Melancholic Freedom

by Alex

“Melancholic Freedom: Agency and the Spirit of Politics”:http://www.amazon.com/Melancholic-Freedom-Agency-Spirit-Politics/dp/0195319826/ref=sr_1_2?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1214896943&sr=8-2 by “David Kyuman Kim”:http://www.conncoll.edu/academics/web_profiles/kim.html looks like a great book. That said, I do feel the blurb from Cornell West (his dissertation supervisor) is a bit excessive:

David Kyuman Kim is the leading philosopher of religion and culture of his generation. The breadth of his synthetic imagination, the scope of his scholarly knowledge and the depth of his poetic wisdom is amazing. How rare it is to see such delicate style, nuanced analysis and robust vision in one figure and text in our compartmentalized academy and terrorized society. His dark hope summons us!

I must admit that no one on my dissertation committee thought that I offered hope of any sort, much less the dark sort that summons people.

More seriously, though: although I do not know Kim, his name and the fact that he has a Th.D. from a div school… am I being stereotypically reductive in suggesting that we have found someone to be the Korean Christian version of Patchen Markell? Perhaps it is presumptuous of me to guess at Kim’s faith, but this combination of subject position, obvious intelligence, and philosophical projects sounds really enticing to me. So… I will have to check it out.