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Michael Wood
- Dicta and Contradicta by Karl Kraus, translated by Jonathan McVity
Karl Kraus had many enemies, but his friends and admirers are something of a liability too. They insist on his unremitting probity and passion for justice, but his justice was all his own – there was no one else on the bench. ‘His vision was never unsteadied by scepticism,’ Erich Heller wrote. Walter Benjamin asserted that ‘Kraus never offered an argument that had not engaged his whole person. Thus he embodies the secret of authority: never to disappoint.’ It’s easy to see why unsteady, disappointed people would be attracted to such a figure, but the more general virtues of unfailing dogmatism are not so clear. Jonathan McVity, in an afterword to his excellent translation of a volume of Kraus’s aphorisms, says that Kraus ‘miscalculated badly in the Dreyfus Affair’. A remorseless critic in Kraus’s own mould might well argue that if you were wrong about Dreyfus it wouldn’t matter too much what you were right about.
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Michael Wood teaches at Princeton. His most recent book is Literature and the Taste of Knowledge.
Other articles by this contributor:
Four Thousand, Tops · Headlong by Michael Frayn
At the Movies · ‘No Country for Old Men’
At the Movies · Bergman and Antonioni
At the Movies · ‘Lust, Caution’
At the Movies · Marlon Brando
What Henry didn’t do · ‘The Master’
At the Movies · The Lives of Others
Cheerfully Chopping up the World · Film theory
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