Reseña del libro "Contra Todo"
Mark Greif, siguiendo la tradicion de grandes intelectuales americanos como Lionel Trilling o Susan Sontag, se replantea en este libro todo lo que damos por supuesto: por que hacemos ciertas cosas y no otras? De verdad creemos en lo que hacemos, o solo seguimos un patron aprendido en el que ni siquiera acabamos de confiar? El libro tambien aborda cuestiones sociales clave (la redistribucion de la renta, el fenomeno YouTube, la politica internacional de los Estados Unidos) a la hora de conformar nuestro mundo futuro, y nos ofrece, ademas, una cronica personal del movimiento Occupy Wall Street en la que Greif reivindica la figura de Henry David Thoreau como ejemplo de pensamiento independiente y radical a la hora de enfrentarse a los retos de la vida social y cotidiana. / Over the past eleven years, Greif has been publishing superb, and in some cases already famous, essays in n+1, the high-profile little magazine that he co-founded. These essays address such key topics in the cultural, political, and intellectual life of our time as the tyranny of exercise, the tyranny of nutrition and food snobbery, the sexualization of childhood (and everything else), the philosophical meaning of Radiohead, the rise and fall of the hipster, the impact of the Occupy Wall Street movement, and the crisis of policing. Four of the selections address, directly and unironically, the meaning of lifewhat might be the right philosophical stance to adopt toward ones self and the world. Each essay in Against Everything is learned, original, highly entertaining, and, from start to finish, dead serious. They are the work of a young intellectual who, with his peers, is reinventing and reinvigorating what intellectuals can be and say and do. Mark Greif manages to reincarnate and revivify the thought and spirit of the greatest of American dissenters, Henry David Thoreau, for our time and historical situation.
