown Palo Alto, which he was borrowing from the current tenant “just for the fun of telling the story of the Apple mouse in the place where it was invented.” Gladwell writes:

He had brought a big plastic bag full of the artifacts of that moment: diagrams scribbled on lined paper, dozens of differently sized plastic mouse shells, a spool of guitar wire, a tiny set of wheels from a toy train set, and the metal lid from a jar of Ralph’s preserves. He turned the lid over. It was filled with a waxlike substance, the middle of which had a round indentation, in the shape of a small ball. “It’s epoxy casting resin,” he said. “You pour it, and then I put Vaseline on a smooth steel ball, and set it in the resin, and it hardens around it.” He tucked the steel ball underneath the lid and rolled it around the tabletop. “It’s a kind of mouse.”

Hovey has shared some of his photographs and sketches from the days of development, presented here with excerpts from Gladwell’s piece.

More here.

From Guardian:

Francis Fukuyama will always be best known for one cosmic soundbite – “The End of History“. This has given him an undeserved reputation as a political optimist, the man who believes that everything will turn out all right for democracy if we just let history run its course. In fact, Fukuyama is a much gloomier thinker than you might guess, always on the lookout for what can go wrong. The End of History, which was published in 1992, is a pretty depressing book (much more depressing than the original 1989 article on which it is based). It is overshadowed by the influence of one of Fukuyama's mentors, the conservative Chicago philosopher Allan Bloom. Bloom thought that American society was drowning in a sea of intellectual relativism and pop cultural pap, and Fukuyama worried that the post-1989 triumph of democracy threatened more of the same. With no big ideological battles to fight any more, politics would just become one mindless thing after another.

More here.

Aatish Bhatia in his excellent new blog, Empirical Zeal:

A world without light is quite an alien place. There are many examples of fish that live in completely dark caves. Remarkably, if you compare these fish to their relatives that live in rivers or in the ocean, you find that the cavefish often undergo a similar set of changes. Their eyes do not fully develop, rendering them essentially blind. They lose pigmentation in their skin, and their jaws and teeth tend to develop in particular ways. This is an example of what is known as convergent evolution, where different organisms faced with similar ecological challenges also stumble upon similar evolutionary solutions.

The changes mentioned above are all about appearance, but what about changes in behavior? In particular, when animals sleep, they generally line up with the day and night cycle. In the absence of any daylight, how do their sleep patterns evolve?

A recent paper by Erik Duboué and colleagues addressed this question by comparing 4 groups of fish of the same species Astyanax mexicanus. Three of the populations (the Pachón, Tinaja, and Molino) were blind cavefish that inhabited different dark caves, whereas the fourth was a surface-dwelling fish.

More here.

A symposium over at Dissent:

Dissent writers to offer reflections on the killing of Osama bin Laden—on how it was carried out, its potential impact on government policies, and its meaning to and reception by the public. Their responses, beginning with Dissent co-editor Michael Walzer’s, are below.

Michael Walzer – “Killing Osama”
Lindsay Beyerstein – “The War Paradigm”
Feisal G. Mohamed – “The Theater of Counter-Terrorism”
Fred Smoler – “The Particular Case of Osama bin Laden”
Bhaskar Sunkara – “Pakistan at War with Itself”

Walzer:

It was, as everyone said, a famous (symbolic) victory. What was wrong, then, with the celebrations in front of the White House? There is an old Jewish commentary on the book of Exodus, which says that when Pharaoh’s army drowned in the sea, the angels in heaven began to celebrate, and God rebuked them: how can you rejoice when my creatures are drowning? There must be a secular equivalent to that story. It would say that we should celebrate the ending of wars but not the killing of our enemies. And the war against Islamist terrorism isn’t over.

But are we actually at war? There are many people on the left who reject the very idea. Osama bin Laden was not an enemy to be killed, they argue, but a criminal to be brought to justice. From the beginning, that has been the critical debate: was the 9/11 attack an act of war or a crime? The two positions are generally held with great certainty; each one excludes the other. But the truth is that each one is right, some of the time, in some places.

