This is a very unusual book. It is a nature book that is actually about nature. Most nature books are about the author's soul, turbulent childhood, and tortured relationships—about his or her hope of redemption by leaving the ad agency for a hut in the woods, by looking at ponds, and by noting, more or less inaccurately, that eagles are free. But Chundawat has written instead about tigers.Scientifically, his book is a triumph. It is far and away the most complete account of tiger ecology and conservation to be found between two covers. But it deserves to be read much more widely than that unappetizing description suggests. For, better than anything else I know, it demonstrates the poetry of its many graphs, charts, and statistical analyses. This is not science for science's sake, or academic preferment's sake, but for the tigers’ sake, and for love's sake. It is an inquiry into the accessibility of otherness, framed as an inquiry into the accessibility of a particular striped, slinking, snarling, beleaguered otherness in a sweltering, malarious forest on the northern edge of the Vindhyan mountains, where the hills drop down to the Gangetic plain.Chundawat worked there from 1996, when there were no more than fifteen tigers in the reserve. He pioneered radio-collar and elephant-back tracking of tigers and a suite of conservation measures that took the needs of the human inhabitants sensitively into account. The results were spectacular: the tiger population rose to thirty-five in five years. And then it all went wrong. Politics, accountants, and human egos marched into the reserve, and the poachers were hot on their heels. By 2009 there were no tigers left. Chundawat tells us a lot about tigers: he tells us a lot about ourselves too, and it is not flattering.In 2014 it was estimated that there were around 2,200 tigers in the whole of India—close to the number shot each year when sport-hunting by pith-helmeted Englishmen was at its peak. There is not much slack in that system. If tigers are to survive—if anything, including humans, is to survive–Chundawat's uncomfortable lessons about the sort of creatures we are need to be part of a compulsory curriculum, alongside the exhilarating and intimate science so splendidly on display in this book.

In 1996, the anthropologist Eduardo Viveiros de Castro chose a sentence by Gilles Deleuze as the epigraph for an article, published in the Brazilian journal Mana, on Amerindian perspectivism. (A modified version of the article appeared in English two years later, in the Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute.) Since then, Deleuze's name has appeared often in works about perspectivism, but Chamois's new book is the first monograph to focus on perspectivism and Deleuze. Among the most important contributions of Chamois's analysis is to draw our attention to a little-known passage in a course, “Truth and Time,” that Deleuze taught in 1983 (and that is available for listening online). In it, he criticizes the example of the cube used as a paradigm, at least since Edmund Husserl's day, to conceptualize what a perspective is. It is impossible to see all six faces of a cube at the same time; thus, to “intuit” the cube as a cube, we must add to our own perception of a profile of the cube more possible points of view on it. The problem with this example and description is that it takes for granted that the subject already knows what she needs to see (a cube).Inspired, however, by the process philosophy of Alfred North Whitehead, Deleuze holds that each perception is an invitation to other perceptions: “To perceive is to become capable of perceiving more and more things that were initially not perceived” (percevoir, c'est devenir apte à percevoir de plus en plus de choses qui d'abord n’étaient pas perçues). Deleuze contrasts the “spatial” or “frozen” notion of perspective to the “temporal perspective” that he seeks to emphasize: “It's time that acts as perspective” (C'est le temps qui agit comme perspective). The question, therefore, at the heart of Deleuze's perspectivism is how a perspective changes over time. Chamois goes through the early texts of Deleuze to show how the idea of the temporal perspective emerged from the concept of the structure Autrui. The “structure-Other” is best exemplified by someone else's emotive face—the frightened face of my friend, for instance. If I perceive that face while, say, I am laughing, another possible world would slip into my own: a frightening world penetrates my humorous one, and perhaps I should turn my head to see what danger may be en route. As in the case of the cube, my own limited perception is supplemented by others’ limited perceptions. The object of perception in this case, however, is not presupposed to be stable (the world is changing), and what I am about to see is not known in advance.But what, precisely, in the face of the other must I notice to become aware of the world she perceives? Deleuze does not explore that question in any detail, but Chamois reviews recent anthropological and psychological research that supplies some elements of a response. To confront the writings of Deleuze with relevant scientific data is fruitful. I must admit, though, that I was a bit embarrassed by the framing of the discussion: Chamois presents Deleuze's concepts as hypotheses demanding verification that they are “corroborated by the facts.” For Deleuze, concepts are inseparable from percepts and affects; as opposed to a hypothesis, a concept is true not because it correlates to a set of relevant facts but because it helps us to perceive other aspects of the world (percept) and induces us to act better (affect). Thus, the minute and rewarding analysis of Chamois should be complemented with an assessment of what we learn to focus on and of how we change our actions thanks to the perspectivism of Deleuze—in contrast to other forms of perspectivism (or indeed to other cosmologies).

