Introduction to the Seminar Images of the Present Time
KENNETH REINHARDBadiou delivered the series of lectures entitled Images of the Present Time at the Collège international de philosophie in Paris over three years, between 2001 and 2004, although the third year was suspended after only four sessions.1 After having spent the previous three years examining the waning twentieth century, Badiou entered the twenty-first century by posing the question of “the present”: what does it mean to be present to one’s own time, to be one’s own contemporary? In what sense might one not be present to the present? Is being in the present a question of cutting through the symbolic and imaginary wrappings of reality and seeking an immediate encounter with something real? The twentieth century was “the century of the hypothesis of the absolute beginning,” according to Badiou; does an authentic experience of the present require such a radical break with the past?2 Or is being present a question of keeping pace with the fleeting “now” in the temporal flow of subjective or chronological instants? What is the relationship of the present with the future? Finally, can any philosophy be adequate to its own time? For Hegel, we recall, “the owl of Minerva only takes flight at dusk”—that is, wisdom is blind to its own moment as it unfolds; it can only be retrospective, a reconstruction after the fact.3 For Badiou the question will be, as he puts it, can we think a philosophical bird that flies at dawn? How can thinking be adequate to the contemporary moment?
During the years in which he delivered this seminar, Badiou was writing Logics of Worlds, the second of the three volumes of Being and Event,
to the Seminar Images of the Present Timein which his emphasis shifts from an ontological account of situations to the logics that determine the degree to which something may or may not appear in a world—that is, be registered not only in its simple being but also as being there, as counting. The primary obstacle that we face in reflecting on our present time is the fact that we are effectively worldless; as Badiou writes, “we are in an in-between period, between a wornout, deteriorating, exhausted world and a world that is not yet either calculable or foreseeable.”4 Badiou follows Plato in defining a “world” as a situation in which “justice [is] done to the visible.”5 When a vast quantity of the elements (above all, the people) in a situation do not show up, do not count as significant, do not receive justice, we are in default of a world. And this lack of a world is also the lack of a present time: our worldless experience of temporality is no more, Badiou writes, than a “stagnant restlessness, or a restless stagnation,” the unspooling of a flickering reel of static images that produce only the illusion of movement and change.6
In Logics of Worlds, Badiou names the general consensus that describes the contemporary liberal West “democratic materialism,” which he defines as the belief that a world is made up of nothing other than bodies and languages—bodies meaning human beings as well as all other material entities and languages implying the contingent cultural systems of meaning and value through which those bodies are named, situated, and put into relation with each other. When Badiou introduces the expression “democratic materialism” in this seminar, he calls it a proposition defined by the question of “what is meant by a body being seized by a language,” a question that could also describe intersectional cultural studies today.7 Democratic materialism is indeed a “materialism” in its refusal of the existence of gods, spirits, angels, or any other “nonmaterial bodies.” It is “democratic” insofar as it considers all systems of value and meaning to be equal, as well as historically and geographically local, with none regarded as intrinsically superior to any others. Its only universal value is the belief that values are relative, that any claims to an absolute must be rejected out of hand. One of Badiou’s central arguments in Images of the Present Time is that the primary “emblem” of our time is democracy itself, which is generally regarded as the only legitimate political ideal and the only alternative to the various disastrous
historical totalitarianisms, left and right, of the past century. Although Badiou does not equate emblems such as democracy with ideology, they do involve some classic ideological functions, such as suturing contradictory beliefs into an apparently consistent whole.8 But if ideology is understood to mean the use of ideas to obscure reality, for Badiou the essential role of emblems is to defend against ideas, to block thinking as such.9 Democratic materialism regards beliefs that do not conform to its underlying capitalist structure and its emblems with suspicion, and is especially allergic to claims of truth. The implicit imperative of democratic materialism, enacted and displayed in its emblems, is to “live without any ideas.”10
Yet while Badiou agrees with democratic materialism’s claim that there is nothing other than bodies and languages—no third “noumenal” element—he argues that human beings are capable of producing exceptions to the totality of bodies and languages. Badiou opposes to democratic materialism what he calls “the materialist dialectic,” which will supplement those liberal beliefs with the exceptional possibility of truths 11 Hence the opposition that matters here is not between materialism and idealism but a scission within materialism itself. So, what is a truth? For Badiou, a truth is something singular with a possibly universal value that human beings are capable of producing. Truths are not generated by philosophy, according to Badiou, but through the four types of truth procedures that he distinguishes: politics, science, art, and love. Those procedures involve the identification of exceptions to what is normative or generally believed to be possible in a world—anomalies that Badiou calls events—and the practical elaboration of the novel consequences of those events as new truths. Hence in Badiou’s usage, truths are not statements defined by their internal coherence or their correspondence to existing things; rather, they are new things that poets and artists, scientists and mathematicians, political activists and revolutionaries, and lovers of all kinds create in relation to the void of an exceptional event. The inclusion of truths in the dialectic has a retroactive effect on the meaning of both bodies and languages: the bodies that matter, so to speak, in the materialist dialectic are not simply those that are given by nature, but new bodies created in the unfolding of a truth; and the meaning of languages will split to mean both the conventions
to the Seminar Images of the Present Time
of communication and language as a creative act, which Badiou calls a “subject-language.”12 The work of Images of the Present Time is both to show how the dominant images or emblems of our day suppress the possibility of a real present in a real world and to demonstrate how exceptions that allow new truths to appear may nevertheless emerge, on occasion, and reconstitute the bodies and languages of a world.