Amitava Kumar over at Bookslut:

On the website of the University of Chicago Writing Program, there is a link that you can use to generate a random academic sentence. When I last clicked on it, this is what I got: “The idea of the proper-name effect allegorizes the de-eroticization of normative value(s).” The site also says that if you are “the do-it-yourself type,” you may write your own sentence. You are to choose one word from each of the four drop-lists, and then all you need to do is click on “Write It!” If the result doesn’t please, click on “Edit it!” (If you start enjoying what you’re doing, there’s also a third button that is called “Reset.”)

I will now list some of the words and formulaic phrases in each drop list. One: “the public sphere,” “the gendered body,” “power/knowledge,” “agency”; Two: “discourse,” “politics,” “legitimation,” “construction”; Three: “post-capitalist hegemony,” “the gaze,” “pop culture,” “civil society”; and Four: “epistemology,” “emergence,” “logic,” and “culture.” Simply by choosing a word or phrase from each category, it is easy to write sentences like the following: “The emergence of civil society may be parsed as the legitimation of the public sphere.” This was among the more intelligible results I got. When I clicked on the cheerful and encouraging “Edit It!” link, I got the following, rather perfect, result: The legitimation of civil society may be parsed as the emergence of the public sphere.

All this is funny, at least for a short while. When an academic friend of mine posted the above-mentioned link on her Facebook page, another friend asked in the comments section whether she could use the sentence generator to complete her dissertation. That joke was a wonderfully precise one. More than anyone else, it is the academic initiate, the graduate student or, in some cases, the young scholar seeking tenure, who must reveal his or her proficiency in the use of the sacred tongue. Style is assumed to be a feature only of senior living, a part of what you do later in your career, when you have acquired the necessary academic credentials. And till you have amassed the capital of years of professional membership, the luxury of innovation or originality is frowned upon as irresponsible and excessive. Recitation by rote is encouraged. It is to assure all, or at least some of us, that we belong to a community, or at least a tribe with shared rituals and a common language. In a rather obvious way, then, the academy is the original random sentence generator.

‘THE war,” wrote one of its fiercest opponents, “was founded in delusion and error, and we richly deserve to reap nothing but mortification and disappointment in return for all the blood and treasure we have spent.” Robert Manne on the 2003 invasion of Iraq? A German revisionist historian on World War I? No: these words were written during the Crimean War of 1853-56, by an English diarist named Charles Greville. Let it be recalled that England and its allies “won” this territorial dispute with Russia fought in and around the Black Sea. It claimed the lives of 525,000 soldiers. Greville’s words are quoted by Australian philosopher-historian Ian Bickerton in The Illusion of Victory. Bickerton’s thesis in this book is that “the costs of war are rarely, if ever, worthwhile”. That “if ever” is important: Bickerton rejects the notion that war is sometimes a necessary evil. All war is “a betrayal of human purpose and a total failure of imagination”. His argument is essentially utilitarian, based on a retrospective cost-benefit analysis of major European-based wars in the past 200 years.

more from Roy Williams at The Australian here.

Leslie Vinjamuri and Jack Snyder over at Duck of Minerva:

Last Wednesday’s announcement that the International Criminal Court will seek arrest warrants against three senior officials in Libya will come as no surprise to Security Council members who gave the ICC authority to investigate. They may soon find themselves regretting this decision.

The responsibility to protect and the duty to prosecute both have strong coalitions backing them, but these two norms do not always go well together. The duty to prosecute removes an indispensable strategy for inducing the peaceful exit of perpetrators. Unless NATO is prepared to put boots on the ground, its ability to negotiate a palatable exit for Qaddafi and his key supporters could become essential to bringing an end to this intervention.

Libyan rebel leaders demand that Qaddafi step down, but they refuse to negotiate a settlement with him. Leaders in Britain, France, and the United States have embraced this rebel demand, blurring the line between the goal of protecting civilians and regime change. So far, though, they have been prudent. The mandate of protecting civilians has not been used to justify an expanded mission with on the ground operations to ensure a swift change of regime.

Without an international decision to invade or arm the rebels, it is hard to imagine how this conflict will end. The ICC’s announcement that arrest warrants are forthcoming will only make this worse. Qaddafi or his core supporters will be unlikely to abdicate power without guarantees against prosecution. The international coalition that backed UN Security Council Resolutions 1970 and 1973 may have boxed itself into a corner.

