Tsk tsk Chuck. Remember, in the part you quoted, Yoshie said (emphasis added) "IF you accept Hardt & Negri's analysis." The case being argued might be that (whatever their intentions) Negri & Hardt _add up to_ Brad in practice: that they present an all-destroying empire and offer no way to oppose it.... Carrol
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Okay. I am bloody sick of the Old Testament (got to Samuel 1), and don't particularly like,`Parting of the Waters, America in the King Years, 1954-63', by Taylor Branch, and will really have to steal myself to go back to Yusuf Ali's annotated Quran. So I just hiked up to Cody's and bought Negri and Hardt's Empire this afternoon. I'll find out one way or another.
Yes, I did get some of these ideas about the conservation of culture and past from Yeats, but I also learned a sort of judgment about it from thinking on his, Blake, Joyce, Auden, Mann, Malraux and others deeply conservative natures. There is a kind of alure to the past or its images that entrance with a kind of wistfulness, a killing by regret over turns never taken. Rilke, Heidegger, Gide, even Sartre in some sense share those sorts of difficult to disentangle threads. On the other hand, I've also come across another consequence to these meditations on the past, which is that sometimes they lead to very revolutionary and quite radical developments---they turn history in some different direction---without explicitly trying to do so. It is always a risk.
But it is an interesting sort of risk. Can you stand the weight? Somebody's signature bares a Marx quote saying something similar. Just checking now, it's Thomas Seay's signature quote:
``The tradition of all the dead generations weighs like a nightmare on the brain of the living..'' -Karl Marx
I would amend it to read, The tradition of all the generations weighs like a nightmare and uplifts like a dream on the brain of all the living and the dead. (paraphrasing Joyce).
As for Yoshie practicing something called indirect discourse, is that like devil's advocate? I am not good at board games, usually because I've been drinking and was tossed out of the room for smoking.
Chuck Grimes