John Michael

Beyond Us and Them: Identity and Terror from an Arab American's Perspective

Beau Geste,William A.Wellman’s  cinematic romance of legionnaires besieged by Bedouins in a desert outpost, represents a version of Arab identity still familiar in the West. The orphaned Geste brothers, Beau (Gary Cooper), Digby (Robert Preston), and John (Ray Milland), described by their charming guardian (Susan Hayward) as ‘‘three little gentlemen of fortune,’’ grow up to join the foreign legion. Their incidental motivation involves a chivalrous desire to protect their guardian from a family scandal involving financial ruin and a purloined jewel, the ‘‘Blue Water Sapphire.’’ Their real motivation stems from their boyish desire for adventure. Their enlistment in the expeditionary forces of the French Empire continues their romantic childhood fantasies and games. Thus, the film imagines the armed conflicts of empire as the romantic projection of Western masculinity upon the East, the expression of a boyish love of adventure upon the territory and bodies of the natives. In one wonderful scene, recruits to the legion appear at a desert staging-ground

The Intellectual in Uncivil Society: Michnik, Poland, and Community

If Adam Michnik once exemplified the “post-totalitarian mind,” he now represents the paradoxes of the situation in which that mind must think. His place in the Polish opposition has never been unproblematic. Often called “a great political and moral symbol” in the 1970s and 1980s — “the thinking persons Walesa” — his works have always provoked controversy. Recently, however, his impact seems to be waning. If the politics of the “new” Poland that Michnik and Walesa helped create have tarnished Walesas status as a great symbol, they have also left their mark on Michnik. More important, todays Poland is not a coherent society in which great moral or political symbols can exist. This is the post-communist postscript.

Critical Intellectuals and Identity Logic: Politics, Representation and Community

In his introduction to the special Telos issue on the French New Right Paul Piccone locates the main thrust of the Frankfurt Schools attack on modernity in its critique of identity logic. The violence of fascism in pre-war Europe and the failure of liberalism in todays US, he specifies, have a common origin in the “identity logic of Enlightenment ideology,” whose “abstract universalism … comes to dominate concrete particularity … The abstract concept redefines the concrete particular in its own image while delegitimating all that is left out of this exercise in conceptual engineering…” Modernitys violence is a legacy of failed enlightenment strategies of representation which attempt to articulate power, reason, and rights.

Tradition and the Critical Talent

From Montaigne to Edmund Burke to Matthew Arnold and William Bennett, tradition has been the special weapon of conservative critics attacking modernity and reform. In a further sign, if one were needed, that old intellectual and political oppositions are in flux, tradition has lately reappeared in a different guise especially among intellectuals on the “Left.” In The Past in Ruins David Gross attempts to formalize this conceptual reorientation by reintroducing tradition not primarily as an object for critical analysis but as a potential grounding for critical opposition to the dominant culture. His work introduces but does not quite answer the crucial question of traditions place in a society where heterogeneity and division rather than homogeneity and unity are the rule.