Dennis Dutton in The Australian:

Throughout history and across cultures, the arts of homo sapiens have demonstrated universal features. These aesthetic inclinations and patterns have evolved as part of our hardwired psychological nature, ingrained in the human species over the 80,000 generations lived out by our ancestors in the 1.6 million years of the Pleistocene.

The existence of a universal aesthetic psychology has been suggested, not only experimentally, but by the fact that the arts travel outside their local contexts so easily: Beethoven is loved in Japan, Aboriginal art in Paris, Korean ceramics in Brazil, and Hollywood movies all over the globe.

Our aesthetic psychology has remained unchanged since the building of cities and the advent of writing some 10,000 years ago, which explains why The Iliad and The Odyssey of Homer, and the Epic of Gilgamesh, remain good reading today.

We haven’t lost Pleistocene tastes for fat and sweet foods, nor have we lost our ancient tastes for artistic entertainment.

The fascination, for example, that people worldwide find in the exercise of artistic virtuosity, from Praxiteles to Renee Fleming, is not a social construct, but an evolutionary adaptation; the worldwide interest in sports comes from a similar source.

More here.

Geov Parrish interviews Noam Chomsky at AlterNet:

Geov Parrish: Is George Bush in political trouble? And if so, why?

Noam Chomsky: George Bush would be in severe political trouble if there were an opposition political party in the country. Just about every day, they’re shooting themselves in the foot. The striking fact about contemporary American politics is that the Democrats are making almost no gain from this. The only gain that they’re getting is that the Republicans are losing support. Now, again, an opposition party would be making hay, but the Democrats are so close in policy to the Republicans that they can’t do anything about it. When they try to say something about Iraq, George Bush turns back to them, or Karl Rove turns back to them, and says, “How can you criticize it? You all voted for it.” And, yeah, they’re basically correct.

How could the Democrats distinguish themselves at this point, given that they’ve already played into that trap?

Democrats read the polls way more than I do, their leadership. They know what public opinion is. They could take a stand that’s supported by public opinion instead of opposed to it. Then they could become an opposition party, and a majority party.

More here.

“Ismail Kadare has turned the decline and fall of Albania’s bloodthirsty dictator into a superb thriller, The Successor, says Ian Thomson.”

Review of Kadare’s The Successor (translated by David Bellos), in The Guardian:

Albanians are descended from the most ancient of European races, the Illyrians. For many in the West, though, Albania remains as remote as the fictional Syldavia of the Tintin comics. The country came into existence only in 1912 with the dissolution of the Ottoman Empire. Its first ruler, the fantastically named King Zog, was ousted by Mussolini when he invaded in 1939. Five years later, Mussolini’s troops were expelled in turn by Albanian nationalist Enver Hoxha. Following 50 years of communism under Hoxha, the Balkan nation is now a fledgling democracy. However, it will be many years before Albania shakes off Hoxha’s brutal legacy.

Outwardly a Stalinist, Hoxha was an Ottoman dandy whose politburo was united less by Marxist-Leninism than by the Balkan revenge cult of gjak per gjak (blood for blood). For 40 years, Hoxha terrorised Albania by retaliatory murders and government purges. His dictatorship was inimical to literary expression, yet Albanian novelist Ismail Kadare has produced marvellously subtle critiques of Hoxha even under his censorship. Kadare was never a party member, but he was chairman of a cultural institute run by the dictator’s dangerous wife, Nexhmije Hoxha. As Minister for Propaganda during the early Sixties, she helped run Albania’s feared Sigurimi secret police.

Kadare’s first novel, The General of the Dead Army, nevertheless defied the authorities by refusing to mention the word ‘party’. It told the story of an Italian army officer who returns to Albania at the war’s end to bury his fallen compatriots, and remains a magnificent allegory of life under dictatorship. Kadare was accommodated by the regime until he finally incurred the wrath of the Sigurimi in 1990, and defected to Paris.

More here.

Carl Zimmer in his blog, The Loom:

Last year was the hottest on record, or the second hottest, depending on the records climatologists look at. The planet has warmed .8 degrees C over the past 150 years, and scientists are generally agreed that greenhouse gases have played a major part in that warming. They also agree that the warming will continue in the decades to come. Many experts are concerned that warming may make two unpleasant things more common: extinctions and diseases. In tomorrow’s issue of Nature (link to come here), a team of scientists report on a case that ties these two dangers together: frogs have become extinct as climate change spreads a deadly fungus. It’s an important study, but it can’t be boiled down to simple slogans. It highlights the dangers of global warming, but it shows that global warming’s effects can be counterintuitive and unpredictable.

