Linking as away of life

Political

This is not déjà-vu. This is déjà double-vu. And it gets worse.

Robert Fisk remembers the Soviet occupation of Afghanistan and asks Have we learned nothing?

One thing at least: it's best to avoid terminally boring neo-Wieseltier ideologues. Perverse Egalitarianism doesn't however, and discusses Adam Kirsch's review of two books by Slavoj Zizek.

To further confound such people, post a public tribute to Chomsky to mark his 80th birthday on Sunday.

Philosophical
Nearby, Larval Subjects finds a Sony Reader-tastic link to a PDF of Terry Pinkard's new translation of Hegel's Phenomenology of Spirit.

Literary

What is fictional, what actually experienced? What difference does it make when the actual experience is told, and in the telling is given structure and meaning in the manner of fiction? Each of Handke’s previous works have asked these questions in various ways; but of them all, Die morawische Nacht may be the most self-reflexive.

Scott Abbott writes about Peter Handke's most recent novel (though most is behind a paywall).

Following Lionel Shriver's nonsense about punctuation in literary fiction, yet in other ways preceding it, Helen DeWitt wonders how Cormac McCarthy, one target of Shriver's complaints, managed to get his style of punctuation into the published work in the first place, and then tells a hair-raising story of her own experience.

Literary, political, philosophical

Why would someone who has devoted so much of his adult life to the study of politics write a book about loneliness? Isn't it a radical departure from the concerns of polity to focus on a subject that on the face of it has nothing to do with our political condition?

Thomas Dumm writes about Loneliness as a Way of Life. See the PDF extract. Writing?