Reading...

"It is always easy to mock 'distress,' but we are its contemporaries; we are at the endpoint of what Nous, ratio, & Logos, still today the framework for what we are, cannot have failed to show: that murder is the first thing to count on, and elimination the surest means of identification. Today, everywhere, against this black but 'enlightened' background, remaining reality is disappearing in the mire of a 'globalized' world. Nothing, not even the most obvious phenomena, not even the purest, most wrenching love, can escape this era's shadow: a cancer of the subject, whether in the ego or in the masses..." --Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe, Poetry As Experience

& & &

"The year of Herman Melville's birth was the year pauperism bacame a visible feature of American urban life. After the war of 1812, a new strident nationalism had replaced the classical republicanism of the Founding Fathers, ushering in an era of individualism that made commitment to the 'common good' seem old-fashioned and naive." --Laurie Robertson-Lorant, Melville: A Biography