In Logics of Worlds, Badiou distinguishes three modes of the human experience of a present in terms of three types of subject: faithful, reactionary, and obscure. The “faithful” subject is defined by its fidelity to an event and its commitment to the exploration of possible truths opened up by that event: “The product of this fidelity is the new present which welcomes, point by point, the new truth” (53, emphasis added). The “reactive” subject, on the other hand, refuses to incorporate itself into the unfolding present of a truth and argues that the best we can hope for is “a present ‘a little less worse’ than the past, if only because it resisted the catastrophic temptation which the reactive subject declares is contained in the event” (56). For the reactive subject, the danger represented by the event has been “extinguished,” but like a still smoldering fire, it threatens to burst into flames once again. This subject sees the possibility of the new present, but fights against it and instead calls for the restoration of (an improved version of) the past. Finally, the “obscure” subject neither produces a new present nor calls for a return to the past, but occludes the past and allows the present to descend “into the night of non-exposition.” Badiou’s example is that of political Islamism, which he understands as the call for something like a pseudo-present, one based not on tradition but on “the paradox of an occultation of the present which is itself in the present” (60). Whereas the reactive subject insists that no evental rupture is necessary—that the past can simply be extended into the present—the obscure subject ignores the past and attempts to replace the present with a phantasmatic, totalized, and atemporal body such as God or the Folk. If the reactive subject rejects the evental break and calls for historical continuity, and the obscure subject declares an eternal present into which both past and future dissolve, the faithful subject creates a new present that imbricates elements of both the past and the future. The seminar on Images of the Present Time anticipates this typology of subjects.
Introduction to the Seminar Images of the Present Time
Each year of Images of the Present Time has its own topical focus and subtitle: the first, “Contemporary Nihilism,” anticipates Badiou’s discussion of the reactive subject (and to a lesser extent the obscure subject), while the second, “The Logic of Exceptions,” and the truncated third, “What Does It Mean to Live?,” establish the conditions for what Badiou will call the faithful subject. The first year opens with a reading of Jean Genet’s 1956 play, The Balcony, which Badiou regards as an allegory of the images that dominate our worldless time as well as the possibility of exceptions to their rule. Jacques Lacan had discussed the play in a session of his 1958 seminar, Formations of the Unconscious, as an exemplary comedy of the phallus, and Badiou’s reading of The Balcony expands on Lacan’s insights. The piece is set in a brothel where the prostitutes and their clients engage in sexual play dressed in the costumes of figures of authority (Judge, General, Bishop, etc.), while outside in the streets a violent revolution is raging. The brothel represents the contemporary world as pure simulacrum, a closed hall of performative illusion and fantasy; and a central function of comedy, according to Lacan, is to reveal and ridicule phallic authority—represented in Genet’s play by the Chief of Police, who finally discovers his authentic costume, the image of images par excellence, when he makes his appearance in the brothel in the costume of a giant penis. In Badiou’s reading, The Balcony represents the relationship between the dominant images of our time and the will to “dis-image” embodied by the revolutionaries, who are unsure whether they should destroy all images or replace the old images with new ones. For Badiou, the play asks the question, can there be a desire—sexual or political—that is not phantasmatic, that is not based on the phallus or other such signifiers and images? Can we break free from our so-called society of spectacle? Can there be a real present that is not merely absorbed into the specular world of the imaginary, and if so, how can we encounter it?
