Tim Barr’s links for July

Last week concluded an excellent and stimulating third Genealogies of Modernity Seminar.

“If ‘modernity,’ for example is an egalitarian project, we can say that, to a certain extent, we have started to become modern. But, the increased accumulation of wealth in the hands of a small segment of the world’s population and the shrinking of the middle class would seem to testify that the ‘modern’ project has stopped or even reversed.”

“The decline of academic humanities does not necessarily mean the end of the humanities. It could mean this (and thus the withering of humanity), it could also mean a new way forward. Humans are marked—as Hannah Arendt identified—by natality, the truth of birth and new initiatives.”

“The site’s logo of a tower is an emblem of modernity haunted by genesis. But as both the myth of Babel and the image of the gene remind us, the origin is not at the beginning, but in the middle.”

“The project recognizes that the stories we tell ourselves about the passage to modernity are many and often conflicting even within one discipline.”