I hope you can join me in that effort in a spirit that will save us from all unnecessary quarrels.  I in turn will try to write with as much lucidity and directness as I can and to encourage all who write for us to do likewise.  For me this will require a sort of left-handed form of self-overcoming.  I’m one of those strange souls who has spent most of his life reading difficult writers such as Hegel and Heidegger, Joyce and Pynchon, Broch and Beckett. I’m sure I haven’t escaped unscathed.  But my belief is that I can best serve all that I’ve learned from Hegel, for example, by avoiding the kind of intellectual pyrotechnics that purple the pages of Derrida and Zizek as well as the convolution and pedantry that are the staple of most academic prose, even among those who eschew “theory.”

      I want to say one other word about my own intellectual history as it relates to what I hope will become the value that defines and unites us as an intellectual community.  The most valuable intellectual experiences of my life have occurred when I was confronted with a book that was beyond me; one that shocked me with the depth of my limitations by challenging me to think in way that I found initially far beyond my powers.  Such, for example, was the frustration and the thrill when, as an undergraduate, I first encountered Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit, a book that I found at first completely unintelligible.  But, I told myself, take the easy way out here, call Hegel an abstract pretentious blow-hard who refuses to speak clearly etc. and you compromise your own mind and the belief you have in the value and discipline of thinking.  (I didn’t know it at the time but I was experiencing intuitively what has since become for me the ethical imperative that defines reading –and an inner necessity: to keep finding books and thinkers who will have this effect upon me.  Be that as it may, I would argue—and I wouldn’t be alone in this—that Hegel’s Phenomenology remains one of the key books we must master in order to understand what for lack of a better word we call “the modern world.”  Hegel’s book is a watershed moment in the development of thought and consciousness.  Without it Marx, Kierkegaard, Nietzsche, Heidegger, Sartre, Lacan, Derrida, Zizek, Dostoyevsky, Musil, Broch, Gaddis and Pynchon  are not possible.  Hegel offers us the first systematic diagnosis of the problems and contradictions that shape modern society and modern consciousness.

      Such books are rare and all the more valuable by reason of that fact.  They are  the texts we must chew and digest in order to become responsible world citizens.  But we can only find such works if we let one imperative be the standard of self-discipline and of judgment that we will follow whenever we read.  To put it simply: something is worth reading when it leads me beyond the limitations of my mind, when, that is, the impact of far greater minds activates in me the effort of self-overcoming.  It was Hegel, by the way, who long before Nietzsche established self-overcoming as the force that defines human consciousness.   When it is best, life is a process of deepening the demands that we place on ourselves so that we can exist—and think—most fully.

      Shouldn’t the same principle inform the acts of reading and writing?  Aren’t both finally referred to the principle that Kafka formulated at age 24:  “If the book [or article?] we are reading does not wake us, as with a fist hammering on our skull, why then do we read it?  Good God, we would also be happy if we had no books, and such books as make us happy we could, if need be, write ourselves.  But what we must have are those books which come upon us like ill-fortune, and distress us deeply, like the death of one we love better than ourselves, like suicide.  A book must be an ice-axe to break the sea frozen inside us.” [6] To recall an earlier idea, Kafka’s  statement is another way of indicating why art as cognition is the basis for the revolution in thought and feeling that we must undertake.

      As a final confession and I hope gesture of good faith I want to turn briefly to a circumstance that vexed me with vacillation before I decided to accept this position.  My luddite resistance to technology—to learning how to surf the web—has been one of my biggest mistakes in recent years. I have come slowly to the recognition that so many on the left have already turned to ambitious political and organizational programs: namely, that the new technologies of communication offer us an unexampled opportunity to talk to each other in new ways as we create a global community that continually proliferates new forms of praxis and relationship.  Today when one puts something one writes on MWCNews, for example, one comes in contact that very day with between 5 to 7,000 people, people who live all over the globe and in radically different circumstances.  If one’s words bear fruit, moreover, one hears from those readers and enters dialogues that may bring together in shared projects those who will never see one another.  Everything today is virtual in one sense—and deeply personal in another.  Because everything today turns on the decisions of isolated individuals sitting in front of computer screens.  One can surf –for distraction, information, enlightment…whatever—and remain a private and anonymous (world-) citizen, isolated in a room alone. Or electronic communication can become the basis for the creation of what Sartre called the group in fusion, [7] that process that was for him the origin of politics and action in history.  But that possibility  depends on one thing—that we begin to interact; that I hear from you so that our words reach out to one another across all the spaces that separate us. Which is an idealistic way of making a rhetorical appeal.  Please write.  Join the Forums and other conversations I will try to create here.  Share with us your thoughts about our thoughts.  My hunch is that thereby we will learn what we need to learn from one another as together we think ourselves free of the ideologies that paralyze and blind us. 

      In keeping with that goal let me add here a few words about specific practical directions I hope to give to the editorial component of MWCNews.

      (1) Strong essays on important topics of the day will remain a priority.  (And every reader should feel free to submit.  Credentials may be self-enhancing, but the only authority any person has is their ideas.)   My hope is that we will become the home for daring work where thinkers in many fields can try out their boldest ideas in the confidence that we will provide the kind of discussion and feedback that those ideas deserve.

      (2) For writing is only as good as the dialogue it creates.  All writers need critique. Often that’s when the best work actually begins, as one learns from one’s readers the problems one must address and the further directions one’s thought must take.  Shahram Vahdany, the founder and Managing Editor of  MWCNews has provided me with many fascinating statistics indicating how many of you visit this site, how long you stay once here, and what essays are most read.  But we need to hear from you.  To that end I hope to create a series of Forums on Special Topics featuring roundtable discussions in which a number of writers will interact with one another and our readers in discussions that will take place on a daily basis over a set period of time ranging from a week to a month.  I’ve already arranged for a number of playwrights and theatre professionals to do such a roundtable on the state of contemporary theatre.  I’m currently working to gather appropriate thinkers for two other Forums: one on the unacknowledged crisis of contemporary American psychoanalysis; another dedicated to “Re-imagining Politics.”