There's an interesting debate between Kindred Winecoff over at International Political Economy at the University of North Carolina and Henry Farrell at Crooked Timber. Winecoff:

Paul Krugman thinks that democratic politics does not exist:

Well, what I’ve been hearing with growing frequency from members of the policy elite — self-appointed wise men, officials, and pundits in good standing — is the claim that it’s mostly the public’s fault. The idea is that we got into this mess because voters wanted something for nothing, and weak-minded politicians catered to the electorate’s foolishness.

So this seems like a good time to point out that this blame-the-public view isn’t just self-serving, it’s dead wrong.

The fact is that what we’re experiencing right now is a top-down disaster. The policies that got us into this mess weren’t responses to public demand. They were, with few exceptions, policies championed by small groups of influential people — in many cases, the same people now lecturing the rest of us on the need to get serious. And by trying to shift the blame to the general populace, elites are ducking some much-needed reflection on their own catastrophic mistakes.

If Greenspan's “with notably rare exceptions” deserves internet infamy, and it does, then surely Krugman's less notable exceptions should too. As Drezner notes, Krugman's examples — the Bush tax cuts and the Iraq war, mainly — were supported by majorities of the population. Bush campaigned on a platform of tax cuts too, so it's not as if he tricked the public once elected.

Henry Farrell responds over at Crooked Timber:

I like much of Winecoff’s blogging on IPE, but the relevant political science here seems to me to support Krugman far more than it does Winecoff. International political economy scholarship (the field that Winecoff specializes in) tends to have an extremely stripped down, and bluntly unrealistic account of how policy is made. Typically, modelers in this field either assume that the “median voter” plays an important role in determining national preferences, or that various stylized economic interests (which they try to capture using Stolper-Samuelson, Ricardo-Viner and other approaches borrowed from economic theory) determine policy, perhaps as filtered through a very simple representation of legislative-executive relations.

However, actual work on how policy gets made suggests that this doesn’t work. On many important policy issues, the public has no preferences whatsoever. On others, it has preferences that largely maps onto partisan identifications rather than actual interests, and that reflect claims made by political elites (e.g. global warming). On others yet, the public has a set of contradictory preferences that politicians can pick and choose from. In some broad sense, public opinion does provide a brake on elite policy making – but the boundaries are both relatively loose and weakly defined. Policy elites can get away with a hell of a lot if they want to.

More from Winecoff here.

‘Moonlight’, says James Attlee in his opening chapter, ‘is a subject almost universally regarded as off-limits to contemporary writers, too kitsch, debased and sentimental to be worthy of serious consideration. This alone would make it a subject worth exploring.’ Particularly so because it had occurred to him that we have paid for the boon of electricity by an almost complete loss of darkness and the moon’s lovely alleviation of it – certainly so in towns, under their rusty, pinkish glow of diffused electric light. So he sets out to rediscover and explore the night, and leads us with him in a way so far from being kitsch and sentimental that we become hungry for more. There can’t be many people who have never caught their breath at the sight of a full moon in a clear sky, but the sensations it inspires are inward; the kind of thing usually felt to be material for poets, painters or musicians, rather than for general consideration. Attlee has found a way of engaging with them which brings them out on to the open stage provided by prose without loss of mystery or charm. It is this achievement which is difficult to pin down.

more from Diana Athill at Literary Review here.

The British Fabian Society takes its name from the Roman soldier and politician Quintus Fabius Maximus Verrucosus. He may seem an unlikely patron for a society of intellectual socialists. Born into one of the most aristocratic families of ancient Rome, Fabius is not known for his sympathy for the poor. It was his tactics in the war against Hannibal that inspired the society’s founders in the 1880s. During that war Rome was brought to the brink of disaster thanks to a series of rash and inexperienced generals who insisted on engaging the Carthaginians head on, with terrible consequences. The Battle of Cannae in 216 BC was the worst: our best estimates suggest that some 50,000 Roman soldiers were killed (making it, as Robert Garland puts in his brisk new biography, Hannibal, a bloodbath on the scale of Gettysburg or the first day of the Somme). When Fabius held command, he took a different course. Instead of meeting Hannibal in pitched battle, he played a clever waiting game, harrying the enemy in guerrilla warfare, and scorching the earth of Italy (burning the crops, the homes and the hideouts); the strategy was to wear Hannibal down and deprive him of food for his vast army. Hence his later nickname “Cunctator”, the “Delayer”.

more from Mary Beard at the TLS here.

