LRB Magazine »
14 Bury Place, London, WC1A 2JL. 020 7269 9030 | Home | Your Cart | Contact | Help | Cake Shop | Listen | World Lit Weekend
Printable version  |

£2.75

LRB Article PDF: On Complaining (<i>LRB</i> volume 30 number 22, 20 November 2008) 

LRB Article PDF: On Complaining (LRB volume 30 number 22, 20 November 2008)

Elif Batuman

'We are certainly living in strange times' is how Elisabeth Roudinesco's Philosophy in Turbulent Times begins. Roudinesco's reader, too, is in for a turbulent and strange time, starting with the introduction, a five-page polemic against the spirit of our age:

Jean-Paul Sartre - for or against? Raymond Aron - for or against? . . . Should we take a blowtorch to May 1968 and its ideas . . . seen now as incomprehensible, elitist, dangerous and anti-democratic? Have the protagonists of that revolution . . . all become little bourgeois capitalist pleasure seekers without faith or principles, or haven't they? . . .

The father has vanished, but why not the mother? Isn't the mother really just a father, in the end, and the father a mother? Why do young people not think anything? Why are children so unbearable? Is it because of television, or pornography, or comic books? . . .

And women: are they capable of supervising male workers on the same basis as men are? Of thinking like men, of being philosophers? Do they have the same brain, the same neurons, the same emotions, the same criminal instincts? Was Christ the lover of Mary Magdalene, and if so, does that mean that the Christian religion is sexually split between a hidden feminine pole and a dominant masculine one?

   Has France become decadent? Are you for Spinoza, Darwin, Galileo, or against? Are you partial to the United States? Wasn't Heidegger a Nazi? Was Michel Foucault the precursor of Bin Laden, [and] Gilles Deleuze a drug addict . . . ? Was Napoleon really so different from Hitler?

LRB 20 November 2008 | PDF Download

Quantity 1 (this product is downloadable) Add to cart

Send to a friend

*

*

*


Send to a friend

Your cart

Cart is empty

View cart | Checkout

Customer Login



  Log in 

Recover password
Register for an account

Forthcoming events

February

John Lanchester

Thursday 11 February at 7.00 p.m.

Richard Wilkinson and Kate Pickett

Thursday 25 February at 7.00 p.m.

March

Evan Parker and Mark Wastell

Thursday 4 March at 7.00 p.m.

London Review of Books Winter Lectures

LRB Winter Lectures - The Rhetoric of War and Intervention

Monday 15 February at 6.30 p.m.


More Events..

Free Email Newsletter

Regular news and offers from the London Review Bookshop


Type the characters in the picture (enable images in your browser options if you can't see a picture):

Get a different code

Subscribe Go



Find us on Facebook

Follow us on Twitter

Bookshop image