(8:10 PM) | Brad:

On Blogs & Blogging

On another occasion, said Austerlitz, Great-Uncle Alphonso took us up the hill behind the house on a still, moonless night to spend a few hours looking into the mysterious world of moths. Most of us, said Austerlitz, know nothing about moths except that they eat holes in carpets and clothes and have to be kept at bay by the use of camphor and naphthalene, although in truth their lineage is among the most ancient and most remarkable in the whole history of nature. Soon after darkness fell we were sitting on a promontory far above Andromeda Lodge, behind us the higher slopes and before us the immense darkness out at sea, and no sooner had Alphonso placed his incandescent lamp in a shallow hollow surrounded by heather and lit it than the moths, not one of which we had seen during our climb, came flying in as if from nowhere, describing thousands of different arcs and spirals and loops, until like snowflakes they formed a silent storm around the light, while others, wings whirring, crawled over the sheet spread under the lamp or else, exhausted by their wild circling, settled in the gray recesses of the egg boxes stacked in a crate by Alphonso to provide shelter for them. I do remember, said Austerlitz, that the two of us, Gerald and I, could not get over our amazement at the endless variety of these invertebrates, which are usually hidden from our sight, and that Alphonso let us simply gaze at their wonderful display for a long time. . . . Some had collars and cloaks, like elegant gentlemen on their way to the opera, said Gerald; some had a plain basic hue, but when they moved their wings showed a fantastic lining underneath, with oblique and wavy lines, shadows, crescent markings and lighter patches, freckles, zigzag bands, fringes and veining and colors you could never have imagined, moss green shot with blue, fox brown, saffron, lime yellow, satiny white, and a metallic gleam as of powdered brass or gold. Many of them were still resplendent in immaculate garments, others, their short lives almost over, had torn and ragged wings. Alphonso told us how each of these extravagant creatures had its own character, and that many of them lived only among alders, or on hot, stony slopes, in pastures on poor soil, or on moors. Describing their previous existence as larvae, he said that almost all caterpillars ate only one kind of food—the roots of couch grass, the leaves of sallow or barberry, withered bramble foliage—and they stuffed themselves with that chosen food, said Alphonso, until they became well-nigh senseless, whereas the moths ate nothing more at all for the rest of their lives, and were bent solely on the business of reproduction. They did sometimes seem to suffer thirst, and in periods of drought, when no dew had fallen at night for a long time, it was apparently known for them to set out together in a kind of cloud in search of the nearest river or stream, where they drowned in large numbers as they tried to settle on the flowing water. . . . During the day, said Alphonso, they slept safely hidden under stones, or in cracks in the rock, in leaf litter on the ground or among foliage. Most of them are in a deathlike state when you find them, and have to coax and quiver themselves back to life, crawling over the ground and jerkily moving their wings and legs before they are ready for flight. Their body temperature will then be thirty-six degrees Celsius, like that of mammals, and of dolphins and tunny fish swimming at full speed. Thirty-six degrees, according to Alphonso, has always proved the best natural level, a kind of magical threshold, and it had sometimes occurred to him, Alphonso, said Austerlitz, that all mankind's misfortunes were connected with its departure at some point in time from that norm, and with the slightly feverish, overheated condition in which we constantly found ourselves. On that summer night, said Austerlitz, we sat high above the estuary of the Mawddach in our hollow in the hills until daybreak, watching the moths fly to us, perhaps some ten thousand of them by Alphonso's estimate. The trails of light which they seemed to leave behind them in all kinds of curlicues and streamers and spirals, and which Gerald in particular admired, did not really exist, explained Alphonso, but were merely phantom traces created by the sluggish reaction of the human eye, appearing to see a certain afterglow in the place from which the insect itself, shining for only the fraction of a second in the lamplight, had already gone. It was such unreal phenomena, said Alphonso, the sudden incursion of unreality into the real world, certain effects of light in the landscape spread out before us, or in the eye of a beloved person, that kindled our deepest feelings, or at least what we took for them. Although I did not study natural history later, said Austerlitz, many of Great-Uncle Alphonso's botanical and zoological disquisitions have remained in my mind. Only a few days ago I was rereading that passage in Darwin he once showed me, describing a flock of butterflies flying uninterruptedly for several hours ten miles out from the South American coast, when evne with a telescope it was impossible to find a patch of empty sky visible between their whirling wings. But I always found what Alphonso told us at that time about the life and death of moths especially memorable, and of all creatures I still feel the greatest awe for them. In the warmer months of the year one or other of these nocturnal insects quite often strays indoors from the small garden behind my house. When I get up early in the morning, I find them clinging to the wall, motionless, I believe, said Austerlitz, they know they have lost their way, since if you do not put them out again carefully they will stay where they are, never moving, until the last breath is out of their bodies, and indeed they will remain in the place where they came to grief even after death, held fast by the tiny claws that stiffened in their last agony, until a draft of air detaches them and blows them into a dusty corner. Sometimes, seeing one of these moths that have met their end in my house, I wonder what kind of fear and pain they feel while they are lost.