More here.

Anita Hill in Ms. Magazine:

Whatever the criticism of Miers’ nomination, however, I believe that it was predictable given the way the president introduced her to the public. In previously announcing John Roberts’ nomination, President Bush touted him as the gold standard for nominees. Bush declared that he was chosen from “among the most distinguished jurists and attorneys in the country,” and cited his “intellect, experience and temperament.” The presence of Roberts’ wife and two children rounded out the picture of what the president wanted the public to accept as the rarefied image of judicial leadership.

In contrast, President Bush introduced Miers by citing “the past five years” of service to his administration. He gave her few accolades for her outstanding legal mind, her specific legal experiences and her long career. Physically, she appeared as a single woman without family members— as though kin other than a spouse and children are insignificant.

Days after Miers’ withdrawal from the nomination process, President Bush introduced her replacement, Judge Samuel A. Alito Jr., by referring to his “distinguished record, his measured judicial temperaments and his tremendous personal integrity.” Alito, like Roberts, was accompanied by his wife and two children. From all appearances, the president had hastily returned to the kind of nominee that had been successfully confirmed weeks before: a white male with an Ivy League education, federal judicial experience and a traditional family.

Anita F. Hill is professor of social policy, law and women’s studies at Brandeis University in Waltham, Mass.

More here.

From The New York Times:

‘Gate of the Sun,’ by Elias Khoury. Narrated by a peasant doctor talking to a comatose, aging fighter, “Gate of the Sun” relates a swirl of stories: of grandmothers and grandfathers, midwives and children, wives and lovers – the lucky and the hapless, the mad and the hopeful. Employing a strategy that’s an inversion of “A Thousand and One Nights” (whose narrator, Scheherazade, tells stories to save herself), Khalil half believes that these stories are keeping his dying friend Yunes alive. Between November 1947 and October 1950, some 700,000 Palestinians fled or were forced to flee their homes as the British departed and the Israelis took control. Disputed and complicated, the refugee problem has been a sticking point in more than five decades of war, terrorism and failed peace talks.

Elias Khoury is one of a handful of contemporary Arab novelists to have gained a measure of Western attention. He is also one of the few to write about the Palestinian experience, albeit from the perspective of an outsider. As a Christian born in Beirut in 1948, at the moment of Israel’s inception, Khoury was too young to know firsthand the events that “Gate of the Sun” encompasses.

More here.

Steve Shapin in The New Yorker:

On January 20, 2003, the English journalist William Leith decides he has to lose weight. That’s the day he gets on the bathroom scale and finds that it’s “the fattest day of my life”: he’s just over six feet tall and he weighs two hundred and thirty-six pounds. He feels lousy. He feels repulsive. In fact, he is repulsive. His girlfriend tells him to stop tucking his shirt into his trousers—“It just bulks you out”—and she doesn’t want to have sex with him anymore. He resolves, not for the first time, to do something about it. He gets on a plane and goes to New York to see Dr. Atkins, and he decides, more or less at the same time, to write a book about his eating problems. “The Hungry Years: Confessions of a Food Addict” (Gotham; $25) is the result: Bridget Jones with a Y chromosome, a significant coke habit, and a sneaky sort of intellectual ambition.

Leith’s book is about food addiction, but he’s interested in all sorts of addictions and what it is about our culture that makes it so easy to stuff ourselves, leaving us filled but unfulfilled: “This is the fat society. This is where people come, so they can have exactly what they want. And what they want is . . . more.”

More here.

Maggie Wittlin in Seed Magazine:

There is a real distinction between authentic laughter, that which is caused by a stimulus, and laughter used to manipulate social situations, say Binghamton University researchers. In fact, these two kinds of laughter may have evolved millions of years apart…

“If you do a literature search on laughter, a lot of the material you’re going to come up with is really about humor,” Provine said. “But humor is really a sort of subcategory of the topic of laughter, instead of vice versa, because laughter is ancient and instinctive, while humor is something of relatively modern origin. So there was laughter long before there was humor.”

