For L.K. Lapinski
When I was in high school I asked myself at one point: “Why do I care if my high school’s team wins the football game? I don’t know anybody on the team, they have nothing…
Category: Intellectuals
Voltaire
“What put me off studying the law,” [Voltaire] later told his friend the marquis d’Argenson in 1739, “was the vast amount of useless rubbish they wanted to load into my brain. ‘Get to the point,’…
On Susan Sontag, Trip to Hanoi
Journal, July 2005 Susan Sontag spent two weeks in North Vietnam in 1968, and wrote 90 pages about her experiences. (Perhaps I will cull from those notebooks I kept in Gaza and the West Bank…
Dissidents
Glucksman says the role of the intellectual is to warn, to predict horrors, to be a Cassandra who tell us what is going on outside the walls of the city. I share this notion….I too…
Getting Free
I randomly picked up a book of interviews with Noam Chomsky off my shelf, and turned to a random page therein and found this, from 1983– There are a vast number of people who are…
Comfort the Afflicted, Afflict the Comfortable
At this stage, we have an obligation to make those who shield Israel from criticism feel uncomfortable—not because they are Jewish, but because they are complicit in the commission of crimes against a vulnerable people…
The Thread of One’s Anger — Jean-Paul Sartre
I always felt I had to stay in contact with the world, with my world. Ever since Marx, philosophy must lead to action. Otherwise it is irrelevant. So a philosopher does what he has to…
Facing the Facts
1. In fact, there is no way that I know of apprehending the world from within American culture (with a whole history of exterminism and incorporation behind it) without also apprehending the imperial contest itself. …
The Dissidents Had Time for Tennis
Allen Ginsberg once noted, “Appreciation is the sacrament.” So this, on Noam Chomsky and Howard Zinn, from Alice Walker.