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(10:31 AM) | Adam Kotsko:

Lewis Lapham Retires as Editor of Harper's

Although I really should be doing something other than blogging, I just read Lewis Lapham's latest "Notebook" column announcing his retirement as editor of Harper's, and I feel I need to say a few words about it. I have been reading his "Notebook" columns virtually every month since I was 17 -- part of what has become a satisfying monthly ritual, in retrospect one of the most stable, but at the same time destabilizing, aspects of my life. His style in those columns has grown increasingly artificial and even annoying over the years, but in his capacity as editor, he has seemed to me to show remarkable judgment and integrity -- something that cannot always be said, for example, of the editors of The New Yorker or (even worse) The Atlantic Monthly.

There's none of this cutesy formulaic stuff about how "both sides are wrong," none of these over-clever simple solutions, no hollow attempts at a posture of tough-minded "realism" -- instead, every month there are well-written, compelling, and above all memorable stories. Certainly there is a bias toward the "paranoid," but we are living now (and perhaps always have been living) in times that require a thorough-going paranoia.

I came to Harper's because of a desire to tap into the intellectual scene, inspired by a high school teacher who read The New Yorker religiously (and was apparently trying to work his way through all the back issues as well). There I read of George W. Bush's craven incompetence before he was even a presidential candidate -- not the only or even the best example of a time when Harper's was way ahead of the curve. And I think that over time, it changed me, not into a generic bleeding-heart liberal (the presumed only alternative to the sneering conservative I was in high school), but into an independent leftist. I recognize now that it was Harper's that laid the groundwork so that when I woke up and saw the news on September 11, 2001, my reaction was not a knee-jerk patriotism, but a deep-seated dread at what we good Americans were going to do to the rest of the world as a result of this. And it is a testimony to Lapham's integrity of an editor that I continue to be surprised and challenged by the stories appearing in that magazine -- no simplistic party line and no easy answers are being sold.

So I wish Mr. Lapham the best of luck in his future endeavors -- and it does sound like he'll be busy, with book deals and with a new quarterly. I have not been able to find out who the new editor is going to be, but I hope they find someone who can tarry with the negative as well as Lewis Lapham has.

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(Adam Kotsko has asserted the moral right to be identified as the author of this post.)

(12:49 AM) | Ben Wolfson:

Tuesday Hatred: adde parvo parvum magnus acervus erit

In his preface to his translation of The Trial, Breon Mitchell says of George Steiner that he suggested "that a translation that improves upon the original is the greatest betrayal of all". I was reminded of this maxim when reading the Critique of Judgment (as Werner Pluhar translates the title of the third critique; the other translation of it I have calls it the Critique of the Power of Judgment). In addition to rendering "Vorstellung" as "presentation" instead of "representation" (as, in my understanding, it is more or less always rendered), he inserts numerous words and phrases into the translation, presumably to make it easier to follow. At one point he inserts a whole sentence, as in this bit from §4:

But in order to say that health is good, we must also use reason and direct this health toward purposes: we must say that health is a state that disposes us to [attend to] all our tasks. [Perhaps in the case of happiness, at least, the agreeable and the good are the same?] Surely everyone believes that happiness, the greatest sum (in number as well as duration) of what is agreeable in life, may be called a true good, indeed the highest good[?]

