°By a new path
Matt quotes a wonderful bit from Levinas’ On Escape. It’s rare for me to read a book or essay - no matter how small - through more than once upon picking it up, but this is one of those. I’ll add to the citation:
This term escape, which we borrow from the language of contemporary literary criticism, is not only a word a la mode, it is world-weariness, the disorder of our time. It is not easy to draw up a list of all the situations in modern life in which it shows itself. They were created in an age that leaves no one in the margins of life, and in which no one has the power to slip by himself unaware. What is caught up in the incomprehensible mechanism of the universal order is no longer the individual who does not yet belong to himself, but an autonomous person who, on the solid terrain he has conquered, feels liable to be mobilised - in every sense of that term. […]
The criticisms of Bergsonian vitalism which follow are also particularly good.