The authors begin their evolutionary tale of laughter well before humor came into the mix, arguing that laughter is a more basic function than even language. “Not only does it precede language developmentally…it probably preceded language in terms of evolution,” Wilson said. “So, there was a time in our history when we were laughing before we were talking.”

Laughter-like behavior started before we split from apes, the researchers say. As they tickle each other and horse around, apes give a pant-grunt, which Wilson said is a clear precursor to laughter.

More here.

From The Economist:

The brave seamen whose great voyages of exploration opened up the world are iconic figures in European history. Columbus found the New World in 1492; Dias discovered the Cape of Good Hope in 1488; and Magellan set off to circumnavigate the world in 1519. However, there is one difficulty with this confident assertion of European mastery: it may not be true.

It seems more likely that the world and all its continents were discovered by a Chinese admiral named Zheng He, whose fleets roamed the oceans between 1405 and 1435. His exploits, which are well documented in Chinese historical records, were written about in a book which appeared in China around 1418 called “The Marvellous Visions of the Star Raft”.

Next week, in Beijing and London, fresh and dramatic evidence is to be revealed to bolster Zheng He’s case. It is a copy, made in 1763, of a map, dated 1418, which contains notes that substantially match the descriptions in the book. “It will revolutionise our thinking about 15th-century world history,” says Gunnar Thompson, a student of ancient maps and early explorers.

More here.

Seth Mnookin in Slate:

Based on all the evidence, it seems Frey’s weird, macho fear of seeing himself as a “victim” led him to fabricate a life that was painful and extreme enough so as to explain the sadness and despair he felt. Instead of a crack-binging street fighter, ostracized by both his peers and society, the Smoking Gun investigation indicates Frey was more likely a lonely, confused boy who may or may not have needed ear surgery as a child and felt distant from his parents and alienated from his peers. He drank too much, did some drugs, got nailed for a couple of DUIs and ended up, at age 23, in one of the country’s most prestigious drug-and-alcohol treatment centers. When Frey writes that, after one of his fictitious arrests, he hated himself, saw no future, and wanted to die, I believe him. I grew up in a well-off suburban household with loving parents and no clear traumas in my past. I was popular enough in high school, I joined the newspaper and acted in plays, and I got into a good college. I was also miserably, sometimes almost suicidally, depressed, and, from the age of 15, I was taking drugs and drinking almost every day. Frey must have felt that his real, very scary, and very lonely feelings would have seemed weak if it was only preceded by standard-issue suburban teenage angst.

More here.  And Slate also has “Lying writers and the readers who love them” by Meghan O’Rourke:

It’s been quite a week for literary scandals. First, The Smoking Gun made a persuasive case that Oprah-anointed author James Frey had fabricated crucial swathes of his best-selling addiction-and-recovery memoir A Million Little Pieces. Second, the New York Times offered its own strong case that the cult novelist JT LeRoy—a former child prostitute and recovered heroin addict, whose raw and “honest” writing had made him a celebrity darling—was merely a persona invented by writer Laura Albert and “played” in public by a friend. You might conclude from all the media hoopla that these hoaxes have upended our long-held ideas about truth and literary merit. But are we really all that surprised?

Long before his book was exposed as fraudulent, the James Frey phenomenon was itself Display A of what has become a deep-seated conviction of our therapeutic culture: Not only is the line between what is factually true and what is purveyed as “authentic” blurry indeed, but the inspirational power of a work of imagination or memory is the most relevant currency by which to judge its value.

More here.  And see this previous post about Frey with many comments from 3QD readers.

Geoffrey Wheatcroft in Slate:

On Capitol Hill, as well as Westminster, drink once oiled the political process. “Cactus” Jack Garner, the genial Texan reactionary who was FDR’s vice president in the 1930s and who famously said that his job wasn’t worth a bucket of warm piss, confined his work to asking senators in to “strike a blow for liberty” over a flask of bourbon, so much of which flowed that Cactus Jack had a malodorous urinal installed in a corner of his office. If he wasn’t the best advertisement for the virtues of booze, the late Daniel Patrick Moynihan was a notably serious drinker who was also several cuts morally and intellectually above most of his Senate colleagues.

More alarming were Richard Nixon’s last years at the White House. After a good many evening martinis, he would call Henry Kissinger, and the secretary of state would grin silently as he passed around the telephone so that others could listen to their commander in chief’s unbalanced ramblings. Since Nixon was in a position to blow us all up, this suggests a somewhat esoteric sense of humor on Kissinger’s part…

In 1911, Winston Churchill wrote to his wife about Prime Minister H.H. Asquith: “On Thursday night the PM was very bad: and I squirmed with embarrassment. He could hardly speak and many people noticed his condition. … [O]nly the persistent freemasonry of the House of Commons prevents a scandal.”

