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  Cultural Comment The Coruscating Moral Vision of André Glucksmann By  November 11, 2015 Save this story The French intellectual André Glucksmann enjoyed telling listeners, “I cannot tell you what to be for. But I know what to be against.” PHOTOGRAPH BY MARION KALTER / AKG André Glucksmann, who died on Monday night, in Paris, was one of the great figures, and master thinkers, of contemporary French life, with the irony that much of his greatness depended on his passionate dismantling of the idea of “great men” and “master thinkers,” which he thought had disfigured European life for far too long. His death, at age seventy-eight, is more than painful; it is disconcerting and disorienting. If you were lucky enough to know him, it was always still possible to imagine taking one more Métro trip to his large, book-filled bohemian apartment in the north of Paris, and, with his brilliant wife, Fanfan, engaged alongside—in an atmosphere always somehow more Chekhovian than French—takin...

  Culture | Poetry and humanitarianism What can poetry say? An evening of worthy poetry reveals the limitations of the medium Save Share Sep 23rd 2011 | 2 min read By E.H. | LONDON THEODOR ADORNO famously declared in 1951 that to write poetry after Auschwitz was “barbaric”. Mindful of the limits of words, generations of poets still strive to use them to describe the impossible. “Poetry and the State”, an event that took place on September 20th, was haunted by this problem: how to put into words events that leave you speechless. Organised by the poetry initiative “Poet in the City”, the magazine Modern Poetry in Translation and Amnesty International, the evening aimed to show the relevance of poetry in making “a public statement with a universal reach”. The five poets who gave readings were connected, in some way or another, to humanitarian causes. They included Timothy Allen, a former aid worker, Zuzanna Olszewska, a fellow from Oxford who conducts anthropological studies with f...