This is outrageous! Not only is the "[attend to]" wholly superfluous (elsewhere, he inserts "[meant]" in expressions using an obviously purposive "to be", or an obviously purposive "for", as in (from §16) "if only the building were not [meant] to be a church"—the "[meant]" adds nothing), but, if the transition between the first quoted sentence and the last is not obvious in the German, then perhaps it just shouldn't be obvious in the English. If Kant turns out to be a less than perfectly graceful writer, well, few people will be surprised. Another passage that roused my not inconsiderable ire, from §7 (I stopped noting them after the Analytic of the Beautiful):

Thus we will say that someone has taste if he knows how to entertain his guests [at a party] with agreeable things (that they can enjoy by all the senses) in such a way that everyone likes [the party].

Now, again, the first addition seems, to the extent that it's harmless, superfluous, but the second one clearly changes the meaning of the sentence. Without that addition, it would mean that everyone likes the way in which they're entertained; with it, it means that they like the party. Maybe there's some textual evidence that Kant meant the latter. If so, though, why not just translate it that way? There are all sorts of slightly meaning-changing additions of this sort; it's quite annoying. More than that: it's hateful. (Oddly, in one case where there is apparent textual or philosophical evidence that Kant meant something and wrote another, Pluhar doesn't make the change: footnote 29, on page 59, indicates that Kant meant "universal" where he actually had written "general". Textual emendation is an inexact science, of course, but I'm surprised that such restraint was exhibited here, when the rule seems to have been profligacy elsewhere.) In sum: hatred!

Here are some other things I hate: I hate being single. I hate Craig Segall for having suggested that I'm single at least in part because I am, as he put it, an "insufferable pedant". I hate that shockwave's email chess program is broken.

I leave you with the following quotation from the third critique in, yes, Pluhar's translation, from the "General Comment" following the Analytic of the Sublime:

…to shun people either from misanthropy because we are hostile toward them or from anthropophobia (fear of people) because we are afraid they might be our enemies is partly odious and partly contemptible. There is, however, a different (very improperly so-called) misanthropy, the predisposition to which tends to appear in the minds of many well-meaning people as they grow older. This latter misanthropy is philanthropic enough as regards benevolence [Wohlwollen], but as the result of a long and sad experience it has veered far away from a liking [Wohlgefallen] for people. We find evidence of this in a person's propensity toward reclusiveness, in his fanciful wish that he could spend the rest of his life on a remote country estate, or for that matter (in the case of young people) in their dream of happily spending their lives with a small family, on some island unkown to the rest of the world—all of which novelists and writers of Robinsonades use so cleverly. Falseness, ingratitude, injustice, whatever is childish in the purposes that we ourselves consider important and great and in the pursuit of which people inflict all conceivable evils on one another, these so contradict the idea of what people could be if they wanted to, and so conflict with our fervent wish to see them improved, that, given that we cannot love them, it seems but a slight sacrifice to forgo all social joys to avoid hating them.

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(Ben Wolfson has asserted the moral right to be identified as the author of this post.)

Monday, April 17, 2006

(12:03 AM) | Anthony Paul Smith:

Monday Picture Blogging: Books Can Be Cute Too.

This is a section of the bookstore I work at. I always thought I'd like working a bookstore, but it is still retail and carries with it all the horrors that any retail shop near a major sports arena/yuppie drinking spot would. I have a set of phrases that I use to get me through each transaction:

Customer walks up to counter. "You all set?"
Take books, ring up. "That will be $10.90. Out of $20.00?"
While making change. "Would you like a bag?"
Hand them change. Bag books."Thanks so much. Have a good night."
If at any time the customer attempts conversation I do one of two things: 1)If it's something I care about and the person isn't insane I will talk to them about it. 2) If the person is the other 98% I mumble something incoherently until they are uncomfortable and leave. It's worked so far.



These are my bookshelves that hold all my philosophy, religious studies, theology, and assorted other humanities books. Before Hayley packed them up we had another bookshelf that had most of our fiction and some of her social work stuff. I kept some of it out for me to read in some fantasy future (Gabriel Garcia Marquez mostly). I noticed the other day that I don't refer to this set of objects in the world as a library but simply as "my books". I wonder why that is. This may not be big enough to be a library yet, but I also feel like, with many of these books, I've poured a lot of time and energy into them. Maybe this has allowed them to take on a kind of singularity that I don't want to reduce to the collective "library". Or maybe I just don't want to sound like a pompous ass. At least until I get that red smoking jacket and leather chair.

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(Anthony Paul Smith has asserted the moral right to be identified as the author of this post.)