Badiou describes four primary moments or approaches to the analysis of the dominant images of our time.13 First, and most briefly defined, is what he refers to as the “systemic stage,” which clarifies the structure or underlying law of our historical moment. In Genet’s play, it is the well-ordered world of the brothel, under the supervision of the madam and the protection of the Chief of Police, but this can be generalized as
what Badiou calls the “prostitutional” matrix of social relations today, understood as “the reduction of every norm to the commercial potentialities of bodies—of which sex is but one variation—through the twin procedures of commercial validation and biological valuation.” “The prostitutional,” Badiou writes, “is the democratization of prostitution.”14
The fundamental logic of our prostitutional times, in the broadest sense, is global capitalism, but other aspects of contemporary society could also be understood in these structural terms: the system of nation states, for example, or the embedded architectures of class, race, and gender, all of which operate under the emblem of democracy.
The second stage of analysis is the identification of what Badiou calls the “real tracings” or exceptions to the structure of the time; in The Balcony, the primary exception is the revolution—however precarious and liable to fall into new modes of the prostitutional it may be. Moments of exception to capitalism, the state, and the police have emerged on occasion in the modern world: the great revolutionary movements, the Paris Commune in 1871 and those that followed in Mexico, Shanghai, and all over the world, as well as the many other autonomous zones and experiments in autopoetic social and political organization that have arisen despite the underlying capitalist structure. Badiou urges us to create an “encyclopedia” of such exceptions in order to take stock of the resources we will need to counter the images that dominate today. The vulnerabilities of capitalism and the emblems that cloak it can be discovered in the traces of those exceptions. Such exceptions may constitute events, as the seeds of new truth procedures and new modes of subjectivity. Of course, the truths elaborated in relation to those exceptions are not exclusively political, but also occur in the realms of science, art, and love. If politics, according to Badiou, involves the “tracing of the collective,” science is “the tracing of the letter in its appearing,” through the inscription of symbolic elements and functions in their materiality (similar to Lacan’s account of what he calls “mathemes”). Art is “the real tracing of the infinite resources of the finitude of the sensible world,” and love is “the real tracing of the Two,” that is, of difference as such.15
The third moment of analysis (although often the initial point of interpretation) is determining the emblem, the “images” that give the underlying structure its ideological coherence, its apparent consistency,
Introduction to the Seminar
Images of the Present Time
xxviiand that guarantee its circulation; again, for Badiou, the key image of our present time is emblematized in the word “democracy.” Badiou writes that an emblem expresses the “spiritual community” of a time in the way that what Lacan calls a “master signifier” does, as a shared point of attachment “that both unites and rallies people.”16 Hence we must identify the primary emblems that mask the contradictions of the underlying system, as well as the secondary emblems constellated around them. For example, the emblem of “democracy” works hand in hand with that of “freedom” to support global capitalism. The primary motto of freedom implied by American democratic materialism is the “pursuit of happiness”—the freedom to enjoy the variety of pleasures that stock the shelves of generalized prostitution. The subject of democracy is negatively defined by the objects it consumes, all interchangeable and all available through the general equivalent of money. Such freedom, Badiou points out, is actually “the harshest and bitterest of servitudes,” in which the subject is no more than a passive consumer, the empty point through which an endless conveyer belt of commodities circulates. For Badiou, “freedom to enjoy” is the nihilist core of democracy.