There is a certain irony here, given Churchill’s own reputation. Few people ever saw him grossly drunk, but in 1935, Neville Chamberlain reported almost good-naturedly that “Winston makes a good many speeches considerably fortified by cocktails and old brandies,” and his all-day-long consumption of champagne, whisky, and brandy, not least in the years 1940-45, would have him marked down by many contemporary doctors as a functional alcoholic.

More here.

Douglas Farah & Kathi Austin in The New Republic:

The guns-for-minerals pipeline bore the hallmarks of Viktor Bout, a notorious Russian arms dealer who operates one of the largest private air fleets in the world. Bout has made millions flying lethal cargo to many of the world’s worst elements, from former Liberian dictator Charles Taylor to the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia to Rwandan genocidaires. Bout’s activities are so egregious that Peter Hain, a British cabinet minister, publicly branded him “Africa’s chief merchant of death.”

After years of prompting by the United Nations, President Bush issued an executive order in July 2004 making it illegal for any American person or institution to do business “directly or indirectly” with Charles Taylor’s associates, including Bout. Nine months later, the Treasury Department’s Office of Foreign Assets Control (ofac) ordered the freezing of the U.S. assets of 30 Bout-related companies, along with those of his U.S.-based partner, his brother, and two other associates. The United Nations had already taken similar action against Bout, who has been wanted by Interpol since 2002 on an outstanding warrant for laundering the proceeds of illicit weapons sales…

Yet, remarkably, given this record and the international efforts to shut him down, Bout also counts among his clients the U.S. military and its contractors in Iraq, nato forces in Afghanistan, and the United Nations in Sudan. The New Republic has learned that the Defense Department has largely turned a blind eye to Bout’s activities and has continued to supply him with contracts, in violation of the executive order and despite the fact that other, more legitimate air carriers are available. Revenues from these flights enable Bout to carry on the profitable business of nurturing conflicts in other, less covered parts of the world, threatening further international instability.

More here.

By Beth Nolan, Curtis Bradley, David Cole, Geoffrey Stone, Harold Hongju Koh, Kathleen M. Sullivan, Laurence H. Tribe, Martin Lederman, Philip B. Heymann, Richard Epstein, Ronald Dworkin, Walter Dellinger, William S. Sessions, and William Van Alstyne, in the New York Review of Books:

Dear Members of Congress:

We are scholars of constitutional law and former government officials. We write in our individual capacities as citizens concerned by the Bush administration’s National Security Agency domestic spying program, as reported in The New York Times, and in particular to respond to the Justice Department’s December 22, 2005, letter to the majority and minority leaders of the House and Senate Intelligence Committees setting forth the administration’s defense of the program.^[1] Although the program’s secrecy prevents us from being privy to all of its details, the Justice Department’s defense of what it concedes was secret and warrantless electronic surveillance of persons within the United States fails to identify any plausible legal authority for such surveillance. Accordingly the program appears on its face to violate existing law.

More here.

Richard A. Fortey reviews Charles Darwin, Geologist, by Sandra Herbert, in the Times Literary Supplement:

In 1838, Charles Darwin wrote in his Notebook M, “I a geologist have illdefined [sic] notion of land covered with ocean, former animals, slow force cracking surface &c truly poetical”. When the young naturalist set forth on the Beagle late in 1831 he thought of himself not as a biologist, but as a geologist first and foremost. Our subsequent picture of him has been altogether coloured by the overwhelming impact of The Origin of Species, which was not published until 1859. But for a dozen years or so Charles Darwin was mostly concerned with geological problems, and it was a geological underpinning that led to much of what was most original in his subsequent work on evolution.

Sandra Herbert charts these early years – the era before Darwin became plagued by ill health and turned into the Sage of Down. This was a young man bursting with vigour, and not immune to poetical thoughts (years later he was to confess a little ruefully that he latterly preferred novels to the poetry of his youth). He was a naturalist let loose upon a world of uncharted wonders – flexible and fervent with enthusiasm, but already blessed with the dedicated, systematic approach to collections and observations which would so unfailingly serve him in the years to come.

