It is now over a month since my last post on this blog, and it looks like it may be another month yet before my next post. Behind the scenes, my conception of this blog has been undergoing some major structural alterations since I left my voluntary work at Hammersmith & Fulham Mind a month or two ago. Basically, releasing myself from the influence of my befriendee somehow returned me to my interest in literature, and I have been reading again in Thoreau and J. H. Prynne. This means I have had to work out how to begin to align these literary interests with (what had become) the workings of this blog as a sort of forced amateur encyclopaedia of Weimar thought, an over-responsible charm against my befriendee's irresponsibility: that is, a series of rather formal, very detailed crystallizations of what one contemporary academic (often Thornhill) had to say about one historical thinker (often Jaspers). So far as I have worked it out, you can expect quite a bit of Heidegger here in the future. But my posts may be a bit more informal than they have been in the past; exploratory attempts to return to the sort of philosophical literary criticism I once practiced as an academic.
My next post, which will stem from last year's important essay collection The Weimar Moment, will still be 'purely philosophical'. But because of my altered plans now, I will not be producing an entire post puffing this year's sensation, the Weimar Thought anthology edited by Gordon and McCormick. So here's an advertisement of its front cover instead. I recommend it. To my mind it & its theological turn definitively supersedes the old identity politics manual, The Weimar Republic Sourcebook.
I look forward to the new direction. While your crystallizations were always fascinating -- often as accessible yet careful summaries of scholarship that I will probably never grapple with in its original form, but for which I now have, thanks to you, some feelings of recognition -- still, I always appreciate much more your original strikings out. Philosophical literary criticism is a thing the world can always use more of.
ReplyDeleteThanks for your support, Robert. I really don't know what to say about the issues you currently raise on your blog; about turning to programming, etc. All I know is that our universities are such vile, hopeless places - if they, like our mental health services, weren't so full of deadbeats and career-hungry bullies, it wouldn't be left to unsalaried oddballs like us to get on with the work unaided and scorned.
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