Stella Bloch and ‘Up to Date’ Java

Abstract

A warm day in June in the year 1923. The scene: a third-floor walkup on East 34th Street in Manhattan, the apartment of John Murray Anderson, the ‘dandy impresario’ behind ‘the most compact, streamlined, witty, and modern’ of musical revues, the Greenwich Village Follies (Kendall 1979: 178). The fourth ‘edition’ of the Follies is due to open in September, and Anderson is busy plotting with a creative team he has assembled in his apartment — which also functioned as the impresario’s office — as he took a leisurely bath.

In this substitution in which identity is inverted, this passivity more passive still than the passivity conjoined with action, beyond the inert passivity of the designated, the self is absolved of itself. Is this freedom?

Levinas, Otherwise than Being, or, Beyond Essence, 2006: 115