As the rest of the speakers greeted each other on stage with warm effusions and European pecks on the cheek, literary critic Michael Hardt, the sole American-born speaker at the London conference, stood apart from the crowd. With folded arms, he gazed out not just into but somehow beyond the audience of the packed lecture hall.

Hardt's behavior seemed to be a defensive performance of self-sufficiency, as if to pre-empt his inevitable failure to fit in with the rest of the "glittering array of Continental academic rockstars," as Terry Eagleton put it, that had assembled that weekend for the conference titled "On the Idea of Communism." Nearly the entire emerging canon of (mostly male) contemporary Continental philosophers—including Alain Badiou, Slavoj Žižek, Jacques Rancière, Eagleton, and Antonio Negri, Hardt's mentor and collaborator—as well as their translators and champions in the English-language academy and a few other European notables less well known outside the Continent joined Hardt at the conference. Hardt's reputation has always been doubled by a secret tendency to diminutivize him in relation to Negri—his more famous (or notorious), frequently jailed co-author on Empire and Multitude—and it was hard not to regard Hardt in this light when one saw him onstage next to the old masters. Yet he seemed even more out of place among the rest the other scholars who, Eagleton quipped, had "married in" to the elite circles of Continental philosophy, a group that included the two Badiou scholars—Bruno Bosteels and Peter Hallward—who joined Hardt in the first panel of the conference. Read More

Like many academics, I attend a lot of conferences. When you're first starting out, there's a certain glamor to these affairs. In a line of work in which infantilization rules—imagine yourself as a 40-year old graduate student anticipating your first good paying job, while your college friends have two kids and a summer house on the shore—traveling on planes to other cities and staying in hotel rooms on a university department's dime can feel very adult indeed.  

Eventually the excitement fades. After a few trips on Southwest, a few nights spent sharing hotel bars with salesmen from Buffalo, and one or one hundred panels on Elizabeth Bowen or L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E poetry, the luster begins to dull. If you are the sort of academic who tries to make his or her work something more than scholarship—something that bears directly on political life—you are bound, usually quite quickly, to encounter a fundamental conundrum. So we can quote Milton on the freedom to publish, and talk about the effects of late capitalism on literary form. Our papers, we tell ourselves, are incisive critiques of the status quo. But how intimidated is the status quo by a rigorous Marxist analysis of  Philip Larkin's "Whitsun Weddings" anyway? It doesn't help that Power, despite our repeated invitations, rarely shows up at events like "Rethinking Modernities" to suffer our blistering remarks. 

Directed and produced by relative newcomer Sophie Fiennes, The Pervert's Guide to Cinema is above all a vehicle for the ideas of its oddly charismatic presenter, Slavoj Zizek, the Slovenian intellectual billed in this film's opening credits as "philosopher and psychoanalyst," who has risen to prominence for his deft fusions of popular culture and Lacanian theory. Touching here on a number of his favored directors including Charlie Chaplin, Alfred Hitchcock, David Lynch, and Andrei Tarkovsky, Zizek moves through an idiosyncratic cross-section of film history in three parts: focusing on the unconscious, the libido, and the realm of appearances, respectively.

Whatever happened to the war on terror? As recently as the 2004 election, it was considered political disaster for a candidate to question its premises. Now, attacking the war on terror and "the politics of fear" has become a liberal cause. Zbigniew Brzezinski, sage of liberal diplomacy, tells us in the Washington Post that "The ‘war on terror' has created a culture of fear in America." Barack Obama calls for "a politics of hope instead of a politics of fear." John Edwards has become the only front-running Democratic presidential candidate explicitly to call for an end to the war on terror. He has leveled the now commonplace charge that the war on terror is just a "political frame and political rhetoric," which the President and his people use "to justify everything they do." Read More

I've just arrived in Berlin to begin a year-long research fellowship at a well-known Institute for Philosophy. All the really smart philosophers left here in the 1930s, but Berlin retains an unmistakable luster. Come here as a philosopher, and you are assumed to be thinking some very profound thoughts. 

Day 1

Richard Rorty, who died in June, was a private public intellectual. He did not weigh in as often as possible on as many issues as possible. He had a minimalist homepage. If his self-deprecation was an act, it was a very convincing one. His response to the appalling record of the George W. Bush presidency was to be shocked into honorable silence. He had no wars to urge America into or to resonantly recant his earlier support for. It was only in the Clinton years that he found his distinctive public voice: the affable, ironic bluntness of somebody talking at his kitchen table. He could denounce with such verve in those years because he could also be hopeful.