Sunday, April 16, 2006

(8:55 AM) | Adam Kotsko:

Easter Post

Just like last year, I have failed to go to church on Easter. Last year I did at least squeeze in Holy Thursday -- since then, I have also managed to duck my head in on a Tuesday afternoon, a Saturday evening, and a Friday afternoon, separated by about three or four months each time. I am, however, listening to Mozart's Requiem, which I used to do every Sunday morning after going to church Saturday evening. I also plan to read some Augustine.

Later this evening I will go have an "Easter dinner" with some friends from CTS, the seminary of course being the closest thing to a church that I have (and the same could be said of many students during their sojourn there, even the ones who are pursuing MDiv degrees).

UPDATE (SUNDAY LATIN MIND-TEASER!!!): Augustine, De Trinitate V.1.1:

Ab his etiam qui ista lecturi sunt ut ignoscant peto ubi me magis voluisse quam potuisse dicere adverterint quod vel ipsi melius intellegunt vel propter mei eloquii difficultatem non intellegunt, sicut ego eis ignosco ubi propter suam tarditatem intellegere non possunt.

Here's an attempted translation, literalistically:

From these ones who are about to read those things, I ask that they may forgive when they will have perceived me better to have wanted to than to have been able to say [or else: not to have been able to say clearly what I meant -- is volo dicere in Latin the same as vouloir dire in French?] because either they understand the same things better or do not understand because of the difficulty of my expression, just as I forgive them when because of their slowness they cannot understand.

Is this at all approaching right? (I perhaps would have gotten to this point much faster had I gone more slowly through the last few chapters of the grammar -- but who knew that they actually used perfect infinitives?)

What kind of pisses me off is that I spent an hour trying to decode Augustine's throat-clearing before he gets to the actual content of the chapter.

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(Adam Kotsko has asserted the moral right to be identified as the author of this post.)

Saturday, April 15, 2006

(12:40 PM) | Adam Kotsko:

On Taking Blogs Seriously

Blog traffic is important, because one wants to have a guaranteed audience for one's thoughts.

Therefore, one must post every day, so that people do not lose interest. But then one ends up writing a lot that is not worth reading.

And also, one must make friends with other bloggers, who can help generate traffic. But then one is tempted to be overly cautious in what one is saying, and can in fact get caught in the middle of wars between two friends or "allies." And so one ends up reading and writing a lot that is not worth any amount of time or attention.

If one wants a large audience while simultaneously being a "public intellectual" of some kind, one must try to be a political blog, because our intellectual culture is entirely dominated by politics (in the most reductive sense of the word) and everything must have a political pay-off. But then one ends up pandering to an impatient audience that already knows what it thinks and will complain if you write what you actually want to write -- unless one sincerely wants to write, say, hackwork propaganda for the Democratic party. (Some people really do want to do that -- and in general, they do a fine job of it. I couldn't do better, and I wouldn't propose myself as their replacement, no matter how much traffic I could generate thereby.)

We live in serious times, so serious blogs must address serious topics in order to be taken seriously. Blogs are reshaping our political culture in an unprecedented way -- into a flurry of clipping and commenting and posturing and "snark," crowding out all hope for genuine reflection.

Or is that just the same thing? I don't know anymore -- I can't remember anything, don't want to remember anything, that happened more than a week ago.

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(Adam Kotsko has asserted the moral right to be identified as the author of this post.)

Friday, April 14, 2006

(8:18 PM) | Adam Kotsko:

Give my regards to Holbo Theory

At John Holbo's request, I have read the infamous Mock-Platonic Dialogue, his most ambitious statement of his general theory of the Higher Eclecticism (e-mail him for a copy). It is a long dialogue, and as befits its genre, its communication often proceeds by indirect means. Yet, perhaps naively, I am going to comment on it, as if I already knew what was meant by a "text," "reading," "understanding," "dialogue," "Platonic," and "mock."

