(3) I also hope to run a series of Book reviews. Given the ideological drift and rigidity of mainstream media, one of our problems has to do with what I’ll term “the reviewing industry.”    Many of the most important books never get the reception they deserve because mainstream reviewers only pay attention to canonized names and well advertised titles.  For example, recent issues of The New Yorker, The Nation, and The New Republic and The New York Review of Books have featured lengthy reviews of recent books by Father Neuhaus (another in his series of flights back to Thomism), Kevin Phillips, and the redoubtable Francis Fukuyama, whose recantation of his previously trumpeted right-wing proclamation of the end of ideology is greeted as worth talking about because, as one reviewer claims, nothing worth reading or reviewing is being written on the left.  I think it will be fairly easy to prove this reviewer wrong.  To that end I hope to run, on a monthly basis, reviews covering three distinct areas: (a) one on a theoretical or philosophic book of leftist thought, i.e., books such as the recent publication of Marcuse’s Heideggerian Marxism, Zizek’s The Parallax View and Karatani’s Transcritique (a deep and fascinating re-reading of Marx that shows us some of the ways in which we have not yet begun to read Kapital correctly); (b) one on a practical political text, i.e., books such as Afflicted Powers (by the Retort group), Khalidi’s Resurrecting Empire and Kunstler’s The Long Emergency; and (3) one on a book of cultural criticism, i.e., books about literature, film, theatre , including books on the work of particular artists.  (I invite submissions and suggested titles from all readers.)

      (4) Finally, I plan to offer short essays and editorials on a regular basis.  I’m hoping that these will evolve a single line of thought as a result of continuing dialogue with the comments and reactions of readers.

      Ingmar Bergman is my favorite filmmaker.  I recall here a story he tells in the Preface to a collection of his early screenplays.  Struck by lighting the cathedral of Chartres is burned to the ground.  Thousands of people then come from all points of the compass to make their contribution to its rebuilding.  They labor together, each bringing their own special skill and the sweat of their brow to that endeavor, working tirelessly, until the job is done. That is why no one today knows who built Chartres.  The builders remain anonymous. Such, Bergman suggests, is a parable for the task before us. A godless man, one who (like me) worked himself free of religion, Bergman nonetheless sees in the rebuilding of a cathedral the image for the collective task that we must undertake as citizens of a far different world than the one our medieval forerunners inhabited. We too need to build a new home, a global habitat for humanity.  We can do so, in this darkest of times, only if we find ways to think together, contributing what is best in us and in our thought, to a common enterprise in which we are all humble servants of  the effort to build something greater and far more important than any one of us. 

Biographical:  Walter A Davis,  Editor in Chief at MWC News

ENDNOTES:

(1) The concept of a crisis as the best thing that can happen to any philosophy, science or discipline is one of the great achievement of Heidegger’s Being and Time. Crisis is the most creative possibility, Heidegger argues, because when it occurs the relationship between the a priori demands of our frameworks and paradigms and their inadequacy to the phenomena is experienced in a way that throws everything up for grabs.  Every dogmatic assumption and belief receives an abrupt quietus.  Most of what passes as received thought—as what thinkers count and what approaches are reasonable, objective, etc.—is an attempt to prevent such an event.  

(2) Walter A. Davis, Deracination: Historicity, Hiroshima and the Tragic Imperative (NY: SUNY P, 2001);  Death’s Dream Kingdom: The American Psyche since 9-11 (London: Pluto P, 2006); and  Theatre and Ideology: The Corrie Controversy and the Prospects for a Radical Politics (forthcoming). 

(3) Hayden’s statement:. 

(4) And to complete his thought, why for Freud neurosis should be seen as a “privatized religion.”  Or, to draw the key implication, why religion remains central to evertying and why understand a vast range of social, political and private phenomena is ill served by the reductiveness of Harris, Dennet, and Pinker, however scientific.  

(5) I hasten to add, the first task facing any reclaiming of psychoanalyis in the U.S. today is a critique of the establishment.  For psychoanalysis in Amerika has become little more than the happy talk mental health wing of compulsive normalization through adaptation to the capitalist order and the way its subjects must feel about their psyches in order to prosper within it and, in doing so, to come to regard themselves as the final answer to the eternal question regarding the essence of “human nature.” 

(6) Kafka, Diaries. 2 volumes. (NY: Schocken Bks, 1965). 

(7) Sartre, Critique of Dialectical Reason. Vol. 1. (London: NLB, 1976).  

Contact Dr. Davis

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