In the past decade or two, as Silicon Valley has emerged as the most dynamic sector of the economy, our ideas about aesthetic fulfillment have undergone a subtle transformation. Our models of creativity are no longer struggling loners like painters or novelists. They aren’t media figures, like pop stars or movie stars. They’re not performers of any kind, for the most part—definitely not dancers, stage actors or classical musicians. More than anything, they’re skillful managers and team builders—entrepreneurs like Steve Jobs, architects like Zaha Hadid, chefs like Redzepi. Their mode of work—sociable, engaged, attentive to design, profitable—is immensely appealing, especially to those stuck alone at a desk or computer console.
Hence the attention to soil, grass, mushrooms and wood. In its refusal of culture in the name of nature, Redzepi’s cooking reminds me not so much of anything Nordic, but of Teutonic philosophy. In “The Origin of the Work of Art,” Martin Heidegger describes a pair of old peasant shoes vibrating with “the silent call of the earth, its quiet gift of the ripening grain and its unexplained self-refusal in the fallow desolation of the wintry field.” The earth represents, to Heidegger, a state of being before humans and before language. It’s a kind of philosophic no-place at the other end of an experiential abyss. The difficulty of thinking our way into it is the reason it’s so hard to answer the question of what it’s like to be a bat—or a toad or a rock or a clump of grass. Poets fascinated by the nonhuman realm, like Seamus Heaney and Francis Ponge, try to put this “silent call” into words. In his own peculiar way, Redzepi is attempting to do the same thing, only instead of trying to give it voice, he wants to put it on a plate.
So this is Redzepi’s wish: to put a piece of ground in front of a diner and have him figure it out. And once you got over your dismay at being served moss on a plate, maybe you would. His cooking is an attempt to go beyond the world of language and culture and into the world of pure things. And like any real artist, Redzepi articulates desires we didn’t even know we had—not for nutritive powders or engineered foams, but for contact with another way of being. To taste the essence of rocks and trees, to creep through the forest like a snail, to sleep in the earth like onions, with our feet in the air.
Noma, Jacob Mikanowski ThePointMag
Intellectuals, no less than politicians, respond to crises based on what they think they learned from earlier ones. It is difficult to see what is genuinely new in an emergency, harder still to admit ignorance in the face of it. Our instinct is to assume that the unforeseen confirms our picture of the world rather than the necessity of altering it. The temptation to settle old scores is particularly hard to resist.
Charb and the radical French republicans keep restaging the eighteenth- and nineteenth-century battles against the Catholic Church, which was a powerful religious institution wielding authority. There is no such institution in Islam, just a community of communities of believers bound together in a collective relationship with God
Manent’s analysis rests on the distinction, inherited from Montesquieu, between a society’s explicit formal legal order (les lois) and the implicit mores, habits, and beliefs that bind it together (les moeurs). This distinction, he believes, helps us to understand why the integration of Muslims in Europe has proved so difficult. Secular Europeans today think largely in terms of the principle of individual rights and no longer accept the authority of social moeurs. They would prefer to forget their continuing debt to Christian cultural assumptions, such as the autonomy of individuals and the moral priority of inner experience.
According to Manent, Muslims, on the other hand, assume the priority of communal morality over individual liberty, an assumption most societies in most times and places have also made throughout history. He therefore finds it understandable that Muslims see modern ideas of freedom as just another set of cultural moeurs, and feel condescended to by Westerners delivering lectures on human rights.
Taking these two incompatible perspectives as given, Manent thinks that the practical challenge European countries face today is to find ways to maintain the independence of law while also recognizing the moeurs that Muslims consider legitimate.
in Manent’s view, Muslims understand something secular Europe doesn’t: strong moeurs binding a community trump abstract political principles held by unconnected individuals. (This was also the fundamental thesis of Houellebecq’s Submission.)
In Kepel’s view it was these events that crystalized a new consciousness among the third political generation of young French Muslims, who have become susceptible to the allure of fundamentalism in a way previous generations never were. Though in language, education, and pop culture they are highly assimilated, they are disengaged from domestic politics and identify increasingly with the conditions, real and imagined, of Muslims worldwide. A demonstration against the National Front will not bring them into the streets but one in opposition to Israeli bombing of Gaza will. They see themselves less as Muslims of France than as part of a global religious proletariat suffering from Islamophobia and colonialism.
over the past decade the Internet nursed the development of both an online right-wing “fachosphere,” expressing nationalist anger, and a mirror-image Muslim “jihadosphere,” websites that are astonishingly similar, down to the expressions of vicious hatred of Jews.
