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:: Latest Features

• Melancholy and its Correctives: Flaubert, Chekhov, Tolstoy

  

  It is not strange that our response to Chekhov or to Vermeer should have the character of nostalgia. What we reflect on is the image of that world we dreamed up perhaps when we were very young, when the idea of a moral life had already been imparted to us, and we had begun to envisage what it might be, but before we had grown used to the thought that it was a fiction to be left behind (…) What strikes us about Vermeer or Chekhov is the unobtrusive manner in which life’s passage is observed. When the voices that normally obtrude upon the world are silent—chief among them our own—we feel as though these voices had hung about the world like a veil, and that for once, it has been rent; these voices, and their erstwhile concerns, were idle, and had only dissuaded us from truth.

  Adrian West considers the fundamental role of guilty conscience in the melancholic pleasures of fiction.

• You’re Human Like the Rest of Them: The Films of B S Johnson

  

  Forty years on, it seems astonishing not that people watched Fat Man on a Beach, but that it got through any commissioning process, let alone on ITV, now notorious for its pursuit of the lowest common denominator at any cost. Given the contempt in which 21st century television holds its audiences, to be explicitly told that “Now might be a good time to get a cup of tea” before Johnson recites his poetry feels like being credited with an unusual level of intelligence — at least, the viewer could opt to refuse to be patronised, and be rewarded for choosing to stick with the host.

  Juliet Jacques reviews You’re Human Like the Rest of Them: The Films of B S Johnson BFI Flipside DVD.

:: Interviews

• Habermas, Adorno, Politics

  

  Habermas has a rare and enviable capacity to sense the issues that are relevant to the present. In the mid-1980s he was among the most vocal opponents of the right-wing historiographers in the Historian Controversy, whom he accused of wanting to relativize the crimes of the Nazi regime, in the interests of normalizing West German foreign policy. More recently he has engaged in debates around gene technology and their threat to our self-understanding as autonomous moral persons. He has been true to his own view that the task of the public intellectual is to “stir up critical developments when everyone else is still doing business as usual.” Philosophers should do more of that. As a bunch, we tend to be too inward looking.

  Continuing the End Times series, Richard Marshall interviews Gordon Finlayson.

• without concepts

  

  A science of concepts would be like a science of Tuesdays. As you can imagine, not all psychologists are thrilled!

  But this view has a silver lining for psychologists. If I am correct, there are a bunch of exciting empirical questions that have been ignored by psychologists, and that should be tackled urgently. These include, How are the concepts organized? Do some concepts have priority over others? How are resulting conflicts resolved? Are they triggered in different contexts? And what is the relevant mechanism? How are different types of concepts acquired?

  Continuing the End Times series, Richard Marshall interviews Edouard Machery.

:: Non-Fiction

• Melancholy and its Correctives: Flaubert, Chekhov, Tolstoy

  

  It is not strange that our response to Chekhov or to Vermeer should have the character of nostalgia. What we reflect on is the image of that world we dreamed up perhaps when we were very young, when the idea of a moral life had already been imparted to us, and we had begun to envisage what it might be, but before we had grown used to the thought that it was a fiction to be left behind (…) What strikes us about Vermeer or Chekhov is the unobtrusive manner in which life’s passage is observed. When the voices that normally obtrude upon the world are silent—chief among them our own—we feel as though these voices had hung about the world like a veil, and that for once, it has been rent; these voices, and their erstwhile concerns, were idle, and had only dissuaded us from truth.

  Adrian West considers the fundamental role of guilty conscience in the melancholic pleasures of fiction.

• You’re Human Like the Rest of Them: The Films of B S Johnson

  

  Forty years on, it seems astonishing not that people watched Fat Man on a Beach, but that it got through any commissioning process, let alone on ITV, now notorious for its pursuit of the lowest common denominator at any cost. Given the contempt in which 21st century television holds its audiences, to be explicitly told that “Now might be a good time to get a cup of tea” before Johnson recites his poetry feels like being credited with an unusual level of intelligence — at least, the viewer could opt to refuse to be patronised, and be rewarded for choosing to stick with the host.

  Juliet Jacques reviews You’re Human Like the Rest of Them: The Films of B S Johnson BFI Flipside DVD.