From Guardian:

One of the distinctive aspects of British culture is that the word “intellectual” seems to be regarded as a term of abuse. WH Auden summed it up neatly when he wrote: “To the man-in-the-street, who, I'm sorry to say, / Is a keen observer of life,/ The word 'Intellectual' suggests right away/ A man who's untrue to his wife.”

Auden wasn't alone in thinking that intellectuals suffer from ethical deficiencies. The journalist and historian Paul Johnson once devoted an entire book, Intellectuals: from Marx and Tolstoy to Sartre and Chomsky (2000), to proving that some of the 20th century's most prominent thinkers were moral cretins. And in his book The Intellectuals and the Masses (Faber, 1992) the literary critic John Carey argued that most of our culture's esteemed thinkers over several centuries despised the masses and devoted much of their efforts to excluding the hoi-polloi from cultural life. Both Johnson and Carey were pushing at an open door. Britain is a country in which the word “intellectual” is often preceded by the sneering adjective “so-called”, where smart people are put down because they are “too clever by half” and where a cerebral politician (David Willetts) was for years saddled with the soubriquet “Two Brains”.

More here.

From The New York Times:

Those stars among the hunter-gatherers of fossils related to human origins, Donald C. Johanson and Richard Leakey, returned last week to the American Museum of Natural History in New York, the scene of a bitter televised brawl between the two 30 years ago. They were older, presumably wiser and definitely much more temperate. The title of the program, “Human Evolution and Why It Matters: A Conversation with Leakey and Johanson,” signaled that this was not to be a re-enactment.

At the start, Mr. Leakey called attention to scars on his face and a thick bandage on his scalp, the result of skin-cancer treatment. With a smile and a wink in his voice, he said, “I assure you this was the work of a doctor, not a colleague.” Everyone laughed, including Dr. Johanson, and relaxed for the next hour and a half as the two paleoanthropologists conducted a tour of their science’s unfinished business, from the search for the last common ancestor of the chimpanzee and human lineages to a deeper understanding of how early modern Homo sapiens developed the gift of symbolic thinking and language. In a field as contentious as theirs, it was probably inevitable that by 1981 the two men, both in their mid-30s, had become rivals who clashed over interpretations drawn from the meager sampling of bones coming to light. Dr. Johanson was riding a wave of fame as the discoverer of the skeleton nicknamed Lucy, then the earliest known hominid species and judged by him to be a direct ancestor of humans.

More here.

Dave Mosher in Scientific American:

Much of what we know about sex, or think we know, stems from the animal kingdom. No surprise there—we're animals and the nuances of the genetic tango are easier to study in organisms larger than infinitesimal blobs.

Trouble is, animal sex is specialized to the point of distraction. Most researchers have learned to avoid seeking universal sexual truths by examining animals' twig on the tree of life, but some still rely heavily on single animal models whereas others hawk dated taxonomic ideas without realizing it, says protistologist Frederick Spiegel of the University of Arkansas in Fayetteville.

“Huge numbers of trees are killed over the origin and function of sex, but some people writing and teaching this material still have animal sex in the back of their minds. It's biased, and it's backwards,” says Spiegel, author of a commentary on sex published online May 10 in Proceedings of the Royal Society B.

Enter the amoeba: a collection of blobby, typically asexual microorganisms that taxonomists have historically swept under the rug as evolutionary oddities. If biologists want to understand sex's universal features, especially its benefits and costs, Spiegel argues there's no better critter to start with.

“Sex is one of the most primitive characteristics of all eukaryotic life,” he says. “There are only a few eukaryotic lineages where we've never seen sex, and they're all amoebae. With these asexual organisms, we can compare and ask some truly synthetic questions about sex.”

