Dylan and Cohen: Poets of Rock and Roll
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impetus to mass atrocity lies in a hubristic and ultimately totalitarian faith in human omnipotence. Jerome Kohn also focuses on Arendt, taking Bernstein’s (1996) Hannah Arendt and the Jewish Question as his starting point, but with the goal of explicating the faculty of ‘judgement’ and, in particular, how this human faculty can be said to contribute to the generation of a ‘common world.’ As with nearly all Festschriften, the essays and pieces that make up Pragmatism, Critique, Judgment are very diverse, offering analyses of disparate subjects from a variety of perspectives. There is a failing often observed in books of this sort: that the multiplicity of their contributions leads to a shallow, superficial effect. Yet this is not the case here. Rather, the diversity of this volume’s contributions happily mirror the diversity of the man they were collected to honour, a man, as Benhabib and Fraser rightly note, defined by his patient refusal to limit himself to one line of thought or to a single concern. Thus, Pragmatism, Critique, Judgment is certainly marked by eclecticism, but certainly this eclecticism is of the very best sort. Keith Breen Queen’s University Belfast, Northern Ireland, UK
Dylan and Cohen: Poets of Rock and Roll David Boucher Continuum, New York & London, 2004, 261pp. ISBN 0 8264 5981 1. The Political Art of Bob Dylan David Boucher and Gary Browning (eds.) Palgrave Macmillan, Basingstoke, 2004, 177pp. ISBN 1 4039 1682 9. Contemporary Political Theory (2006) 5, 342–346. doi:10.1057/palgrave.cpt.9300241
There’s no question about it: Bob Dylan is a fascinating artist. I use the word artist here fully in the knowledge of its ambiguity: an artist is one who makes art, but we also use the word artist these days when we really mean artiste — a performer, or entertainer. That Dylan is a performer is unquestionable — the man performs almost ceaselessly, to the extent that we must wonder whether or not he has any time for life beyond performance. He spends so much time on the road, endlessly touring, that one might conclude he has the proverbial hellhound on his trail. We might, less dramatically, see this incessant desire for life Contemporary Political Theory 2006 5
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on the road as a pathological need for contact with an audience. Yet Dylan is an intensely private man, and even his greatest admirers would have to admit that his performances can be cold, dispassionate, almost technical exercises in (re)working his material. The sense that Dylan is an intensely private man has not been dispelled by the recent publication of Chronicles, the first volume of his autobiography, which manages to be both a fascinating account of scattered periods of Dylan’s life, and at the same time a maddeningly superficial account of those periods, with little real revelation (hence, presumably, Chronicles and not Revelations!). Indeed, a close friend of mine, and a long time Dylan aficionado, believes that Chronicles is actually more fiction than autobiography, just another in the long line of masks
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