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Delays in posting happen.  Why?  In my case, I agreed to serve as dean of humanities at NYU starting in September, which has already led to a surprise extra trip back to New York and a good deal of time on skype, phone and email learning the ropes.  I've experienced the rapture of art by Mondrian, Calder (heart-lifting wire sculptures and miniature-circus films), and Sol LeWitt at the marvelously refreshing Gemeentemuseum in the Hague.   LeWitt's slabs of bright color on the wall slammed me back into my body after a couple of days I'd spent floating in thought -- the best path back to the world after burying yourself in writing that I know of.  Then after those blasts of color, Mondrian's wonderfully meticulous designs that somehow give the impression of being both careful and carefree.  I'm participating in a series of conferences, most recently on Dionysius of Halicarnassus at Leiden University, admirably organized by Casper de Jonge.  My nights and a few very early mornings have been absorbed in novel-reading -- Hilary Mantel's Bring Up the Bodies, Elmore Leonard's Tishomingo Blues, H. F. M. Prescott's Man on a Donkey, and now Laurent Binet's brilliant HHhH (the perfect book to read while you're writing your own: hardworking authors take note!).  And drawn by provocative parallel lines of thinking in Axel Honneth, David Velleman, Cicero, Horace, Paul Allen Miller, Judith Butler and Simon Critchley -- the kind of crazily heterogeneous yet utterly sensible reading list I most love to build up -- I've dipped into Levinas.  From there it's impossible to resist following a few smoke-puffs of thought that relate to my next hoped-for project on ethics and literature:

The proximity of things is poetry; in themselves the things are revealed before being approached. In stroking an animal already the hide hardens in the skin. But over the hands that have touched things, places trampled by beings, the things they have held, the images of those things, the fragments of those things, the contexts in which those fragments enter, the inflexions of the voice and the words that are articulated in them, the ever sensible signs of language, the letters traced, the vestiges, the relics—over all things, beginning with the human face and skin, tenderness spreads. Cognition turns into proximity, into the purely sensible (Collected Philosophical Papers, 118-119).