Have you noticed how there aren’t any new French intellectuals any more? There was a ver- itable flood in the late ’70s and early ’80s: Derrida, Foucault, Baudrillard, Kristeva, Lyotard, de Certeau … but there has been almost no one since.

By the end of the twentieth and beginning of the twenty-first century, it is the one emotion that is considered intrinsically illegitimate. We have legal categories like “hate speech,” “hate crimes.”

We seem to have reached an impasse. Capitalism as we know it appears to be coming apart. But as financial institutions stagger and crumble, there is no obvious alternative. Organized resistance appears scattered and incoherent; the global justice movement a shadow of its former self.

In Nablus, every street seems to have a men’s hair salon. There are literally thousands of them. Most stay open until at least 2 at night; often other than mosques they’re the only places lit up and open at two at night; and it seems any time you pass by one, there are likely to be four or five nicely coiffed young men clustered inside, watching someone get a haircut.

The Japanese translation of "Hostile Intelligence: Reflections from a Visit to the West Bank" by Tatsuhiko Haga

Nobody thinks much about bureaucracy anymore. But in the middle of the twentieth century, particularly in the late Sixties and early Seventies, the word was everywhere.

Since David’s death in 2020, much of my life has been entwined with his vast archive of published and unpublished texts, hundreds of notebooks, audio and video recordings, and correspondences. David once said that the real care for a “great man” begins after his death, and is almost always done by women. Now I know what he meant.