"The Apprentice" A Book Review

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And here for your literary improvement and daily dose of Kultur we present  Alan Farrell's review of Lewis Libby novel of esoteric crapola.

Pat Lang

Comments

[wtofd]

Bravo!

[RJJ]

This review is remarkable; it contains nothing that might misbecome the reviewer! But the usual, what - vitality? fluency? facility? is missing. So, how did he do that? Is he just naturally magnanimous, or did all the tempting cheap shots get edited out?

Tangent 1: appreciate the Benton reminder. Artist in America and American in Art somehow dropped off the must read list.

Tangent 2. deleted.

[W. Patrick Lang]

RJJ

I think he is stunned by the vanity and inanity if the thing.

Pat

[RJJ]

veneerealism (sic).

[wtofd]

RJJ,

I think Libby contracted a bad case of Veneereal(ism) Disease. You have to be so careful who you get into bed with these days.

[Eric]

Meanwhile, Rumsfeld's got a new science fiction novella out.

Someone ought to review it:

http://tinyurl.com/cs6g9

[Doug Hacker]

I tried to read some of the book but to no avail. Scooter indeed!

[CK]

Per Libby “novel”:

There is more than meets the eye here, particularly for those with a professional interest in the "Neocon" network, its mindset, and its linkages domestic and foreign.

Libby was a student of Wolfowitz. Wolfowitz, in turn, was a student of Allan Bloom, a "Straussian" (the Professor Leo Strauss cult) insider and notorious and aggressive “gay” professor at Cornell.

Bloom was selected by Strauss for “special” education in Europe. Bloom then traveled frequently to Paris to study under the guidance of one Alexandre Kojeve, a Stalinist-fascist professor at the Sorbonne in the 1930s-40s, then a French bureaucrat in the Economics Ministry in the 1950s-60s.

Among other things, Kojeve taught a particular twist to Hegelian philosophy that one Francis Fukuyama, another Straussian-Bloomian-Kojevan, took up.

The reported pornographic-bestiality stuff in the Libby novel seems to
tie into the profile of the Kojeve Paris circle that contained a range of famous homosexual, sado-masochistic, and other perverse “intellectuals” of the 50s and 60s and 70s such as Georges Bataille. [In the mix you also have Foucault, Lacan, and Derrida for example].

Kojeve visited Japan and took quite an interest in it...one of his Japanese fans, writer Yukio Mishima, committed suicide/seppuku in front of the Japanese Defense Force HQ in 1967. Remember that one?

For documentation of the above and more see: in English by Prof. Shadia Drury, "Alexandre Kojeve. The Roots of Postmodern Politics"(NY: St. Martin 1994 She, in turn, uses as one source the very detailed study of Kojeve by French author Dominique Auffret, "Alexandre Kojeve: La philosophie, l'etat, la fin de l'histoire," (Paris: Grasset, 1990.) For those who read French, the Auffret book is not to be missed, although ponderous.
Both have excellent bibliographies.

CK