Friendship

1. The birth of art 2. The museum, art and time 3. Museum sickness 4. The time of encyclopedias 5. Translating 6. The great reducers 7. Man at point zero 8. Slow obsequies 9. On one approach to communism 10. Marx's three voices 11. The apocalypse is disappointing 12. War and literature.

"This is an extraordinary work of criticism - literary, cultural, political - but also of writing. It manages to weave together an almost journalistic directness and clarity with a philosophical-theoretical meditation of tingling complexity. Its appearance is an event of considerable importance and of great excitement, not simply because many of the essays in this volume are of enormous significance by themselves, but because the style and concerns of the book make it of interest to a broader reading public as well as academics." - Thomas Keenan, Princeton University