Abstract In this brief introduction to part 2 of the Common Knowledge symposium “Whatever Happened to Richard Rorty?” the journal’s editor asks why Rorty was dependent on Thomas Kuhn, rather than Paul Feyerabend or the then-rising stars of “science studies” (such as Bruno Latour), for science-centered arguments to support his own philosophical neopragmatism. The editor cites a letter from Rorty sent to him in the early 1990s, suggesting that the differences between Feyerabend and himself were temperamental more than philosophical. Rorty enjoyed referring to himself and others like him as “we atheists,” by which he seems to have meant “those of us repelled by extravagant or overheated claims and absolutes.” His tendency was thus to pull back in what might seem to be bored alarm from treatments of science as superior, perilous, or in any essential way different from other forms of intellectual discourse. Rorty’s understanding of these approaches to science as temperamentally religious appears lately to have been vindicated by the emergence of the primeval goddess “Gaia” in the rhetoric of science studies.

Abstract In this autobiographical essay, written in 2018 and previously unpublished, the late György Konrád intertwines his memories as a child during World War II with more theoretical reflections (and unanswered questions) on the war, its repercussions, its lessons. Written in Hungarian not long before his death in 2019, Konrád goes back in this essay to the period following the arrest of his parents after the German invasion of Hungary. Aged eleven, he was able to escape the small town where he was born—and hence the fate of its entire Jewish community. “The others had been turned to ash,” in Konrád's chilling words. Seventy years later, he proceeds from these events to reflect on guilt and contrition, on sympathy and empathetic suffering, on how friends can become enemies during war, as well as on the Jewish heritage underlying Christian culture.

This very long book sets out to track and trace the working-class men and, less commonly, women who, against the limited expectations of their social position, learned Greek and Latin as an aspiration for personal change. The ideology of the book is clear and welcome: these figures “offer us a new ancestral backstory for a discipline sorely in need of a democratic makeover.” The book's twenty-five chapters explore how classics and class were linked in the educational system of Britain and in its cultural performativity: Is he a gentleman? Does he have Greek? became the paradigmatic questions, as the study of classics became a sign of cultural attainment and social exclusion. This book sets out to explore the counterstory of the cobblers and shepherds who, like Jude the Obscure, fought against society's oppressiveness to access classical learning.The book's breadth is exemplary. It looks at the issue through genres and media, through different communities and national identities, through the prosopography of ragged-trousered philanthropists, beggar-lecturers, body-building performers, and through other institutions and people who helped, including adult-education teachers, kind bosses, supportive vicars, and fiery communists. This breadth, and the fascinating research that it encapsulates, will make this book a fantastic resource for future scholarship: it outlines the richness of a field that has been all too rarely explored properly. If you do not know Stephen Duck, “the thresher poet,” or Hawkie, the crutch-wielding beggar who performed from the books he sold on the streets of Glasgow, then this book is the place to the meet them. The cast list alone is worth the entrance ticket.Yet this very breadth is also the source of the book's limitations. The sheer number of cases listed, treated at similar length and depth, repeatedly conceals the complexity and even the interest of individual figures or events. So, the numerous representations of Vesuvius in shows around London in the first half of the nineteenth century—after the discoveries at Pompeii—are duly noted as a source of excitement and knowledge about antiquity, but against the recent treatment by Clare Pettitt in Serial Forms (which came out the same year) this mere noting looks desperately thin. There is little discussion of how the characters themselves talked about or negotiated class. This deficiency is particularly important for someone like Charles Kingsley, who was very active in the Chartist movement but also became Queen Victoria's chaplain and the professor of history at Cambridge. There are hilarious descriptions of Kingsley's stammering engagement with the working-class leaders he actively supported, which capture how awkward the interaction of classes could be even and especially when the participants shared a goal of transformation. (Ed Richardson's Classical Victorians: Scholars, Scoundrels and Generals in the Pursuit of Antiquity is good on these moments of awkwardness but is one of several books whose absence from the notes looks pointed.) The authors list cases of working men who were picked up by fashionable society as poets or scholars, many of whom were dropped almost as quickly back into penury—but the telling description of such a