I've mentioned Paul Berman's writings several times in this blog (the earliest post here). For me, Berman does a great job in contextualizing intellectual history since the 60's, a compass that I have used to orient myself in the forest of signs and memes and philosophical ideas that all artists have a responsibility to account for in contemporary art. Here is an Amazon link to his books. A Tale of Two Utopias is particularly interesting in this regard.
Fresh in Slate, Ron Rosenblum reviews Paul Berman's upcoming release of his new book :
The Flight of the Intellectuals, Paul Berman's new 300-page polemic (to be published this spring), recalls these heady days in a book that is likely to provoke an intense controversy among public intellectuals. The most contentious assertion in Berman's book is that some of the most prominent of these?people who rushed to the defense of Salman Rushdie when he was threatened with death for a novel deemed blasphemously irreverent to Islam?have failed to offer wholehearted support to Muslim dissidents today, people such as Ayaan Hirsi Ali, the Somali-born author and Muslim apostate, whose lives are similarly threatened. This failure, this "flight of the intellectuals," Berman argues, represents a deeply troubling abandonment of Enlightenment values in the face of recurrent threats to freedom of expression. Berman's book will likely provoke bouts of rage, praise, and condemnation in print and online. In doing so, his book will remind us that those old Partisan Review smack-downs raised questions that have evolved and mutated but remain unresolved: Is there a paradox at the heart of Enlightenment values? Should a belief in "tolerance" extend to the intolerant? Must Enlightenment values stop short of challenging multicultural values? Or do multicultural values sometimes entail moral relativism? One key issue, for instance, is whether Ayaan Hirsi Ali's campaign against female genital mutilation makes her?as the intellectuals Berman attacks have called her?an "Enlightenment fundamentalist," the flashpoint buzz phrase of the controversy. (Although my favorite buzz phrase is the one the French intellectual Pascal Bruckner devised for those who have sneered at Ayaan Hirsi Ali: "The racism of the anti-racists.")
For more about Paul Berman, from 2008, here is a diavlog between Heather Hurlburt and Paul Berman at Bloggingheads.tv:
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