The Focus

Readings:

• "The Temporary Autonomous Zone" by Hakim Bey. This is the concluding essay in T.A.Z.: The Temporary Autonomous Zone, Ontological Anarchy, Poetic Terrorism (Autonomedia, 1985). A cyberpunk cult classic that explores the possibility of free enclaves in an overadministered world. Its "ranterish enthusiasm" (the author's own words) is infectious. A delightful bit of madness that inspires and invigorates without demanding assent. There are a number of TAZ web sites.
• Disappearance of the Outside: A Manifesto for Escape by Andrei Codrescu (Addison-Wesley, 1990). This book appears to be out of print but you can still get it used or remaindered from Powell's Books. It is well worth the effort. The image of the disappearing outside exactly captures the social present and Codrescu develops it brilliantly. It is, as a reviewer for The Nation said about it, "the sort of social-cultural-political analysis the mind longs for when it's been fed for months on Wonder Bread while roaring for raw meat."
• "The Power of the Powerless" by Vaclav Havel. This essay has been reprinted in several different places. Three are most readily available: (1) Power of the Powerless: Citizens Against the State in Central-Eastern Europe (M.E. Sharpe, 1985); (2) Vaclav Havel or Living in Truth (Faber & Faber, 1986); and (3) Open Letters: Selected Writings 1965-1990 (Vintage, 1992). The first contains essays by other Czech writers that are still very much of interest. "Prospects for democracy and socialism in eastern Europe," by Ladislav Hejdanek and "The alternative community as revolutionary avant-garde," by Petr Uhl should be very helpful to any American trying to imagine what his or her own freedom would look like. The third is a great anthology of Havel's essays and early speeches. Among the most important of these is an open letter to Gustav Husak. No one has better understand cynicism and its role in the collection of psychopathologies that constitutes the political culture of modernity. The essay "Politics and Conscience." is also important. There is a picture of Havel in his pre-power suit days on the Heroes page.
• "Transcendence and Height" by Emmanuel Levinas. Reprinted in Emannuel Levinas: Basic Philosophical Writings (Indiana 1996), this essay is a good introduction to Levinas's view of autonomy. Levinas is particularly interesting when he discusses the way personal autonomy is bound up with responsibility for "the Other." Like all of Levinas's writing this essay is dense and difficult.
• Minima Moralia by Theodor Adorno. This is the most accessible of Adorno's exceedingly difficult texts. As hermetic as they seem at first, they do repay close study. No one has treated the meaning of autonomy with more dialectical finesse. For those trying to clarify for themselves the meaning of freedom under current conditions the classics of the Frankfurt School are indispensible. I would recommend this one as the one to start with. There is a fine black and white photograph of Adorno on my Heroes page.
• Lucretius. Read De Rerum Natura. Then read the chapters on Lucretius in Martha Nussbaum's Therapy of Desire. Lucretius finds personal liberty in an exact scientific understanding of the natural world and an unblinking acceptance of the world so revealed to understanding. No gods, no supernatural sanction for our projects and institutions, no afterlife. Just here and now, atoms and the void. Would this be freedom? Could one live it if it were? Reading Lucretius changed my life.