The fourth stage of analysis involves the identification of the naked power that defends the emblems, emerging in reaction to the exceptions that oppose them. Although at one time the primary power summoned to counteract exceptional truths was the state (and perhaps in many cases it still is), today the locus of naked power is less clear, perhaps less “naked.” Badiou criticizes two recent accounts of such power: Foucault’s theory of “biopower” (and its elaboration by Agamben) and the analysis of technology proposed by Heidegger and his followers. For Badiou, naked power today, on its most fundamental level, does not act through the state’s forceful regulation of living bodies or the imposition of techne onto physis, but through the democratic materialist imperative to separate the body from ideas: to be a recognizable individual under the emblem of democracy, we must continue to passively receive and consume its commodities, material and symbolic, without trying to think about their means of production or distribution. Hence naked power in democratic materialism takes the form of the imperative to pursue our freedom to enjoy without thinking. We should note that this is very close to how Lacan describes the force of the superego, which exerts its coercive power not
to the Seminar Images of the Present Timeas a law of prohibition but, on the contrary, as an obscene injunction to jouissance. In Badiou’s analysis, there are two modes of naked power’s imperative to enjoy: the “libertarian” (and perhaps libertine) compulsion to be consumed by enjoyment and the “liberal” promises of satisfaction through the serial consumption of commodities. In the first case, Badiou’s model is the use of recreational drugs for the sake of detaching from the world, thereby equating enjoyment with nothingness, under the imperative to become the waste product left over from enjoyment; in the second case, the drive to be a good citizen-consumer is to reduce the world to a garbage heap of the empty husks of transient pleasures.17 The function of naked power today, whether its agents are subjective or objective, is to separate us from our infinite capacity for making works of truth. And this power is first of all simply political (rather than biopolitical or technopolitical), insofar as it requires our consent, under the guise of personal freedom and the illusion of autonomy. It is not, however, a question of our consent to any particular emblem, any fixed ideological point, but consent to the belief that the underlying structure of capitalism and the emblems that grant it consistency are simply the irrecusable nature of things. Badiou writes, “In other words, the essence of power isn’t alienation, even though alienation is an absolutely fundamental operation. The essence of naked power is ultimately the belief that alienation is necessary, in one way or another. We have to be forced, not so much to go along with images as not to be able to claim that we can do without them.”18 Finally, naked power is a kind of violence, under the guise of consent, that persuades us that limitations are objectively necessary, that submission to the “natural” structure of consumer capitalism and its emblems is our only choice—and no choice at all.
In the second year of the seminar, Badiou focuses on the question of how a true present can be constructed by following the “tracings” or inscriptions of real exceptions across the surface of emblems. If there is no present today, it is because we are doubly alienated by what Badiou calls “repetition” and “projection.” When we become too caught up in history and tradition, we are liable to simply repeat the past, which becomes a deadweight on the possibility of creating a present. Repetition can also take the form of constant novelty, the endless marketing of minor differences as real innovations; as Badiou writes, “change can be
Introduction to the Seminar Images of the Present Time xxix
just as repetitive as immobility.”19 In both cases, the present is reduced to nothing more than the empty place for repetition. But we can also fail to construct a real present by the radical destruction of the past in the name of the glorious “projection” of a future ex nihilo, as was the case at times for both the Russian and Chinese revolutions. These modes of alienation by means of repetition and projection correspond not only to the positions of the reactive and obscure subjects but also to what twenty years earlier, in Theory of the Subject, Badiou called the “two deviations”: the “deviation to the right,” which sees the place of the subject as predetermined and its static repetition as necessary and salutary, and the “deviation to the left,” which mercilessly destroys tradition and thrusts itself into a future unconnected to any past. Between these two modes of temporal alienation, the present is reduced to nothing more than a gap, the empty point of transition between past and future, with no consistency of its own. A real present, Badiou argues, is not something that we can simply inhabit, according to either orientation (or their nihilistic conjunction) but is something that must be actively constructed. A real present requires what Badiou calls (in another central term from Theory of the Subject) the “torsion” of past and future, through which the past has not fully passed and the future, in some sense, is already here; that is, something from tradition must be transformed and sublimated to the status of the future. This is not simply the preservation of those parts of the past that we value, but the rewriting or reinflection of some precise points into the anticipation of something new.
We can understand this torsion of past and future in terms of the two key modes of the production of change that Badiou describes in Being and Event: fidelity and forcing. On the one hand, a truth procedure involves fidelity to an event as something that is always in the past. Fidelity is the work of insisting that there was an event and, by following its implications and consequences, of bringing it into the present. On the other hand, Badiou uses the concept of forcing—a mathematical technique for the production of unprecedented new sets that he borrows from Paul Cohen—to describe how the projection of a truth procedure into the future when it will have been completed can be used to generate useful knowledge in the present. To borrow a term that Badiou borrows from Deleuze, the “disjunctive synthesis” of fidelity to something in the
to the Seminar Images of the Present Timepast (repetition) and forcing of something in the future (projection) is required for the construction of a real present.
