Showing results by narrator "Angela Offutt" in All Categories

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.

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.

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.