PASSAGES

“Impure food when mixed with what is pure sometimes makes the entire mass more wholesome than a small quantity of the pure would be. “ Aristotle, Politics Book 3, 128b “We praise a man who feels angry on the right grounds and against the right persons and also in the right manner at the right moment and for the right length of time.” Aristotle, Ethics II “I recently discussed with an intelligent and well-disposed man the threat of another war,… Read more: Passages – March 2026

The segmentation in Kluge’s stories, however, is not merely perspectival and cinematographic (a fifteen-minute sequence of experience juxtaposed with a paragraph foreshortening eight years); it also projects qualitative leaps into incommensurable dimensions; this particular reading experience is prolonged in Geschichte und Eigensinn, where notes on Marx’s “mode of production” (he dozed much of the day on the sofa, with people coming in and out, wrote nasty comments in the margins, strewed his papers with tobacco spots), disquisitions on Blitzkrieg and… Read more: Passages – August 2025 | 1

Few understood that, for him, it was a way of mourning the workers’ movement. He began this process long ago, and perhaps this was, at bottom, the meaning of his life’s work. It was not a renunciation, but a lucid break, an uprooting: to face and confront the end of a world head-on in order to continue searching, in spite of it all, for a way out. If he leaves behind hundreds of readers scattered around the world, it is… Read more: Passages – July 2025 | 3

But if all contradictions are once and for all disposed of, we shall have arrived at so-called absolute truth — world history will be at an end. And yet it has to continue, although there is nothing left for it to do — hence, a new, insoluble contradiction. Friedrich Engels, Ludwig Feuerbach and the End of Classical German Philosophy II Here Engels makes short work of the old objection, resuscitated by Croce shortly before his death (see the refutation in… Read more: Passages – July 2025 | 2

Quintilian was certainly sensitive to the spell of these archaic modes. His characterization of the style of the early Roman poet Ennius foreshadows in mood and imagery the Romantic champions of medieval poetry: ‘Let us worship him, as we do sacred groves, hallowed by age, where the grand old oak trees are perhaps not as beautiful as they are awe-inspiring’ (X.i.88). But such appreciation can lead to affectation when the attempt is made to tap these effects in a modern… Read more: Passages – July 2025 | 1

The conclusion is clear: before the time of the Maccabees there was no canon of sacred books; the books we now have were selected from many others by the Pharisees of the second temple, who also instituted the formulas for prayers, and these books were accepted only because they decided to accept them. The so-called Great Synagogue didn’t begin until after Asia was conquered by the Macedonians. And the opinion of Maimonides and others that this council was presided over by Ezra, Daniel,… Read more: WINTER | SPRING 2025

TODAY IT IS HARD TO FORM AN EVEN PARTLY adequate idea of the extent of the devastation suffered by the cities of Germany in the last years of the Second World War, still harder to think about the horrors involved in that devastation. It is true that the strategic bombing surveys published by the Allies, together with the records of the Federal German Statistics Office and other official sources, show that the Royal Air Force alone dropped a million tons… Read more: SPRING | SUMMER 2024

However paradoxical it may seem, I’d venture to suggest that our age threatens one day to appear in the history of human culture, as marked by the most dramatic and difficult trial of all. The discovery of and training in the meaning of the simplest acts of existence, seeing, listening, speaking, reading, the acts which relate men, to their works, and to those works thrown in their faces, their absence of works. Louis Althusser, Reading Capital II  Although the envious… Read more: FALL | WINTER 2023