ABSTRACT
This chapter describes the relationship between morality and style. It begins with the function of the fashionable as an epithet. The word itself is an insult, usually hurled from the supposed right to the supposed left. The title of Alan Sokal and Jean Bricmont's diatribe against what they call 'postmodern intellectuals' abuse of science' says it all: Fashionable Nonsense. To have style is, precisely, to be fashionable. Thus, style is used in an absolute sense to denote a 'fashionable air, appearance, deportment'. The question of morality and style, and the role of the word fashionable in connecting them, or in disrupting what we think they might have to do with one another. There is no more fashionable art form than the maxim, and it balances, precisely, on the point of style, as on the heightened temporality of the timely/timeless, and on the tipping point between wit and judgment.
