Showing results by narrator "Angela Offutt" in All Categories

Every description of anything is a projection. Physics describes the world in space and time; mathematics in number; philosophy in existence and cause. Each of these is a medium, and none of them need belong to the thing described.

Everyone knows how the Middle Ages ended. Gunpowder arrived, the armored horseman became a museum piece, castles fell, feudalism collapsed, and the modern world walked in through the breach. It is a wonderful story. Almost none of it survives contact with the evidence. The finest plate armor ever made was produced after firearms were common, and the best armorers advertised their work by shooting it and leaving the dent. Heavy cavalry went on deciding battles for three hundred years after the first cannon appeared on a European field.

For sixty years Barbara McClintock grew corn and read it the way other people read a page. What she found in it should have rearranged biology in 1951. Genes are not beads fixed on a string. They move. They switch one another on and off. A genome is not an instruction manual handed down intact from one generation to the next but a text that revises itself while it is being read.

In the winter of 1604, a man with ruined eyesight and crippled hands sat in a rented room in Prague, comparing a column of numbers against a curve he had drawn by hand, and found that the two disagreed by an amount roughly equal to the width of a coin seen from across a wide room. Everyone he knew would have called that agreement. He called it a problem, and spent the next five years destroying the most beautiful idea he had ever had in order to fix it. Johannes Kepler has been reduced, in most retellings, to three tidy statements in a physics textbook.

For four hundred years, most of the Middle East was not a collection of countries. It was a set of provinces, and provinces do not have foreign ministries. They have tax registers, religious courts, and a distant capital that keeps the important decisions for itself. When that capital vanished after the First World War, the region inherited everything except the one skill that turns a territory into a state: the practice of dealing with the world outside as an equal. This book is about what happened next, and about why it is still happening.

The emergency was supposed to be temporary. That was the whole idea of it. Something terrible happens, the ordinary rules are set aside for a while, and then the rules come back. Somewhere along the way the second half of that sentence quietly stopped happening. Giorgio Agamben has spent thirty years arguing that this is not a malfunction of modern government but its operating principle — that the exception has become the rule, that the camp rather than the city is the true model of our political space, and that power exists to strip human beings down to the bare fact of being alive.

Emil Cioran wrote for sixty years about the pointlessness of writing, preached suicide, and died at eighty-four. He is quoted more than almost any thinker of the last century and read less than almost any. His admirers treat him as an atmosphere. His detractors treat him as a pose. Both agree, without noticing that they agree, that his sentences are not the sort of thing one checks. This book checks them. Thirty-three of his central claims are stated plainly, given the strongest case that can be made for them, and then tested to see whether they survive. The results satisfy nobody.