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Dispite being one of the best players in his day (and indeed, he continues to be very strong to this day -- still at 70+ years old in the top 50!), the annotations are at a level class players like myself can understand. Variations are kept to a bare minimum in the book.
This book is very similar to Yasser's Winning Chess Brilliancies, but more games, and a little less depth. Victor just gets to the point rapidly, explains the nuances of the position, and moves on.
This book was also named BCF book of the year, for I think good reasons. A third volume in this series should be out soon, I look forward to it, and will purchase the first volume as well.
Viktor Korchnoi - two times challenger to the title of World Champion - has been around for ever, he has played and beaten the stars of the 1950s through to players who are stars now at the beginning of the 21st century.
Here Korchnoi has chosen 50 of his games with Black from 1952 to 2000, he stresses that he is rather old-fashioned about his black opening strategy, not being a regular exponent of the King's Indian or the Pirc or other 'nihilistic' ways of playing with Black.
This is the second volume of a two volume work and there is no doubt: this is the most eagerly waited book of recent months; the first volume last year won the British Chess Federation's Book of the Year award: the decision was unanimous. If you are a chess player you can't live without this book.
Furthermore this OLMS edition is very well done.
Vitanza's book then asks its readers to receive this gift without reserve--that is, to read by way of a general, not restricted economy. If we receive thus we will have accepted his challenge to reconsider desire and to revisit our (erotic) relation to others in/through language. Vitanza's gift to us is wrapped in the immediate challenge to overcome the History of Rhetoric as it has been canonized via the Negative; but of course, as we continue to unwrap the text, we are also offered the gift, the challenge to overcome our own subjectivity--a subjectivity based on bad faith and ressentiment, subject to k(no)w. And if we accept this challenge, we will find ourselves attending to the kai(e)rotic moment wherein desire desires desire, not its fulfillment, and where it luxuriously, unreproductively, uselessly spasms via "rherotics" (24): subjectivities without reserve, language without reserve, histories without reserve.
Georges Bataille argued that during the twentieth century, the intimacy between self and other had become merely a relation of self and things, demanding returns and profits; likewise, today, at the end of the twentieth century, we could argue that the relation between self and other has become merely a relation of self and information. The question of/for desire within this economy is always: "What is the pay off?"--Answers, of course, which risk nothing, but merely keep exchanges within the restricted economy of supply and demand. In contradistinction to this economy, Vitanza asks us to desire dangerously, without reserve, without return, as a sovereign. The figure of the Vitanzian Sovereign requires that one sacrifice both the self and the other. This risk appears to the subject as irresponsible, apolitical, and apathetic. But it is a risk that must be made, if we are to overcome the negative and its death-grip on all we know of sociality, community, and the other. We are subjects, subject to the Negative. But the sovereign contrariwise is a figure of (non-positive) affirmation.
As we come to risk ourselves and the other, we will have become sovereign and will be able to accept the book for what it "is" a sovereign lover's gift: a sacrifice which expects no return, which is by its very definition useless splendor--and hence divine--as in "impossible, yet there it is" (Bataille, Erotism 206)--as in the schizophrenic's excessive table (Deleuze and Guattari, Anti-Oedipus 6). Of this gift--the one given without reserve--Barthes's writes: "The gift is not necessarily excrement, but it has, nonetheless, a vocation as waste: the gift I receive is more than I know what to do with, it does not fit my space, . . . it is too much: 'What am I going to do with your present!'" (76). Indeed, what are we to do with Vitanza's gift? Nothing! and everything. We will ask, not what does it mean, what desire can it fulfill, what use can it serve, but we will ask: how to give?
Whether Vitanza's "book" can really be called a book is an interesting question. Its very structure disrupts and challenges the sense of authority and closure that is typically expected from the book as a medium. Vitanza's performative prose enacts language in a way that exposes the hypertextual playfulness beneath the discursive imperative. That is, it both addresses and *performs* a linguistic overflow that "civilized" discourse cannot finally expel or absorb. So, while certainly progressing forward, it also proceeds to "steal and fly"--as one of his most important influences (Hélène Cixous) might put it--to steal and fly seemingly *everywhere*, in all directions at once. Through his light manipulation of typography--his unusual and/or illegal diacritical marks--and his joyful skewing of grammatical/mechanical injunctions, Vitanza manages to write a "book" that is no book, that in fact acts as a showcase for language's perpetual mis/behavior--indeed, this "book" exposes and affirms the "authority" not of the author but of the language that takes the author hostage.
The bottom line: _Negation, Subjectivity, and The History of Rhetoric_ is a linguistic tour de force, a must read that will leave no reader unmoved.
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Recipes are fantastic and easy to do , pictures and lay out are simply wonderful.
You really will have a taste of Brazil with this book
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Kojeve, in his discussion of Strauss's comments, will elucidate his peculiar mixture of Hegelian, Marxist, and Heideggerian philosophies in order to defend the unity of 'Tyranny and Wisdom' at the end of history, with some amusing asides on Strauss's tendency to build a philosophical cult. Modern tyranny (Stalinism) is rational, or wise, because it leads to the universal, homogenous state. The state in which everyone -- people, politicians, and philosophers -- will be fulfilled. This state, where the people will be safe, politicians renowned, and philosophers enthralled by the rationality of it all, will happen as a result of historical action, or work. We will be living in a world that we made with our own hands. And, as the conflicts of history weed out ever more irrationalities, we come to feel more and more at home in this fabricated, technological world. This leads to less conflict and more fulfillment. Which means, as Kojeve said elsewhere, "History is the history of the working slave." This leaves some of us, Strauss included, wondering if the only thing more wretched than being a slave would be living as a contented one.
Strauss comments on all this in a reply that briefly starts out with a discussion of Eric Voegelin but then turns to the main event. Strauss wants to know how anyone will want to live in this world where everyone thinks the same, feels the same, wants the same. A world in which anyone who thinks/feels/wants differently, as Nietzsche said, goes voluntarily to the madhouse. A world that as Reason is woven into it, Humanity is pushed out of it. His prescription is a return to the ancients, who, as the Hiero shows us, knew that philosophy both could not and should not be realized in time. Otherwise, Humanity will end up engulfed by its own artifacts. Or, as Ernst Juenger remarked, "History is the replacement of men by things.
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