Bavarian gentians

Not every man has felt the pure delight
– the un-self-conscious delight – of sitting forward
suddenly upright and alert, a swallow of beer
still coating the back of his throat as he sits forward
alert on the stained and punctured leather cushion
Detroit soul hanging in the air unheard… it is not
as I say, every man who has known
the unthought joy of budging forward, alert,
glass in hand or close by, saying aloud
(and none too quietly), “Are you on crack?”
addressing the query to a book about the law.

Reach me a gentian, give me a torch… I’m currently reading A debate over rights, for the second and probably not the last time. Heaven knows if I’ll ever make a living – or even score a research grant – out of this stuff, but as reading matter goes I am really enjoying it.

More importantly, I’m liking the directions it’s leading me. To be perhaps more clear than I usually am on this topic, it’s been my conviction for a while that (firstly) there’s something deeply unsatisfactory – something less than fully or universally human – about models of subjecthood predicated on a Kantian model of the rights-bearing individual; and that (secondly) all currently available alternatives – whether they start from a utilitarian calculation of costs and benefits to society as a whole or from less hard-edged assertions of the rights of the ‘community’ – are even worse. We – particularly a Marxist ‘we’ – need something better than a Kantian liberal model of society as composed of individual bearers of jointly compossible rights, but in order to get there I believe we’ll need to wring the liberal model dry, or push it till it breaks. It’s going to be a big job – and, in fairness, reading Kramer et al in a pub may not seem like much of a contribution to it. But it is giving me food for thought in great quantities – even, or especially, those passages I strongly disagree with – which I appreciate greatly. Thanks again, Matthew and Nigel.