More here.

Dorothy Clark reviews Descartes’ Secret Notebook: A True Tale of Mathematics, Mysticism, and the Quest to Understand the Universe, by Amir D. Aczel, in the Boston Globe:

Amir D. Aczel, a professor of mathematical sciences at Bentley College in Waltham, has made a name for himself unwrapping the mysteries of mathematics in ways that enlighten the uninitiated. Mathematics is intriguing, and its history is full of intrigue, the stuff of secrets, spies, and cloak-and-dagger films.

The titles of Aczel’s previous nine nonfiction books attest to that — the international bestseller ”Fermat’s Last Theorem: Unlocking the Secret of an Ancient Mathematical Problem” (1996) and ”The Mystery of the Aleph: Mathematics, Kabbalah, and the Search for Infinity” (2000), among them.

His latest, ”Descartes’ Secret Notebook,” is a first-rate suspense story. It begins with an unsuspecting Aczel setting out to research the life and work of Renee Descartes when he finds the philosopher/mathematician kept a secret notebook. Aczel’s project turned into a detective adventure, revealing occult science, a secret brotherhood, political and religious controversies, a locked box, romance, obsession, a jealousy that may have had fatal consequences, and Descartes’s purloined skull.

More here.

Rachel Metz in Wired:

Think those mix tapes are passé? More like haute couture.

Sound and visual artist Alyce Santoro has created Sonic Fabric, a cloth made from pre-recorded, recycled cassette tape combined with other fibers. Using a minimally hacked Walkman, the fabric becomes an audible reminder of its musical past.

Sonic Fabric feels a bit like flexible plastic tarp, and is durable and hand-washable. Santoro’s work has drawn lots of oohs and aahs, and is making waves in the design world.

She came up with the idea in 2001 as a conceptual art project where she used strands of cassette tape to determine the direction of the wind, combining the idea of wind-activated prayers on Tibetan prayer flags with her childhood love of sailing.

More here.

Diana Lutz at American Scientist:

The Velocity of Honey’s 24 chapters are short meditations on questions that are probably never going to make the cover of Science or Nature, such as why toast falls butter side down and why time seems to speed up as we grow older. You might call them crossword puzzles for the scientifically minded—they offer a mental workout for its own sake but also soothe and amuse. In fact, author Jay Ingram calls The Velocity of Honey “a self-help book.” Its essays “reduce stress,” he says, and offer “a brief interruption in the ridiculous rush of life.”

Ingram, who hosts the Discovery Channel’s science program Daily Planet, says he picked the topics for their appeal—adding with characteristic self-irony that this means their appeal to him. Somehow, he says, that turned out to mean there is a lot of physics and psychology and not much in between. (Ingram himself has a master’s degree in microbiology from the University of Toronto.) The physics chapters include, in addition to tumbling toast, essays on the way paper crumples and crackles when it is squeezed, the aerodynamics of the maple key (the thin fibrous “wing” that encases the maple seed), the tricky behavior of stones thrown slantwise across water or sand, and the motion across ice of the 20-kilo granite “rocks” used in the sport of curling.

More here.

From The National Geographic:

Stealing a last, long-lashed glance at a camera in Islamabad, Pakistan, yesterday, a camel sold for slaughter waits to be loaded onto a truck. Purchased for the equivalent of nearly a thousand U.S. dollars, the animal was one of many sheep, goats, camels, and cows sacrificed around the world during Id al-Adha, the annual three-day Muslim festival of sacrifice.

The sacrifices commemorate the story of Ibraham (Abraham) and his son, wherein Allah (God) tested Ibrahim by telling him to sacrifice the child, then allowed Ibrahim to sacrifice a ram instead. Muslim families are encouraged to keep a third of the resulting meat for themselves. Another third is to go to the needy, and the final third to friends and neighbors.

More here.

V.S. RAMACHANDRAN in The Edge:

Freud once pointed out that the history of ideas in the last few centuries has been punctuated by “revolutions,” major upheavals of thought that have forever altered our view of ourselves and our place in the cosmos. First, there was the Copernican system dethroning the earth as the center of the cosmos. Second was the Darwinian revolution; the idea that far from being the climax of “intelligent design” we are merely neotonous apes that happen to be slightly cleverer than our cousins. Third, the Freudian view that even though you claim to be “in charge” of your life, your behavior is in fact governed by a cauldron of drives and motives of which you are largely unconscious. And fourth, the discovery of DNA and the genetic code with its implication (to quote James Watson) that “There are only molecules. Everything else is sociology”.