- How the French Face Terror, Mark Zilla
Hence the attention to soil, grass, mushrooms and wood. In its refusal of culture in the name of nature, Redzepi’s cooking reminds me not so much of anything Nordic, but of Teutonic philosophy. In “The Origin of the Work of Art,” Martin Heidegger describes a pair of old peasant shoes vibrating with “the silent call of the earth, its quiet gift of the ripening grain and its unexplained self-refusal in the fallow desolation of the wintry field.” The earth represents, to Heidegger, a state of being before humans and before language. It’s a kind of philosophic no-place at the other end of an experiential abyss. The difficulty of thinking our way into it is the reason it’s so hard to answer the question of what it’s like to be a bat—or a toad or a rock or a clump of grass. Poets fascinated by the nonhuman realm, like Seamus Heaney and Francis Ponge, try to put this “silent call” into words. In his own peculiar way, Redzepi is attempting to do the same thing, only instead of trying to give it voice, he wants to put it on a plate.
So this is Redzepi’s wish: to put a piece of ground in front of a diner and have him figure it out. And once you got over your dismay at being served moss on a plate, maybe you would. His cooking is an attempt to go beyond the world of language and culture and into the world of pure things. And like any real artist, Redzepi articulates desires we didn’t even know we had—not for nutritive powders or engineered foams, but for contact with another way of being. To taste the essence of rocks and trees, to creep through the forest like a snail, to sleep in the earth like onions, with our feet in the air.
Noma, Jacob Mikanowski ThePointMag
Intellectuals, no less than politicians, respond to crises based on what they think they learned from earlier ones. It is difficult to see what is genuinely new in an emergency, harder still to admit ignorance in the face of it. Our instinct is to assume that the unforeseen confirms our picture of the world rather than the necessity of altering it. The temptation to settle old scores is particularly hard to resist.
Charb and the radical French republicans keep restaging the eighteenth- and nineteenth-century battles against the Catholic Church, which was a powerful religious institution wielding authority. There is no such institution in Islam, just a community of communities of believers bound together in a collective relationship with God
Manent’s analysis rests on the distinction, inherited from Montesquieu, between a society’s explicit formal legal order (les lois) and the implicit mores, habits, and beliefs that bind it together (les moeurs). This distinction, he believes, helps us to understand why the integration of Muslims in Europe has proved so difficult. Secular Europeans today think largely in terms of the principle of individual rights and no longer accept the authority of social moeurs. They would prefer to forget their continuing debt to Christian cultural assumptions, such as the autonomy of individuals and the moral priority of inner experience.
According to Manent, Muslims, on the other hand, assume the priority of communal morality over individual liberty, an assumption most societies in most times and places have also made throughout history. He therefore finds it understandable that Muslims see modern ideas of freedom as just another set of cultural moeurs, and feel condescended to by Westerners delivering lectures on human rights.
Taking these two incompatible perspectives as given, Manent thinks that the practical challenge European countries face today is to find ways to maintain the independence of law while also recognizing the moeurs that Muslims consider legitimate.
in Manent’s view, Muslims understand something secular Europe doesn’t: strong moeurs binding a community trump abstract political principles held by unconnected individuals. (This was also the fundamental thesis of Houellebecq’s Submission.)
In Kepel’s view it was these events that crystalized a new consciousness among the third political generation of young French Muslims, who have become susceptible to the allure of fundamentalism in a way previous generations never were. Though in language, education, and pop culture they are highly assimilated, they are disengaged from domestic politics and identify increasingly with the conditions, real and imagined, of Muslims worldwide. A demonstration against the National Front will not bring them into the streets but one in opposition to Israeli bombing of Gaza will. They see themselves less as Muslims of France than as part of a global religious proletariat suffering from Islamophobia and colonialism.
over the past decade the Internet nursed the development of both an online right-wing “fachosphere,” expressing nationalist anger, and a mirror-image Muslim “jihadosphere,” websites that are astonishingly similar, down to the expressions of vicious hatred of Jews.
- How the French Face Terror, Mark Zilla
No comments:
Post a Comment