I should state from the outset that although I am one of the foremost critics of The Valve, I do not belong to an English department nor do I have any particular emotional investment in Theory -- at least not in all senses of the word. I will say, provisionally, and against Holbo, that there are not two, but three:

1. Critical thinking in general, with a greater or lesser degree of systematicity and sophistocation (Holbo's "small-t theory")
   
2. The lackluster, jargony scholarship most often churned out by American literature professors
   
3. The sources drawn upon in said lackluster, jargony scholarship, including but not limited to certain prominent continental philosophers

Thus, both Derrida and an overworked Assistant Professor of English at Governor's State University can be considered Theorists. This is equivocation. Though he notes, by way of inoculation, that he will be accused of trying to discredit continental philosophy on the cheap, that does not prevent him from actually trying to discredit continental philosophy on the cheap -- mainly by claiming that Theory is really philosophy, and it's therefore wrong to "exclude" analytic philosophy from the Theory canon. The hypocrisy of this charge could not be more transparent. And in any case, running with the "Theory is just philosophy" thing, it is not contradictory to say both of the following:

1. In a certain sense, we all do philosophy all the time, insofar as philosophy means critical inquiry, etc.
   
2. The following is an anthology of philosophy that does not include the long conversation you had that one night in your dorm room.

In point of fact, the so-called "canon" of Theory is extremely wide-ranging -- including even mutually contradictory views. And as "Socrates" notes, the category of Theory is open-ended, presumably now including Zizek and Hardt/Negri (who are opposed to each other and are both opposed to certain other bodies of thought included within the canon). The fact that one points out that both Deleuze and Quine do "philosophy" does not indicate that the speaker has some kind of totalizing ambition that would pull off the presumably impossible feat of mixing Quine and Deleuze into a heady epistemological tonic. And were one to gain a thorough mastery of even a handful of the thinkers represented in the Norton Theory anthology, one would objectively be an extremely learned person.

I will gladly admit that the gestures toward scientificity or toward a sophistocated professionality founded on the practice of Theory have not panned out. And thank God for that! And I will gladly admit that many of the apologiae for Theory have amounted to little more than the wagon-circling of a discipline that has never been and never will be coherent or straightforward -- even sticking with the "traditional" approach, I find it difficult, nay impossible, to create a rigorous concept that would include spending five years writing a study of, say, William Blake and then spending most of the rest of one's career teaching basic composition.

The excitement surrounding Theory was ultimately a resurgence of enthusiasm for philosophy, which is always at its strongest when it is no longer in its "proper place." It might have been obnoxious in its revolutionary or messianic rhetoric, but it really did represent a revolution. The move toward professionalization and the rearguard apologetics prove what we had already learned by the time Theory first arose: that the institutionalization of philosophy leads inexorably to a tedious scholasticism. This appears to be the case whether one is talking about an institutionalization of philosophy based on exclusion (Actual Existing philosophy departments) or on over-extending one's reach (Actual Existing Theory). Theory failed insofar as, in a certain sense, it succeeded -- it let its love go. That doesn't mean that it wasn't a genuine liberation of thought, at least for a time. And who knows? Something like that may even happen again. Let us hope so -- after all, in our anti-intellectual society, intellectual passion, even if naive or obnoxiously grandiose, is certainly to be welcomed.

That, I suppose, is my objection to John Holbo's general theory of Higher Eclecticism: I don't know whether he hopes so too.

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(Adam Kotsko has asserted the moral right to be identified as the author of this post.)

(11:13 AM) | Brad:

My Current Enemy: A Confession

I'm sure everyone was woefully heartbroken & beside themselves when I failed to post on my designated day, Wednesday, but the Weblog offices were not burned to the ground so the rioting must not have been too bad.

As you know, Fridays here are set aside for confessions. Sins come in all sizes and colors and flavors -- personally, I prefer tall, dark, and mango -- as do sinners. I think this is an especially good thing. Some confessions can be summed up in a comment, others, such as this one, only in a blog post.

For you see, I must confess that I have an Enemy. His name, which matters not to you, and matters to me only because he is My Current Enemy, is A. B. Okay, that's not his name, and it might not even be his initials, but that's hardly the point. What're you gonna do, track him down and beat him up for me? C'mon, grow up. Anyway, not so long ago, but before I started my doctoral work, he was my deparment's golden boy, back before the insurgence of infidel agnostics and Muslims and the subsequent de-emphasis on CHRISTIAN theology. Personally, I don't have a problem with his philosophy or theology -- frankly, I hardly even know, nor do I care at all, what they are. No, my problem goes much deeper than that, which in this case means that it's more superficial. My problem is -- as I told him, at first by accident (not realizing he was nearby) and then by a redacted repetition when he asked over my shoulder, eyebrows raised (oh, how I dislike that!), "What did you just say?" -- that he is an "arrogant tit."