Badiou uses a passage from Mallarmé’s 1895 essay “L’Action restreinte” (“Restricted Action”) as a kind of motto or counter-emblem for the production of a real present: “there is no Present, no—a present does not exist. . . . For lack of the Crowd’s declaring itself.”20 In Badiou’s reading, Mallarmé sees the bloody massacre in which the Paris Commune was liquidated as having destroyed both the present and the possibility of any future revolution. Badiou does not agree about the future, but what especially interests him here is Mallarmé’s understanding of the nonexistence of the present as the result of a collective failure to “declare.” According to Badiou, the crowd does on occasion declare itself, and it does so precisely as an exception. But what does Mallarmé mean by a declaration? For Badiou, declaration should be understood, first of all, in opposition to communication: a declaration is not the transmission of knowledge or a message, it is not an utterance governed by a common set of rules and practices—it is not, strictly speaking, language, although it may take a linguistic form—but the interruption of communication, and the announcement of a present. A declaration is what holds together a repetition of something from the past and a projection into the future, creating the present in which they conjoin. Badiou writes, “the present contained in the declaration, in what the Crowd declares, is something that raises repetition to the level of projection.” Through the declaration, projection becomes something like the sublation or sublimation of repetition, rather than its opposite; and this is precisely what Badiou means by the “torsion” of past and future:
A true declaration always involves a skewing of tradition, not a pure separation from it. I think the word that best describes this is “torsion.” It is a matter of putting tradition into torsion so as to connect it to projection, an occasionally violent torsion that’s exerted on tradition but doesn’t separate from it altogether. It’s not a disjunction. It is this movement of torsion that will go through the heart of the situation, its perplexed, entangled, ambiguous, and complicated heart, to produce what will be called the complexity of the present.21
Introduction to the Seminar Images of the Present Time
Badiou describes four modes of such a declaration, corresponding to the four types of truth procedure: in the case of science, the declaration is a “demonstration,” which in its purest form is a mathematical proof. A proof is not an argument that can be rebutted, an opinion that can be countered by another point of view. If it is wrong, if some error in reasoning has been made, then it has failed to be a proof. A scientific declaration of this kind is not limited by its historical or geographical context; it is addressed to everyone and to all times, even if it may be absorbed into some larger declaration at a later point. A scientific demonstration has consequences that unfold in the present by finding its future in the transformative sublation of some element of its past. Our subjective access to the declaration in art is what Badiou calls “contemplation”: to be arrested by the experience of an object in “the crystallization of a changeless duration,” a present that is also “the recapitulation of an enormously long past.” To contemplate a piece of art is to withdraw it from the realm of objective judgment, in the sense of comparison or evaluation, as well as from valuation and exchange in the art market. A political declaration takes the form of an “action”: in a protest or a revolution, one is subjectively taken over by the creative and violent intensity of a heterogeneous present. Such action is not “the orderly or rational management” of acts but “an upsurge that creates its own present” by means of “a collective, unpredictable, incalculable, really present linkage of something that reorients the elements of the past.” And finally, perhaps the paradigmatic case of declaration is the declaration of love. To really say “I love you” is not to state a fact, to communicate a piece of information, but to profess a “passion” that comes into the present in the act of being uttered, unexpectedly, and without calculation or guarantee of return. It is noneconomic, a pure expenditure without reciprocity; in the sense that it is not about circulation and consumption, the declaration of love is objectless, a purely subjective experience of the present.
Each of these modes of declaration functions by constituting a point of the present, a moment that is isolated from the ordinary temporality of capitalist circulation, a point of exception and concentration where some element of the past is elevated to the status of the future perfect. But such a declaration of the present is itself transitory; the goal is not to remain in its ecstatic eternity but to bring it back into the quotidian
world of static repetition in order to make the invisible visible—to justify, if you will, the elements of a world. This is Badiou’s version of the final moment in Plato’s allegory of the cave, when the escaped prisoner who has seen the light of reason decides to return into the darkness, in order to bring that new experience of a truth into the present time.
