What Fascinates Me

What many saw in the United States as a radical change in thinking since 9/11 seems rather to me to be an intensification of issues brewing for some time within intellectual debates. We are living through a time of such rapid transformation (not only in the US) that it has often been difficult to understand what is happening. Vaclav Havel put it this way in the first half of the l990s: “It is as if something were crumbling, decaying and exhausting itself, while something else, still indistinct, were rising from the rubble.” ¹

For some time, I have focused on the anxiety surrounding change in American and European thought, discerning from unusual forums and forms ways of expressing change and the ability to analyze it—forms linked to the uncertainty that a lack of evident precedent for thinking creates.