Bloom-Fest

Conversations between Bloom and Charlie Rose are available here.

More Annals of Mazeppism

Harold Bloom, God love him. Student of M. H. Abrams. Romantic critic. Like Arnold (though he would probably wince at the comparison) a critic of religious texts. Irascible. Titanic. Courageous. Read the transcript of his conversation with Charlie Rose.

Annals of Mazeppism

Jack Kerouac punned on "beat" and "attitude" and arrived at "beatitude" as the true condition of beat-ness. His biographer, Gerald Nicosia, tells us that Jack visited Morocco in 1957 (a half century ago!) where "his best time ... was a solitary hike to a Berber village in the mountains. These were the original fellaheen (the very word is Arabic) who had impressed him in the pages of Spengler with their endurance. Here in real life he was even more respectful of their simplicity and humility. In his notebook he made pencil drawings of their huts, imagining himself retired there to paint for the rest of his life. One of the peasants gave him a machete with a gold-braided handle, which he treasured ever after. Characteristically, Jack's response to Islam was based not on any intellectual apprehension but on his love for these villagers. The glory of their religion, embodied in their stolid faces, moved him to observe the fast of Ramadan. A few months later he would tell Malcolm Cowley that Islam and Buddhism were the only two religions capable of lasting another fifty years."

Nicosia, Memory Babe, London: Penguin (1983), p. 546.

Wonderful Op-Ed Piece

By the artist Judith Ernst on CommonDreams.org. Why is Bush still in office?

An Open Letter To John Edwards

Dear John:

I am in receipt of your undated letter soliciting my support for your Presidential campaign.

I am sure that you do not recall this, but when you voted in 2002 to give President Bush the power to invade Iraq, I wrote you directly protesting your vote and demanding an explanation for it. At the time, you were my United States Senator.

After several weeks, I received a response from you in the mail. Frankly, the response disgusted me. You did not address the specific questions that I raised in my letter. Instead, you regurgitated the Administration's rhetoric in support of their immoral, unjust, and illegal actions. I started to write a response to your response but ended up tossing both in the garbage, recognizing the futility of communicating with someone who was clearly quite comfortable with playing politics with people's lives.

Now you write that you were wrong when you voted in 2002 to grant the President permission to invade Iraq. I suppose that I should find this admission mollifying, but I do not. The reason that I do not is that you had a moral, if not a legal, duty to engage in due diligence when it came to making a decision that you knew would result in the taking of lives. I do not believe for one moment that you exercised that due diligence because, if you had, you would have opposed the Iraq invasion as I did.

Indeed, I find you particularly culpable in this regard because, as someone who has both training and practice in the law, you should possess a finely-tuned sensitivity to what constitutes reasonable evidence. What the Administration offered as "evidence" compelling the decision to invade Iraq would have been laughable if the stakes involved were not so serious. I do not say this in hindsight or as someone who had access to information not publicly available. On the basis of the evidence that the Administration made publicly available at the time, I began telling my students at the University of North Carolina that the United States was preparing to invade Iraq for reasons personal to the President of the United States and members of his inner circle. You, on the other hand, claim to have bought the Administration's case.

I have perhaps overestimated your abilities as a lawyer or your intellect, but I truly doubt that. Therefore, I cannot conclude that the Administration pulled the proverbial wool over your eyes. I do not think that you exercised your duty of due diligence before voting to invade Iraq. I believe, instead, that you made what seemed to you at the time to be a pretty simple political calculation. You voted with the howling mob confident that your Presidential ambitions (not this country and not the people of Iraq) were now that much more secure.

Today, you present yourself in your campaign literature as a moral leader and not just another politician. Forgive me if I find an effrontery in that. In my eyes, your claim to possess a moral vision is simply not credible.