case in Kingsley's Alton Locke is passed over, although it reveals an acute self-consciousness about such narratives in a best-selling novel.The very structure of the book tends toward listing cases rather than analyzing them in depth. It is not clear why “Shoemaker classicists” should take up a chapter, bar there having been some. Nor is it clear why some figures are not included. John Brown was an uneducated Scottish shepherd who taught himself Greek, Latin, and Hebrew. He was discovered by a professor, one John Pringle, when he went into a shop to buy a secondhand Greek Testament (though his own church thought this newfound and inexplicable linguistic brilliance suspicious or even satanic). Brown went on to write the wonderfully titled The Self-Interpreting Bible, which remained in print and sold very widely for more than a century after its publication in 1778—especially after it was championed by the evangelical preacher Charles Simeon. It is a pity that Brown escaped the authors’ net, but religion, one of the main reasons to learn the classical languages, is downplayed throughout this study, although its imbrication with classics is everywhere in evidence. The book, significantly enough, leads rather toward a rosy-eyed depiction of posh classical communists like Geoffrey de Ste. Croix and George Thompson, and other such heroes of the authors.The authors are much more at home in the years of ardent republicanism in the decades on either side of the turn of the nineteenth century and in the beginning of the twentieth century, when socialism and communism became embedded in British life. The last half of the nineteenth century, when classics really established itself institutionally as a discipline, and its revolutionary potential moved away from the zeal of the Romantic philhellenists into the artistic idealism of a Richard Wagner or the sexual freedom of an Oscar Wilde, are less adequately explored. The huge attendance at art galleries and the Great Exhibition at Crystal Palace as a route to encountering the past of antiquity in material form are barely addressed (Kate Nichols's Greece and Rome at the Crystal Palace would have helped); nor do shows like Astley's Circus get air time (Rachel Bryant Davies's Troy, Carthage, and the Victorians is revealing). It is particularly noticeable in such a voluminous study that there is no discussion of how turning to Greek was a crucial route for the self-understanding of what was considered transgressive male sexuality—and for a particular engagement between the classes. To understand the social force of classics requires a deeper appreciation of the dynamics between conservatism and transformation, disciplinarity and self-discovery. The big picture of how classics matters is lost in the gems picked out by the authors. Gems they are, but their facets need more attention and their setting a broader perspective.

Color FilmAs if from darkness, from gloom, from nothing —this moment is sewn through us like a thread —from above our shoulders — from primeval night —a shining river. A flying light.Onto the screen, onto a white calm,onto a cloth, onto the ground of spatial fields,it flies through the eyeless dark,it's as voluminous as seed or salt.And in this theater, where light's been banished,where even streetlight fades away completely,other light channels vibrate,and reflections wander through the eye.The curtains open up — the wings of a gate.The screen shifts our eyes and soulsso that we reach new perspectives,blown by the wind into the changingof colors, landscapes, rooms,we touch fire, earth, water.But no! Not those! And not like that!There's a wall here, the screen's always a wall.So, when the shades are opened and it's over,daylight pours through the aisles,we walk as if from underground corridors,we reach for cigarettes in our pockets.We exit like a flood, like a tide,and start talking again.O reality, blinding and sublime!We learn to love. We learn to see.StanzasThose years are slowly fading.Our house was by the railroad stationwhere engines covered in soot hammeredand invisible locomotives roared at night.Pedestrians passed by our porch,their moods dependent on loveand weather, coats and sorrowscarried over their shoulders, invisibleswords drawn but hesitant — as if awaitingtournament trumpets to launch their lives.The acacia (the one that was cut down later)grew according to a centuries-long spanof rain and sun and, like a lively banner,the windows reflected its green flash.And there was lilac, a skinny creature,diminished from the leaves to the roots.But once a year it flushed numb madlyand flourished although it was in pain.