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  • Memoriam in the Interregnum:William Vaios Spanos, 1924–2017
  • Guy Risko (bio)
On the Ethical Imperatives of the Interregnum: Essays in Loving Strife From Soren Kierkegaard to Cornel West
William V. Spanos
Palgrave Macmillan
www.palgrave.com/us/book/9783319478708
140 Pages; Print, $69.99

Here, at the terminal point of my intellectual life, I have, in the spirit of the late Edward W. Said's last writings, honed it into my late style.

—William V. Spanos

When I was seventeen years old, I was introduced to the work of William Spanos as a high school policy debater, an activity and identity that he would always view with skepticism. As a teenager just discovering the seductive potentiality of critical theory, I found that, by learning to appreciate his particular brand of the "radicalization of Heidegger," Bill's criticism of American Empire resonated with me. Bill's work, especially as it circulated in the world of high school and college debate, showed me the importance of unearthing and confronting the logics American Exceptionalism. His books and essays broadened my global sense of self towards the immense ontological violence precipitated by the control of thought. For a working-class teen in the suburbs of Philadelphia, and later a first generation college student at the University of Pittsburgh, Bill's critique of even the institutions he inhabited taught me that the world we live in asks for passive thoughtlessness. His work encouraged me to put pressure on those who would tell me how to think. On the Ethical Imperatives of the Interregnum continues that critique by pushing inward to Bill's relationships and memories that helped support the growth of a man "shattered" by his youth.

Bill experienced his early life dis-placed, which he described in his previous memoir In the Neighborhood of Zero: A World War II Memoir (2010). As a son of Greek immigrants living in New England, Bill entered adulthood forcefully, conscripted into World War II in 1943. A participant in the Battle of the Bulge, he endured the horrors of the firebombing of Dresden from the basement of a storage building in a Nazi POW labor camp. In his memoir, Bill recounts the horror of not just the firebombing itself, but the aftermath that, for him, illustrated the unspeakable no-where of be-ing. In writing about his own experience in World War II, he was able to resist a fundamental apparatus of American exceptionalism: the memorializing of the war and those that fought. Speaking about his memory of the war, he reflects that "American young men, like me . . . had only a minimal sense of the history that precipitated the war . . . it was not grand narratives of our nation's eventual victory that motivated us; it was primarily survival in a larger totality that was beyond our experience to think." Bill's resistance to memorializing history, especially the apparatus of capture associated with the "Greatest Generation" nomenclature, undergirded his intellectual career. He viewed such justificatory mechanisms with such skepticism that it delayed the very writing of the memoir for decades, fearing that his work would be amalgamated into the discourse he aimed to subvert. In the wake of In the Neighborhood of Zero, at the terminal point of his life, he found his voice in writing in a language reminiscent of his intellectual forbearers.

On the Ethical Imperatives begins by trying [End Page 16] to balance conflicting parts of Bill's mission: to share in his memories of errant, Dionysian figures that formulated his critical outlook, but to do so without falling prey to the Apollonian drive to memorialize. He puts this balance in stark language: "my purpose . . . has not been to monumentalize them. Such a fixing of their being would be the kiss of death. Rather, it is to remind the world that the revolutionary kind of thinking" was "always already new." Bill was always aware of these contradictions between order and errancy in his life and work, a fact made especially clear in the essay about his close friend John Gardner and the naming of Bill's youngest son, Adam. In naming his son...

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