In the third, interrupted, year of the seminar, Badiou begins to address the “timeworn” philosophical question “What does it mean to live?” by surveying some key classical philosophical responses to this question, from Plato, Aristotle, and Saint Paul to Hegel and Nietzsche. Democratic materialism takes up the issue in the vitalism that passes from Nietzsche and Bergson to Foucault and (to a certain extent) Deleuze: the category of life is understood as “simultaneously ontological and normative” insofar as a true life is one that simply “affirms life,” that sees life as both means and end.22 For democratic materialism, the answer is restricted to the finitism of bodies and languages: living well means that bodies should be allowed as much enjoyment as possible with as little restriction as necessary from authoritarian languages and laws. The materialist dialectic, on the other hand, emphasizes the infinite possibilities that the subject of a truth discovers in what at first seemed impossible: “We’re no longer dealing with the finitude of the action of sensory bodies as marked or instrumentalized by languages but with the shift to an infinite capacity made possible by an event.”23 The final sessions of the seminar anticipate Badiou’s remarkably original account in Logics of Worlds of the nature of a new “body” in the materialist dialectic, one based on the event and the participation of a faithful subject in a truth procedure, hence in excess of the dichotomy of bodies and languages: “The evental rupture makes possible the emergence of new bodies, bodies that can be the materiality, the material support, for the new subjective form, which also includes the subject-language.”24 This new body includes the biological concept of a body, but is not limited to its natural and vitalist assumptions; ultimately, the new concept of body that Badiou introduces potentially includes whatever can be the ground for a truth procedure, whether it is organic or inorganic. Such a body is never simply born but always reborn, as a new constellation of preexisting bodies—a new crowd—that is capable of supporting the subject of a truth.
Badiou will develop many (but not all) of the ideas from the four sessions of this third year of the seminar in Logics of Worlds. Its final chapter is dedicated to the question of what it is to live. He writes:
Life is a subjective category. A body is the materiality that life requires, but the becoming of the present depends on the disposition of this body in a subjective formalism, whether it be produced (the formalism is faithful, the body is directly placed “under” the evental trace), erased (the formalism is reactive, the body is held at a double distance by the negation of the trace), or occulted (the body is denied). Neither the reactive deletion of the present, which denies the value of the event, nor, a fortiori, its mortifying occultation, which presupposes a “body” transcendent to the world, sanction the affirmation of life, which is the incorporation, point by point, to the present. To live is thus an incorporation into the present under the faithful form of a subject. (508)
To live in the empty present of democratic materialism is not our fate; it requires our consent—which we can withhold. In the final line of Logics of Worlds, Badiou offers the assurance that “we are shielded from this consent by the Idea, the secret of the pure present” (514). We can agree with the premise that there are only bodies and languages and still believe that occasionally, and as an exception, a truth too is possible, and that such truths transform how we think about both bodies and languages. We do not need to consent to the inevitability of emblems and the images that conceal from us our own capacity for becoming faithful subjects of a truth. We can live in a present that is woven from fibers drawn from evental ruptures in the past and the projections of a future that will have been.
Praise for IMAGES OF THE PRESENT TIME
“Thinking the present in, through, and against the image, Alain Badiou proposes and enacts a comedic philosophy attuned to now’s urgent absurdities. It’s a pleasure to move with the sharp curve and fissure of his thinking. Badiou’s Seminars are a major event in and for contemporary philosophy.”
—Fred Moten, author of In the Break: The Aesthetics of the Black Radical Tradition
“ ‘There are only bodies seized by languages, except there are also truths.’ Philosophy is famously incapable of dealing with the present—except there is also Alain Badiou. Images of the Present Time is a pure joy to read, even as it confronts some of the saddest marvels of our commodified nonworld. A truly innovative affirmation of the materialist dialectic.”
—Sianne Ngai, author of Theory of the Gimmick: Aesthetic Judgment and Capitalist Form
“Unlike sparkling wine, vivid thought never ceases to tickle our established notions and sensibilities, bringing forth new concepts while transforming the very concept of the ‘new.’ By conceiving of the present as a matter of creation rather than mere presence, Badiou engages us in a series of unexpected and truly fascinating, powerful reflections.”
—Alenka
Zupancic, author of The Odd One In: On Comedy
“Alain Badiou is the most important contemporary French philosopher and indeed one of the three or four most important philosophers in the world today. This book, ranging widely across philosophy and literature, with a fluency that only a writer and thinker as simultaneously nimble and erudite as Badiou can summon, represents Badiou the public intellectual at his passionate, engaging, lucid, witty, and provocative best: it is a bracing diagnosis of the obsessions that keep us attached to the way we live now, as well as a fascinating reflection on what it would mean to live truly, in a world not ruled by the insidiously captivating ‘images of the present time.’ ”
—Joseph Litvak, author of The Un-Americans: Jews, the Blacklist, and Stoolpigeon Culture