If you can imagine the sort who feels compelled to bombastically and dramatically voice his opinion through declarative fiat, not unlike some bloggers I suppose, normally just before the conversation is over, not unlike some commenters, you'll be moving in the direction of an A. B. The fact that my enemy is slightly misogynistic and homophobic does not help ingratiate him to me or my department -- "my" department in this instance does not denote the department as a whole, but those who agree with me.

Damn. I just now realized that I've already spilled the beans about the story's climax -- lest you've already forgotten, or are just skimming this post because it's not written by Adam, I'm referring to the part where I finally explode, though that's to make the scene far more violent than it really was, and refer to A. B., in so many words, as a bloviating boob. A bit of context may be necessary, though, to understand the (so-called, but obviously exaggerated) explosion, to see it in its insubstantial glory. You see, I've no doubt that A. B. "knows his stuff" (a quote from a friend of mine who somehow likes him), but his preening hauteur really confuses me. I guess I should expand this a bit, since you've no idea who I'm talking about specifically, and publically affirm my conviction that the hubris shown by much of academia is a bit silly, considering that its cultural status today doesn't come anywhere near the societal value it claims to represent. (Two things pop into my head right now: (1) how poorly my academic friends are paid, not to mention the debt I've accrued to join their ranks; and (2) the curious fact that so many these same friends (and me???) hold the most unfeasible of political persuasions -- such being the power of theory!!) More importantly, and this is back to the specific criticism of My Current Enemy, because the community of academics is so small it makes me think that anybody, e.g., A. B., who goes out of his way to alienate so many people in that community is not only social-stuntedly arrogant, but is uncommonly ignorant. Actually, come to think of it, the redacted repetition to which I alluded above, was something along the lines of "[you are] an uncommonly ignorant tit," but I can't be sure whether I invoked the mammary gland the first or second time around. After all, the diatribe was a bit long, and I'm sure parts didn't make sense at all, considering my inability to say (or write) consecutive simple sentences without violently including wildly deviating parenthetical asides; but I've definitely had the presence of "tit" confirmed by a third party who has long referred to A. B. in private by other (male) body parts.

Hence, My Current Enemy. And thus is my confession.

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(Brad has asserted the moral right to be identified as the author of this post.)

(8:00 AM) | Adam Kotsko:

Friday Afternoon Confessional: Stockholm Syndrome

I confess that I didn't realize until yesterday that it was Holy Week. I confess that my lack of piety has stemmed primarily from a desire to minimize outside demands on my time and that I may well end up going to church more regularly when I move to the new place in Lincoln Square, which is only a block away from a Catholic church. I confess that even though I am not a big fan of the way things are run in the Catholic Church, I don't see the use of joining another denomination unless there is some really good reason for it.

I confess that I can see the horizon of never having to take a class again, and it looks pretty good. I confess that in a certain way, I look forward to the exam stage, because a lot of the stuff I'll be reading is stuff I've "been meaning to read" but might never otherwise read. But I'm getting ahead of myself here, which is the worst possible thing for a grad student to do.

I confess that yesterday I got a ticket for parking on the street during a street cleaning, and I'm not angry or upset about it, even though I was in Hyde Park Tuesday through Thursday and had no opportunity to move my truck, nor indeed to learn of the impending street cleaning. When I objectively break a law that makes sense, getting a ticket is not a big deal (although the money end of it is annoying) -- it's just getting tickets for things like parking on the street as such that get to me, that is, tickets that seem to work at a more basic ontological level.

I confess that my experience of giving an in-class presentation Wednesday night has given me some confidence that I might someday experience at least some moderate success in teaching. (I've heard that this will apparently be required at some point if I'm going to be a professor -- they don't really give more detail than that.) I confess that I used the chalk board for the first time in said presentation.

I confess that this weather makes me much happier. It's nice when it doesn't feel like the world itself is against me. I confess that that feeling has been central to my experience as a born-and-bred Midwesterner and that sometimes I take perverse pride in the bad winters that I've lived through -- but they seem to not be doing the "harsh winter" thing anymore.

I confess that I too commonly use Stockholm Syndrome to explain everyday events.

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(Adam Kotsko has asserted the moral right to be identified as the author of this post.)

