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Conspiracy by the Numbers
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17381 |
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BOOK WORLD
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1 / 1990 |
2,207 Words |
| Author
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Edward N. Luttwak
Edward N.Luttwak holds the Arleigh Burke Chair in strategy at
York University's Center for Strategic and International
Studies and was 1989 Tanner Lecturer at Yale. He is author of
Strategy: The Logic of War and Peace. |
II PENDOLO DI FOUCAULT
Umberto Eco
Bompiani: 1988
509 pp.
FOUCAULT'S PENDULUM
Umberto Eco, translated by William Weaver
Harcourt, Brace Jovanovich, 1989
641 pp., $22.96
A. Umberto Eco teaches semiotics, the theory of the "signs" that permit verbal and nonverbal human communication. B. Eco in an Italian intellectual; that is, he belongs to a tradition that still rejects any narrow specialization (dine with Italian economists and hear them talk of Latin American literature; dine with Italian literati and hear them talk of Soviet economies). A + B = a propensity for verbal artifice and metaphorical fireworks in the display of esoteric knowledge. Upon hearing Eco's title one therefore imagines a verbal pendulum, the usual metaphor for swings of opinion. But no: Jean-Bernard Foucault's pendulum, which swings in the Paris Arts et M¨¦tiers conservatory to prove that the earth rotates, is made of solid brass - though there is artifice all right (a magnet attracts the iron concealed in the brass ball).
The reader who stays the course through 503 pages (Eco should send a generous gift to the two or three who will, worldwide) encounters the pendulum on line 1 of page 1 and finds it used as a gallows on page 473 in the penultimate chapter (barely counting the last chapter as a chapter, for it is only one page long). In between, he will have followed the meandering
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