Showing posts with label George Steiner. Show all posts
Showing posts with label George Steiner. Show all posts
Friday, June 21, 2019

Is it just a symbol?

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For the majority, one suspects, of ‘practising’ Christians — and what does ‘practising’ entail in this context? — the Crucifixion remains an ...
Thursday, June 20, 2019

Drink the hemlock

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Every time a community attempts, by censorship, ostracism or killing to silence a moral-intellectual outsider within its walls, to gag or ef...
Wednesday, June 19, 2019

A higher loyalty

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The ‘patriotism’ of the truth—seeker is antithetical to Rousseau’s civic option. The sole citizenship of the cleric is that of a critical hu...
Tuesday, June 18, 2019

Moribund

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The choice is not a comfortable one. But perhaps the concept of choice is itself a fallacy. As I have implied throughout, the intellectual,...
Monday, June 10, 2019

Our national myth

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The American Adam is not an innocent — far from it. But he is a corrector of errors. He has, after its brief and creative role in the New En...
Friday, June 07, 2019

Is the price too high?

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Civilization, in the elevated and formal sense, does not guarantee civility, does not inhibit social violence and waste. No mob, no storm-tr...
Thursday, June 06, 2019

Pseudo-literacy and the U.S. school

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One cannot, beyond a severely limited and superficial degree, inject sensibility and intellectual rigour into the mass of society. One can, ...
Tuesday, June 04, 2019

Living a lie

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The adoption, on a continental scale, of an eschatology of monetary-material success represents a radical cut in regard to the Periclean—Flo...
Monday, June 03, 2019

Is there such a thing as American culture?

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This, then, is my surmise: the dominant apparatus of American high culture is that of custody. The institutions of learning and of the arts ...
Friday, May 31, 2019

The U.S. and self-perception

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In short: the Puritan programme of a break with the ‘corrupt ancientness’ and hereditary taint of European history, the great hunger of succ...
Wednesday, May 29, 2019

The source of the law

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If, in the Judaic perception, the language of the Adamic was that of love, the grammars of fallen man are those of the legal code. It is the...
Tuesday, May 28, 2019

Live as guests

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To be a guest among other men is a possibility. All of us, I firmly believe are guests of the planet, of its ecology. We did not make our wo...
Monday, May 27, 2019

Textuality

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Those who have produced canonic texts and textualities by which they organize their politics — be they the Koran, the Scriptures, the Kapita...
Friday, May 24, 2019

It ain't easy!

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It would be fantastically arrogant to suppose that we know that we have evolved into a kind of creature that likes living with those that sm...
Wednesday, May 22, 2019

And Freud comes crashing down

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First published in 1966, Das Dritte Reich des Traums is a neglected classic. In it, Charlotte Beradt summarizes her analyses of some three ...
Tuesday, May 21, 2019

On Dreams

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Our knowledge of dreams and of dreaming, the material which constitutes the history of human dreams, are wholly inseparable from the linguis...
Monday, May 20, 2019

Do you?

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It is a confident guess that despite the Enlightenment and positivism, that despite modern agnosticism and Freud, a great majority of mankind...
Friday, May 17, 2019

A change in dream interpretation

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In psychoanalysis, on the contrary, dreams feed not on prophecy but on remembrance. The semiological vector points not to the future but to...
Thursday, May 16, 2019

Tread carefully!

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Any poetic, philosophic, rhetorical pronouncement worth taking seriously will compact its executive means and meanings. It will resist, it w...
Tuesday, May 14, 2019

A matter of perspective

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The extinction of a language however remote, however immune to historical-material success or diffusion, is the death of a unique world—view...