Thursday, April 13, 2006

(8:05 AM) | Old - Doug Johnson:

Render and Submit

I grew up in fundamentalist Baptist circles, and for all my fondness of philosophy, theology, and radical political thinking, there is something about me that is still Baptist. For all the movements I've made intellectually, the Bible still functions as a powerful authority for me. What that means is something like Hans Küng's suggestion following Rahner in Infallible? (arguing against biblical and especially Papal infallibility - it lost him his license to teach from the Vatican) that the Bible is norma normans non-normata, the normer of norms not itself normed.

Whether one takes Scripture as authoritative or not, there are two passages from the New Testament that have been especially influential in political history, and negatively so. In spite of Jesus' execution after the manner of political rebels and in spite of the radically subversive spirit of Pauline theology sensed by Taubes and others, two particular statements, one from the mouth of Jesus, one from the pen of Paul, have proved to be conservative bully whips ever since: "Render unto God what is God's and unto Caesar what is Caesar's" (Matthew 22 and parallels) and "Submit to the governing authorities" (Romans 13). I am thinking of writing an article under the title of this post eventually, working through the history of interpretation of these passages and ending with my particular exegesis of them.

There are any number of ways that more radical political Christians have dealt with these passages. My favorites are Barth's relinking of Romans 13 with the end of chapter 12 which includes a citation of Jesus' "love your enemies" and Dorothy Day's argument that once you give everything to God, there is nothing left to give to Caesar. Both readings, however, can be seriously improved upon by more careful attention to the details of the text. Anyone else have favorite interpreters of Render and Submit?

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(Old - Doug Johnson has asserted the moral right to be identified as the author of this post.)

Wednesday, April 12, 2006

(12:01 AM) | Old - Doug Johnson:

If I Had Gyges Ring ...

... I'd sit in today on Discard the Name's oral comps with Stanley Hauerwas, Michael Hardt, Ken Surin and Reinhard Hütter. Surin basically left Duke's religion department for the lit. department years ago when he no longer bought the Resurrection and fully embraced Deleuzian immanence. Hütter is a German Lutheran turned down-the-line Thomist who is not given to letting things slide and who will not be fond of Discard's marriage of Deleuzian ontology and Yoder. Sparks could fly since Hütter is perhaps Hauerwas' most prized student while Yoder is absolutely the most important figure in Hauerwas' canon. Then again, perhaps it will be unremarkable and just another hurdle crossed.

Either way, good luck Discard!

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(Old - Doug Johnson has asserted the moral right to be identified as the author of this post.)

Tuesday, April 11, 2006

(12:06 AM) | Ben Wolfson:

Tuesday Hatred: suffer your passion to grow upon you

I hate the rain. Rain is no good for anything.

I hate several things involving bicycles. I hate that I see so many people riding around who manifestly have no idea when to change gears, and to whom it may never have occurred that the different gears are useful in different situations, and have not just been put on their bikes to weigh them down. I also hate being caught behind people who are biking too slowly (which means, slower than I am biking at that moment). This also applies to walking: what is it with pedestrians who think that they can proceed at a leisurely pace? What, exactly, is the idea here? Get the fuck out of my way! Here's something else I hate: these bikes, these bikes I see, that haven't been tended to in all their born days, with chains that go "squeak squeak squeak" all day long. Have some pride, owners of these bikes! And don't even get me started on people who bike on the wrong sidewalks! WRONG WAY, ASSHOLE! The preceding sentence is one I have to restrain myself from saying aloud to these persons as I (going in the correct direction) pass them. Now, I'm not exactly Pedal McBikeride, but cripes. (Cripes!)

I saw someone dicing an onion with a paring knife the other day. (What's more, it was my paring knife!) A paring knife is manifestly not the right knife with which to dice an onion, or to slice celery—something else I saw the very same bat-person do with the very same bat-knife (at the very same, or at least a closely following, bat-time in the very same bat-kitchen!). I hate witnessing an otherwise fine person fall so far from knife-wielding excellence.

I hate the locution "the reason is because". No! The reason is that, bitch! I hate myself for having inadvertently locuted that locution the other day.

I hate this sneaking suspicion I have that something's not quite right with the leadership of this country, but I'm having trouble articulating just what I think is going wrong.

Finally, I hate Adam Kotsko. What's up with this "teaching yourself languages" shit? You're making methe rest of us look bad.

