I want to mention something that occurred to me reading Dwayne and Dennis. One way to understand Marx--and it was crudely how I understood him--is to remember Marx had his own experience with the historical fracture. It was the 1848 revolution---also the subject of Flaubert's Sentimental Education. While in the Paris case, it was a mockery perhaps, a kind of craziness, it sparked a trememdous reaction across Europe. I wish I knew Russian history better, but I wouldn't be at all surprised it kicked off something in Russia. Certainly it had an effect on Turgenev (or what the 1870 one, I forget)
Later reading about 1848, reminded my of '68 which was absurd or incoherent in many ways, phoney, strange, carnival, con-job but also real.
The important point though is remember that individual awareness isn't the main thing. The main thing is awareness in others, or seeing it as a public phenomenon, that's what is so disconcerting.
Jumping around history, there is Hegel, finishing the intro to Phenomenonology of Mind on the eve of the French army opening the battle of Jena--where Hegel was writing.
There is Arendt in Weimar going back to Lessing, Heidegger to his Greeks, Strauss to Jacobi then to Spinoza.
Or to bring a much more pointed and immediate example of the fracture, 9/11. Dwayne noted the smoke and mirrors of the War on Terrorism, which reminded me of Bush and the necons---their attempts to mask a fracture of the public mind---the happy world of neoliberalism and empire were everbody wins. What a joke. The jihadis certainly blew that one off.
Travis Fast posted a short note on Brad Delong's rant on Fredric Jameson. Very funny. A kind of denial, similar to Brad's reaction here on LBO during the weeks following 9/11.
It's lunch hour--over. Gotta go.
CG