Amoebas are single-celled blobs that house their DNA in nuclei, just like all of their eukaryotic relatives (humans included). Although some amoebas presumably cannot have sex and divide by mitosis, others are among the eukaryotes that can have sex—a process that can most simply be defined as ripping a genome in half and later recombining it. The practice fuels diversity by juggling genes and ultimately helps lineages weather catastrophic change over generations as natural selection acts on them.

In The Economist:

IN 1948 Lewis Fry Richardson, a British scientist, published what was probably the first rigorous analysis of the statistics of war. Richardson had spent seven years gathering data on the wars waged in the century or so prior to his study. There were almost 300 of them. The list runs from conflicts that claimed a thousand or so lives to the devastation of the two world wars. But when he plotted his results, he found that these diverse events fell into a regular pattern. It was as if the chaos of war seemed to comply with some hitherto unknown law of nature.

At first glance the pattern seems obvious. Richardson found that wars with low death tolls far outnumber high-fatality conflicts. But that obvious observation conceals a precise mathematical description: the link between the severity and frequency of conflicts follows a smooth curve, known as a power law. One consequence is that extreme events such as the world wars do not appear to be anomalies. They are simply what should be expected to occur occasionally, given the frequency with which conflicts take place.

The results have fascinated mathematicians and military strategists ever since. They have also been replicated many times. But they have not had much impact on the conduct of actual wars. As a result, there is a certain “so what” quality to Richardson’s results. It is one thing to show that a pattern exists, another to do something useful with it.

In a paper currently under review at Science, however, Neil Johnson of the University of Miami in Coral Gables, Florida, and his colleagues hint at what that something useful might be. Dr Johnson’s team is one of several groups who, in previous papers, have shown that Richardson’s power law also applies to attacks by terrorists and insurgents. They and others have broadened Richardson’s scope of inquiry to include the timing of attacks, as well as the severity. This prepared the ground for the new paper, which outlines a method for forecasting the evolution of conflicts.

Progress, of a sort

Dr Johnson’s proposal rests on a pattern he and his team found in data on insurgent attacks against American forces in Afghanistan and Iraq. After the initial attacks in any given province, subsequent fatal incidents become more and more frequent. The intriguing point is that it is possible, using a formula Dr Johnson has derived, to predict the details of this pattern from the interval between the first two attacks.

The formula in question (T(n) = T(1)n^-b) is one of a familiar type, known as a progress curve, that describes how productivity improves in a range of human activities from manufacturing to cancer surgery. T(n) is the number of days between the nth attack and its successor. (T(1) is therefore the number of days between the first and second attacks.) The other element of the equation, b, turns out to be directly related to T(1). It is calculated from the relationship between the logarithms of the attack number, n, and the attack interval, T(n). The upshot is that knowing T(1) should be enough to predict the future course of a local insurgency. Conversely, changing b would change both T(1) and T(n), and thus change that future course.

Donald MacKenzie in the LRB:

What goes on in stock markets appears quite different when viewed on different timescales. Look at a whole day’s trading, and market participants can usually tell you a plausible story about how the arrival of news has changed traders’ perceptions of the prospects for a company or the entire economy and pushed share prices up or down. Look at trading activity on a scale of milliseconds, however, and things seem quite different.

When two American financial economists, Joel Hasbrouck and Gideon Saar, did this a couple of years ago, they found strange periodicities and spasms. The most striking periodicity involves large peaks of activity separated by almost exactly 1000 milliseconds: they occur 10-30 milliseconds after the ‘tick’ of each second. The spasms, in contrast, seem to be governed not directly by clock time but by an event: the execution of a buy or sell order, the cancellation of an order, or the arrival of a new order. Average activity levels in the first millisecond after such an event are around 300 times higher than normal. There are lengthy periods – lengthy, that’s to say, on a scale measured in milliseconds – in which little or nothing happens, punctuated by spasms of thousands of orders for a corporation’s shares and cancellations of orders. These spasms seem to begin abruptly, last a minute or two, then end just as abruptly.

