Stephen Squibb at n+1:
In his 1974 “social sculpture” I Like America and America Likes Me, the artist Jospeh Beuys spent three days locked in a gallery with a wild coyote. I often think of Beuys when I think of François Laruelle, the enormously important French thinker who died Monday morning at age 87, and who spent his entire career locked in a similarly intimate and dramatic confrontation with philosophy.
Why would such a confrontation be necessary? Consider Friedrich Engels’s famous quip that, in what would become The German Ideology, he and Marx intended to “settle accounts with our erstwhile philosophical conscience,” thus clearing the way for their departure from a post-Hegelian “utopian” socialism to a more “scientific” kind anchored in the critique of political economy. The possibility of this move—from something called philosophy to something more scientific—is the all-consuming theme considered by Laruelle over six decades and countless books since completing his dissertation at the École Normale Supérieure under Paul Ricœur. This is his immense project of “non-philosophy,” which, in a kind of everlasting dance of participation and description, seeks not so much to transcend or escape philosophy as to show what such an exit strategy might require.
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The election victory by Donald Trump and his Republican Party was a rebuke of a Democratic Party that has positioned itself as protector of a despised status quo, rendering it unable to connect with an electorate desperate for change. Defeating Mr. Trump in the future will require liberals, progressives and others on the left to articulate a positive vision that can capture the imagination of a broad majority of Americans.
Like a pre-teen prodigy performing for grown-ups, Wallace is too show-offy, intent on dazzling us. Thomas Pynchon’s prose has this same adolescent “Look at me!” quality, which is why I could never get through Gravity’s Rainbow. Wallace also reminds me of J.D. Salinger, who sneerily divides characters into the cool, who get it, and the uncool, who don’t.
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Erbai, the outsider, approached the other robots by asking them, “Are you working overtime?”
Twice during a 90-minute interview about her memoir, Cher asked, “Do you think people are going to like it?”
Kaput is about the problems facing Germany rather than the successes of the UK. Münchau (the clue is in the umlaut) is very pessimistic about his native land. It can do little right, in his view. In the German version of Winnie-the-Pooh, Pu der Bär, he is I-Aah, the gloomy donkey. But I-Aah often has a good point to make, and so does Münchau.