anthony galluzzo

The annus mirabilis 1981 gave us both Jameson and MacIntyre’s masterworks, and they are best read together. Both see Marxism as a secularized Christian-Aristotelianism (tho they disagree on whether that makes it good or bad). Both take up the postmodern challenge that their subjects, history and ethics respectively, are impossible because all claims to knowledge are grounded in irreducible choices of narrative interpretation. Indeed, they reply, man is essentially a storytelling being; hence we need ways of constructing unified narratives within which ethics and history are possible—they deny, in other words, the postmodern claim that narratives are undecidably plural. Narrative unity is still possible, their books are proofs of concept, and this allows them to recover a teleological conception of their subject. They hook together that way, the individual and the collective. Both are looking for principles that can salvage or revive the lost faith in grand narratives, and they find them in medieval scholasticism

Who doesn't love some ZARDOZ cookies

Jürgen Habermas has passed away. In an age of increasingly ideological distortion, his steadfast advocacy of self-critical, communicative rationality will remain with us. R.I.P.

“Captivated by the intellectual and musical accomplishments of a certain Frau Henriette Vogel, Kleist, who was himself more disheartened and embittered than ever, agreed to do her bidding and die with her, carrying out this resolution by first shooting the lady and then himself on the shore of the Wannsee near Potsdam, on the 21st of November 1811. Kleist’s whole life was filled by a restless striving after ideal and illusory happiness, and this is largely reflected in his work. He was by far the most important North German dramatist of the Romantic movement, and no other of the Romanticists approaches him in the energy with which he expresses patriotic indignation.” —1911 Encyclopedia Britannica

The flat indifference to public opinion, international law & the Constitution displayed by the US in launching not just any attack but what looks like a major war is terrifying