How old are you? The more thought you bring to bear on the question, the harder it is to answer. For we age simultaneously in different ways: biologically, psychologically, socially. And we age within the larger framework of a culture, in the midst of a history that predates us and will outlast us. Looked at through that lens, many aspects of late modernity would suggest that we are older than ever, but Robert Pogue Harrison argues that we are also getting (...) startlingly younger—in looks, mentality, and behavior. We live, he says, in an age of juvenescence. Like all of Robert Pogue Harrison's books, _Juvenescence_ ranges brilliantly across cultures and history, tracing the ways that the spirits of youth and age have inflected each other from antiquity to the present. Drawing on the scientific concept of neotony, or the retention of juvenile characteristics through adulthood, and extending it into the cultural realm, Harrison argues that youth is essential for culture’s innovative drive and flashes of genius. At the same time, however, youth—which Harrison sees as more protracted than ever—is a luxury that requires the stability and wisdom of our elders and the institutions. “While genius liberates the novelties of the future,” Harrison writes, “wisdom inherits the legacies of the past, renewing them in the process of handing them down.” A heady, deeply learned excursion, rich with ideas and insights, _Juvenescence_ could only have been written by Robert Pogue Harrison. No reader who has wondered at our culture's obsession with youth should miss it. (shrink)

During the latter half of the thirteenth century there arose around Tuscany a strange and unprecedented poetry, erudite, abstract, and arrogantly intellectual. It sang beyond courtly conventions about the wonders of the rational universe whose complex secrets the new speculative sciences were eagerly systematizing. Appropriating the language of natural philosophy, Aristotelian psychology, and even theology, love poetry developed a new theoretical understanding of its enterprise which allowed it to redefine love as spiritualized search for knowledge. This intellectualization of erotic desire (...) culminates in the Florentine sitlnovisti, a handful of learned poets who turned love poetry into an eclectic philosophical affair. Guido Cavalcanti’s famous canzone “Donna me prega” was universally considered to be not only the technically most perfect canzone ever written but also a rigorous philosophical treatise. As much as in our own day, exegeses of the poem were forced into the arcana of Scholastic Aristotelianism in order to make sense of its abstract, psychologistic definition of love’s essence. While Cavalcanti lyricized an Averroistic logic of the unified intellect, his younger friend Dante was preparing to put all of medieval philosophy, theology, and science into terza rima. It was in this terza rima that medieval Paris found perhaps its most felicitous expression, for the Divine Comedy represents, among other things, a creative transfiguration of the critical discourses Paris was diffusing throughout Europe.What recalls that situation today is the way Paris again marks the center of critical thought, while in Italiy a new generation of poets has emerged that translates the lessons of contemporary philosophy into poetry. In this essay I plan to discuss some of the most radical or, by analogy, “stilnovistic” of these lyricists. For purposes of convenience I will refer to them as the “favorite malice” poets. The phrase comes from the title of an anthology of select contemporary Italian poetry, recently published in a bilingual English edition: The Favorite Malice: Ontology and Reference in Contemporary Italian Poetry.2 The title alludes to a passage of Friedrich Nietzsche: “It is my favorite malice and art that my silence has learned not to betray itself through silence.” These words from Thus Spoke Zarathrustra serves as the anthology’s epigraphs and signal the peculiar poetics that brings the poets together in one volume. They are not brought together as a “school” but as a loose convergence of individual practices. The most illustrious name among the group is that of Andrea Zanzotto , who belongs to an older generation but whom the other poets call their “youngest traveling companion.” The “older” companions include Nanni Cagnone, Luigi Ballerini, Raffaele Perrotta, and Angelo Lumelli. Robert P. Harrison is assistant professor of Italian at Stanford University. He has published a book of poems, The Murano Workshop , and articles on Dante, Kierkegaard, Nietzsche, and liberal philology. The Body of Beatrice is the title of his work in progress. (shrink)

Whitford states in her preface that the limits of Merleau-Ponty's critique of Sartre form the limits of her investigation. Since Merleau-Ponty had little to say about Sartre's later development, except that it brought to light certain contradictions inherent in his ontology, the discussion centers around L'Etre et le néant. In effect, Merleau-Ponty, even after his break with Sartre, never ceased returning to that work in order to challenge some of its premises, speculate upon its implications, and use it as a (...) point of reference in the elaboration of his own phenomenology. Whitford has done a solid job of analyzing this rather one-way dialogue between the two thinkers. Her method is expository and her approach unbias. Unlike Simone de Beauvoir, who defended Sartre against Merleau-Ponty's criticisms by arguing that they were based upon flagrant misinterpretations and misrepresentations, Whitford attempts to expose, with straightforward lucidity, the validity as well as shortcomings of Merleau-Ponty's critique. (shrink)

The anti-metaphysical kind of philosophy known as Deconstruction, associated with the name of Derrida, has done much to trouble the conventional distinctions between philosophy and literature. Its project of "textualizing" metaphysical works in order to expose their rhetorical components and reliance on metaphor, their groundless erection of fundamenta inconcussa, has radically affected, among other things, literary criticism. Even where literary critics dissociate themselves from the deconstructive enterprise, their activity betrays an increasing involvement with issues that once belonged to the domain (...) of philosophy alone. Eugene Kaelin's book on "The Poetic Plight of Samuel Beckett" is an example of this relatively recent and problematical marriage between philosophy and literary analysis. (shrink)