(Updated) Impenetrable: The Hollow Rhetoric of Judith Butler

. (Update) Tomorrow, September 11, 2012, the birthday of Theodor Adorno, and only chronologically coincident with the eleventh anniversary of the 9/11 attack, Judith Butler is set to receive the triennial Adorno Prize, awarded by the city of Frankfurt. Resonant with the themes addressed in the commentary below, originally posted last week at the Algemeiner, is this […]

“What Must Be Said” Is Nothing

. I have heard it said – better, I have read it in a tweet – that Gunther Grass could hardly have been expected, at 17, to resist recruitment into the Waffen SS. That odd, indirect defense of the sham poetry Grass did not write but typed up to attack Israel delivers an unexpected enlightenment: […]

A Günter Grass Manifesto

. Ezra Pound is noted, finally, for living the last decade of his life – after his indictment for treasonous, antisemitic broadcasts in support of Mussolini, and his confinement to the asylum of St. Elizabeth’s – in near silence. “I know nothing at all…. I have even forgotten the name of that Greek philosopher who […]