The Man of the Circular Ruins

Extremely interesting and very clear writing. Excellent blog post. Thank you.

>Surprising to me to read a story of someone growing in the midst of the second world war, lost his father to Auschwitz; further down the story he's super annoyed that some of his students had a website collecting his writings. To me it almost feels that those two worlds are completely disconnected, yet here we are.

Of course they're disconnected. The latter protest came about after the man was elderly, having spent the remainder of his life in isolation well after he'd gone "completely insane", to borrow the article's phrasing.

Considering the toll life must've taken on him, there's really no surprise there.

Maybe, there is an epistemological common ground: As an anarchist, he may have thought of science as letters sent to humanity, letters telling of insight and discovery. It was important that these writings were respected as letters, sent with an intent and to a specific addressee. (Compare the dispute about the IHES and its sponsoring by the French army.) Later, as these insights become more and more private, these became letters to be never sent, eventually extending to include his former work. (Figuratively speaking, had they been sent in error? Was there an error in the addressee? Anyway, they were not to be republished.) In the light of this, collecting these writings, while ignoring any of the circumstances under which they had been written and how they were intended, is quite the same kind of scandal, as it had been at the IHES. I guess, this is exactly the kind of importance, you can still cultivate and rely on, even, when your very life is at extreme odds.

Fascinating read, thanks for submitting this.