If all this seems dehumanizing, you haven’t seen anything yet. Consider the following thought experiment that used to be a favorite of philosophers (it was also the basis for the recent Hollywood blockbuster The Matrix): Let’s advance to a point of time where we know everything there is to know about the intricate circuitry and functioning of the human brain. With this knowledge, it would be possible for a neuroscientist to isolate your brain in a vat of nutrients and keep it alive and healthy indefinitely. Utilizing thousands of electrodes and appropriate patterns of electrical stimulation, the scientist makes your brain think and feel that it’s experiencing actual life events. The simulation is perfect and includes a sense of time and planning for the future. The brain doesn’t know that its experiences, its entire life, are not real.

Further assume that the scientist can make your brain “think” and experience being a combination of Einstein, Mark Spitz, Bill Gates, Hugh Heffner, and Gandhi, while at the same time preserving your own deeply personal memories and identity (there’s nothing in contemporary brain science that forbids such a scenario). The mad neuroscientist then gives you a choice. You can either be this incredible, deliriously happy being floating forever in the vat or be your real self, more or less like you are now (for the sake of argument we will further assume that you are basically a happy and contended person, not a starving pheasant). Which of the two would you pick?

More here.

Also in openDemocracy, a two part list of predictions (and thoughts) for 2006 from 49 diffferent writers, intellectuals and activists, from Neal Ascherson to Slavoj Zizek. Zizek’s is interesting:

When, on 2 November 2004, the Dutch documentary filmmaker Theo van Gogh was murdered in Amsterdam by an Islamist extremist (Mohammed Bouyeri), a letter was found stuck into a knife hole in van Gogh’s belly, addressed to his friend Ayaan Hirsi Ali, a Somali member of the Dutch parliament known as a passionate fighter for the rights of Muslim women. If there ever was a “fundamentalist” document, this was it.

The true pearl is hidden in the last paragraph, in the form of a challenge to Hirsi Ali – it is a brutal assertion of the wish to die as the proof of one’s truthfulness:

“I challenge you with this letter to prove that you are right. You don’t have to do much for that, Mrs. Hirsi Ali: wish death if you are really convinced that you are right. If you do not accept this challenge, you will know that my Master, the Most high, has exposed you as a bearer of lies. … If you wish death, then you are being truthful”. But the wicked ones “never wish to die, because of what their hands (and sins) have brought forth. And Allah is the all-knowing over the purveyors of lies.” (2:94-95). To prevent myself from having the same wish come to me as I wish for you, I shall wish this wish for you: Master give us death to give us happiness with martyrdom.” (emphasis added)

Here we get an almost imperceptible shift which signals the presence of a perverse economy: from the readiness to die for the truth to the readiness to die as direct proof of one’s truthfulness, which is in fact a motivation to die; from “if you are truthful, you should not fear death” to “if you wish death, you are truthful.” The passage ends in an astonishing taking-over of the other’s wish: “I shall wish this wish for you…” The underlying logic is complex enough: I will do this “to prevent myself from having the same wish that I have for you come to me.”

What can this mean? Is it not that, by wishing death, he is doing precisely what he wanted to prevent; doesn’t he accept the same wish (that of death) that he wishes for her (he wishes her dead)? So the final proclamation should not surprise us:

“This struggle which has burst forth is different from those of the past. The unbelieving fundamentalists have started it and the true believers will end it. There will be no mercy shown to the purveyors of injustice, only the sword will be lifted against them. No discussions, no demonstrations, no petitions: only death will separate the Truth from Lies.”

Here the situation is pushed to an extreme: there is no symbolic mediation, no symbolic activity – the only thing that separates Truth from Lies is death, i.e., the truthful individual’s readiness and desire to die.

No wonder Michel Foucault was fascinated by Islamic political martyrdom: in it, he discerned the contours of what he called a new “regime of truth” radically different from our Western one, a regime based not on factual accuracy or the consistency of reasoning, but the readiness to die.

This, alas, is what awaits us in 2006 and, one must say, beyond: the struggle between a spurious “culture of life” (the way Christians formulate their refusal of the very core of human creativity) and a “culture of death,” both of which must be rejected in the name of any truly emancipatory politics.