Little of this has to do directly with human action. None of us can react to an event in a millisecond: the fastest we can achieve is around 140 milliseconds, and that’s only for the simplest stimulus, a sudden sound. The periodicities and spasms found by Hasbrouck and Saar are the traces of an epochal shift. As recently as 20 years ago, the heart of most financial markets was a trading floor on which human beings did deals with each other face to face. The ‘open outcry’ trading pits at the Chicago Mercantile Exchange, for example, were often a mêlée of hundreds of sweating, shouting, gesticulating bodies. Now, the heart of many markets (at least in standard products such as shares) is an air-conditioned warehouse full of computers supervised by only a handful of maintenance staff.

The deals that used to be struck on trading floors now take place via ‘matching engines’, computer systems that process buy and sell orders and execute a trade if they find a buy order and a sell order that match. The matching engines of the New York Stock Exchange, for example, aren’t in the exchange’s century-old Broad Street headquarters with its Corinthian columns and sculptures, but in a giant new 400,000-square-foot plain-brick data centre in Mahwah, New Jersey, 30 miles from downtown Manhattan. Nobody minds you taking photos of the Broad Street building’s striking neoclassical façade, but try photographing the Mahwah data centre and you’ll find the police quickly taking an interest: it’s classed as part of the critical infrastructure of the United States.

Nilüfer Göle in The Immanent Frame:

The new faces of the far-right have gained power in their political parties by virtue of their capacity to make a place for themselves in debate—in other words, by manufacturing public personalities—as well as by stirring up controversies over the presence of Islam in Europe. They take great care over their self-presentation, which is given precedence over their political representation and their function in the party. We are witnessing a process whereby the presence of actors in the public sphere and the media determines the place they occupy in the political arena. However, public popularity and political engagement do not always follow the same logic, and, indeed, they sometimes come into tension with each other. There are those among the French public, for instance, who declare the National Front an obstacle to the popularity of Marine Le Pen.

Hence, we face a movement that has been revived politically by its entry to the public sphere, through which it acquires legitimacy for its ideas and puts an end to the stigma of the far-right. These parties are no longer at the end of the political spectrum but seek their political legitimacy at the center of public opinion, and they do so in large part by making Islam a common enemy. Thinkers from the republican right and intellectuals from the left both express perplexity over the rise of right-wing movements that do not hesitate to endorse egalitarian, feminist, and secular ideas. They have been dispossessed of the ideas that previously guaranteed the far-right’s restriction to the margins of the political system.

The rising stars of the European far-right, such as Marine Le Pen in France, in fact scramble the divide between right and left, thus distinguishing themselves from the preceding generation of conservatives. They sometimes display a habitus evocative of European counter-culture—something completely out of step with the style of their predecessors. The leader of the far-right Freedom Party of Austria, Heinz-Christian Strache, who often sports a tee-shirt emblazoned with an effigy of Che, and the Swiss politician Oskar Freysinger, who wears his long hair in a ponytail, do not hesitate to borrow the emblems of cultural revolt. In choosing Islam as a target, they make themselves out to be defenders of sexual equality, feminism, and freedom of expression, as well as supporters of the fight against homophobia and anti-Semitism. Hijacking the cultural legacy of the left, they promote those values to which the preceding, patriarchal, xenophobic, and anti-Semitic far-right was hostile.

According to French intellectual lore, Tzvetan Todorov, upon alighting in France from Bulgaria in 1963 at the age of twenty-four, headed directly for the Sorbonne. Armed with a letter of introduction from his supervisor at the University of Sofia, he sought out the dean of the Faculty of Letters in order to propose a research project on “stylistics”—a rigorously formalist approach to literary study that abstracts from history, sociology, and psychology. At the time, however, the Sorbonne was a bastion of French traditionalism: explication de texte and nationally based literary history predominated. As Todorov recounts in his autobiography, Duties and Delights: The Life of a Go-Between: “[The dean] looked at me as though I came from another planet and explained to me, quite coldly, that there was no literary theory going on in his university, nor were there any plans for it in the future.” (Here and elsewhere, I have relied on the French original, Devoirs et Délices: Une vie de passeur, from Éditions du Seuil.) End of conversation. But hardly the end of the story. As it turned out, coincident with the young Bulgarian’s arrival, the structuralist wave was cresting in Paris. Within a few months France would be awash in innovative approaches to the study of literature—approaches that, according to the Sorbonne’s dean, “didn’t exist.”

more from Richard Wolin at TNR here.