(It's worth mentioning the elderberry —dense, aromatic, and luminous,and how, after trembling on the bush,a rainbow surfaced through the drizzle.)Those lands were also full of winter —Christmassy and audacious, like an invasion,and a piercing whirlwind flew inthrough cold doorways and frozen windows.And in the lanterns oranges burned,buckets clanking through the morning,snow trampled after a blizzard,brown brick ovens roaring inside houses . . .Those years are fading like those legends,but who will weave us sweeter memories?Elegy for the SixtiesSummer, the smell of a soccer ball, elderberry, currant,couples made out in the evening bushes,and when the twilight descended beyond the river,the stony sidewalks smelled of warm rain.The soccer ball flew over antennas and linden trees,its body leather and cosmic.From grape-covered arbors, with pubescent sobs,songs of the prodigy Robertino spread through the world.The night thickened instantly, the ball meltedin the darkness, lamps lit up in the orchards and porches,a mysterious depth opened in a treetop,the shadows on the faded curtains spoke.The ball never came back: disappeared in the distance.Frogs croaked from neglected fountainsin the park where there were dances every night,where a saxophone wheezed, where they carried knives.The ball remained in the air, and the years unfoldedlike sandy seas, like salty deserts,and spooky carousels horrendously circledand creaked for us, as in a dream, until morning.The Museum of AntiquitiesHow the two of us walkthe cramped labyrinths of an old house! . . .Tapestries and trumpetsglorify an unknown couple,as if seeingour conspiracy:every toucha warm flash.And then again and againwe passin the mirrors.The clock with blazonsindicates, as always, it's two,and sneaking after usmaybe anguish, maybe a fugue . . .Passing portraitsand palanquinsan echo of footstepswalks with us.We disappeared somewhere for a long time(for two hundred years?For three hundred?).And when it gets dark,from unheated rooms(I seem to have behaved well,I did nothing wrong),into hot neon lightswe return forever.I carry you in my hand,and life is so vast . . .

Magritte et les philosophes, written by a Belgian semiotician, puts in dialogue some paintings by René Magritte with some thoughts of Kant, Hegel, Nietzsche, Wittgenstein, Sartre, Foucault, and, in a chapter on La condition humaine, even Plato. Painted in 1933, La condition humaine represents a garden as seen from a salon, but in the room there is already a painting on an easel that represents the same garden. Because the second-order painting (the painting in the painting) is placed in front of the window, we cannot see the full garden of the first-order painting. In it we see only the bottom of a hill and a part of a hedge, but in the second-order painting we see, in perfect continuity, the rest of the hill and the hedge. Thus we are inclined to think that the second-order painting covers exactly the reality it reproduces from the first-order painting and that, if we removed the second-order painting, we would see the same garden with a tree in the middle—a tree that for the moment we see only in the second-order painting.Therefore, some perceive in La condition humaine (and also in a similar painting, La belle captive) a parable of the transparency of painting. Opposing this position, Badir claims instead that “the pictures that are represented [that is, the second-order pictures] seem transparent; they give the sensation of transparency, . . . but their nature is totally different, and the painted landscapes in the [second-order] painting cannot make the representation [of the first-order painting] disappear.” We cannot superpose the painting over the reality to see whether the strokes of the painting cover exactly the lines of reality, since, if we do so, the painting gets between us and the garden. Still, we as observers cannot help but think that the second-order painting reproduces the reality behind it. But from where does that irresistible intuition come? Not from the resemblance between the picture and what it represents (since we know nothing about what is hidden by the picture), but from the continuity of the brushstrokes in the second-order painting and the lines of reality in the first-order picture.As in Plato's cave, in Magritte's room we have access to a semblance of reality, but in contrast to Plato, who regarded those shadows as pale imitations, Magritte offers us what may be a method of connecting semblance to reality less invidiously. The relation between the second-order picture and the first-order picture, between painting and reality, is not primarily a relation of analogy, since the analogy between the two orders is insinuated by other, nonanalogical relations—those of continuity and proximity between the brushstrokes of the painting and the lines of the garden. Even if Gilles Deleuze is not mentioned in Badir's book, this option seems to me to capture the gist of his critique of Platonism. When we are inclined to see a relation of analogy, Deleuze, like Magritte, wants us to pay attention to other, more diverse and more creative relations: nonanalogical relations that in some cases induce the sensation of resemblance.The title of Badir's book is Magritte and Philosophers, but it could just as well have been Magritte as Philosopher, because the classical philosophers he deals with play only a minor role as possible interlocutors for the painter. Magritte's thinking, as developed in his artwork, constitutes the main subject of this study. We learn while reading this book that painting can be a powerful tool for developing complex concepts and not merely percepts. Its argument may indeed be a critique of Deleuze's too-categorical distinction between the percepts proper to art and the concepts developed by philosophers.