Be that as it may, I do believe that people can learn from their mistakes and I also believe that people can mend their ways. I have hope for you and wish you the best in your future endeavors. Unfortunately, I do not believe that running for President of the United States is the appropriate way for you to make amends. You see, it was your Presidential ambition that caused you to ignore the evidence and vote with the war-mongers. Supporting you in that ambition now would be like offering an alcoholic a six-pack as a way of furthering his struggle to overcome the addiction to drink. No, I will not be your enabler.

Recently, you were quoted as saying that your ideal job would be as a mill supervisor. I think that that would be a wonderful choice for you and, should you sincerely pursue such a career, I want you to know that you have my best wishes for all success.

Your former constituent,

The Mazeppist

Annals of Mazeppism

And then there is Woody. My 8 year old son came home from school the other day singing "This Land Is Your Land." I asked him where he had learned the song and he told me he had learned it in music class in school. I asked him if they had taught him this verse:

Was a big high wall there, that tried to stop me,
a sign was painted, said "Private Property,"
but on the other side, it didn't say nothin'--
that side was made for you and me...


There are different versions of the verse but I take it on the authority of Joe Klein's biography of Guthrie that this particular version was one that Woody made a point of singing in concert. Woody was a border-crossin' transgressin' kind of guy. Anybody who would paint "This Machine Kills Fascists" on his guitar is a friend of Mazeppa's.

A Mazeppist Avant La Lettre

Eugene V. Debs. Read his speech before sentencing here.

More Mazeppism

Back in law school (late 1980's-early 1990's), I read John D. Caputo's Radical Hermeneutics, a well-written book that articulated a very attractive case for Deconstruction. Even so, there was something that held me back from embracing Caputo's arguments. Something was missing. Yes, I know, that's the point of Deconstruction; but there was something else that I just couldn't put my finger on. So I put the book aside and struggled on my way reading mostly Wittgenstein and trying, as well, to come to terms with Rorty. Eventually, I was to make my peace with what Caputo has termed Rorty's "Yankee hermeneutics." It seems that during the same period, Caputo was coming to terms with Rorty as well. The result, in 2000, was Caputo's More Radical Hermeneutics: a book that inflects the "radical" (Deconstruction-conscious) hermeneutics of the earlier work with Rortian pragmatism. The result, I claim, is Mazeppism--or something very close to it.

Caputo now argues that, post-Heidegger, hermeneutics coalesces around two poles:

(1) Hermeneutics means "beginning where we are"--in Heidegger's "facticity." Caputo calls this the "pregiven fix in which we find ourselves, the confusing web of beliefs and practices, and proceeding from there as best we can; the hermeneutics of factical life means that we are under the necessity to think and act and hope, to press ahead, understanding full well the fix we are in..." (MRH, pp. 55-56).

(2) A second dimension (which Caputo credits to Gadamer's development of Heidegger's hermeneutics) "...lies in putting ourselves at risk, putting our own meanings, our own institutions, our own beliefs and practices, to the risk of the approach of the other, of the neighbor and the stranger" (ibid).

This second dimension seems to owe much to Derrida's late turn towards "hospitality" which, Caputo remarks, reflects the Jewish and Levinasian provenance of deconstruction (MRH, p. 57). I would suggest, instead, that it reflects the Jewish, yes, but more particularly Algerian provenance of Jacques Derrida. We should be mindful of the old proverb, "You can take the Deconstructionist out of Algeria, but you cannot take Algeria out of the Deconstructionist."

Mazeppism is a transgressive moral practice underwritten by a philosophical hermeneutics that looks like Rorty's "Yankee" or Caputo's "more radical" hermeneutics. It is built upon the assertion that, as M. Merleau-Ponty noted, one painter learns from another, "of whom he makes copies (Van Gogh of Millet)--to be himself, learn himself in the other, with and against him" (The Visible and the Invisible, p. 211).

My Mazeppist discourse is the marginalia of a transgressive moral praxis and a Yankee hermeneutics; it is transgressive reading/writing in the Romantic grain.