Michael D. Gordin: One Must Imagine Faust Happy

By Dilip -

Fascination with the relationship between knowledge and power never dies. In just about every intellectual tradition, in essentially every documented era, the topic bristles through the canon, though the European tradition appears especially fixated upon it. Are the two domains compatible? Are they even distinct? Does the latter corrupt the former? While the philosophical treatments are perhaps the most systematic, it is literary representations that I find most alluring...

The prism of Faust appears again and again in commentaries about science during and after World War II, starting from the Manhattan Project to produce nuclear weapons in the United States and the V-2 ballistic missile enterprise in Hitler’s Germany. To be sure, the Faustian language did not appear instantly, but starting in the late 1960s and more intense popular critique of the thermonuclear standoff, it became too common to even provide a cursory list. The conceptual pairing is overdetermined: here we have the most rarefied of intellectual disciplines (physics often stands in as representative of all sciences) confronting the most diabolical of powerful entities: the nuclearized military-industrial complex. Cash was poured liberally upon the scientists, knowledge flowed back to their military paymasters, and all it cost was the former’s souls and a planet thrust into precarity. Faust is ready for his close-up....

https://thepointmag.com/examined-life/one-must-imagine-faust-happy/


Everything and Nothing by Jorge Luis Borges // "Borges and I"


Jorge Luis Borges - Deutsches Requiem: a short story (1946)


Kelly Denton-Borhaug: The True Costs of America’s All-Consuming War-Culture / Chris Hedges: Chronicle of a War Foretold


Chris Hedges: Heeding James Joyce’s ‘Ulysses’


Miłosz’s Magic Mountain. By Joy Neumeyer


Salman Rushdie: how Cervantes and Shakespeare wrote the modern literary rule book


Sally Bayley: The Shakespeare tragedy that truly speaks to us now


Book review: The Death of Sigmund Freud: Fascism, Psychoanalysis and the Rise of Fundamentalism


Harry V. Jaffa: Macbeth and the Moral Universe


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