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(Ben Wolfson has asserted the moral right to be identified as the author of this post.)

Monday, April 10, 2006

(5:04 PM) | Adam Kotsko:

On Not Nuking Iran

What this "nuke Iran" idiocy illustrates is that the system of nuclear deterrence is no longer effective in the case of a rogue nation (such as the United States) striking preemptively at a state without nuclear capacity. Since this is the only system that we've come up with to stave off a nuclear holocaust, perhaps it would be worthwhile to consider reworking it. The idea that leaps to mind is that all nuclear powers other than the United States could sign a treaty effectively taking non-nuclear powers under their wing.

To wit: In the event of a preemptive nuclear attack by the United States, all the other nuclear powers would massively respond, in concert, against the United States. This would, at least in theory, reestablish a situation in which the use of a single nuclear weapon would automatically trigger the end of the human race, thereby effectively taking the nuclear option back off the table. Then all of us Americans would get to avoid being in a situation of living in a country whose leaders killed millions of Iranians in a nuclear holocaust on the off-chance that the Iranians might otherwise have gotten nuclear weapons within the next decade!

In short, it is unacceptable that the United States currently has nuclear weapons. Maybe under most circumstances, "we" could be trusted not to use them. But our electoral system sometimes produces strange results.

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(Adam Kotsko has asserted the moral right to be identified as the author of this post.)

(11:16 AM) | Adam Kotsko:

Language Learning

[Anthony did his best to do the Monday Picture-Blogging for today, but software problems prevented him. As I am currently procrastinating on writing a summary of Caputo's Prayers and Tears of Jacques Derrida, I might as well post something.]

I only have real experience so far with learning to read a language, but so far I've "done" a few: French, German, and Latin. I understand that it's better to learn how to speak and understand them as well, but since I have very little opportunity to practice such skills, it seems difficult to maintain them. Maintaining reading skills is easy, however, given the areas that I am studying. (Some sweet day, however, I will begin my lessons at the Alliance Française de Chicago -- perhaps next semester, enough to bring me up to speed for my début at the AAR/SBL.)

Given that that's my situation, then, what is the best way to go about learning a language? What seems to work? First, one must recognize that there is an infinite qualitative difference between completing grammar exercises and actually reading texts. Inevitably, once you complete the grammar book and set to work on a text that is not prepared specifically for people who are trying to learn the language, you will be stopped cold within the first three sentences -- usually, in my experience, within the first three words of the first sentence. This is frustrating, and it is always tempting to think that if you had just paid closer attention during the grammar portion of the class, or if you had memorized the vocabulary words by rote (something I never, ever do, nor do I ever make flashcards -- but maybe I should?), this would not have happened. That is not actually the case, however. Getting more and more hung up on the details of grammar (without any idea how often these points of grammar ever really even come up), or on vocabulary (without any idea how relevant these words will be for the kinds of texts you'll be reading) would only have produced unnecessary delays and, in the worst case, actually increased the existential despair associated with the first major roadblock.

Thus, my first point is that if you want to learn to read a language, get through the grammar section as quickly as possible. All those people who tell you you should take years of language courses, etc., are lying to you. Take three months, tops, to get through a grammar book (as you acquire more and more languages, this should take less and less time, at least if you're staying within the same language grouping like I am). Do the exercises, etc., to the extent that they don't piss you off. Then, since you want to read texts, you should, you know, read texts.

This leads to the second question: What is the best approach to reading texts? Should I produce a translation of them? Should I go for quantity or for quality? The first point is that you should read something you actually care about, even if it's "hard" (within reason, of course -- you shouldn't start with Ulysses if you're learning English for reading). As for issues of speed, I'm torn. On the one hand, the "plowing" method has much to recommend it, but also has some drawbacks. I found it fairly helpful for French, but then, I was starting my French-reading project during a summer when I had theoretically infinite time to put into it -- plus I was working through an additional grammar book, building vocabulary in a systematic way (though not with flashcards). I ultimately produced a polished translation of a difficult text, all while keeping up reading and all that, so that now I have very solid French reading skills.

There's not always time for all that, however. I didn't have time to do that for German, which I found more difficult overall anyway, and as such the "plowing" method led to a huge amount of frustration. I only started to develop any real confidence with German when I started up my "devotional exercises" of reading through Benjamin's Theses several times. This seems to me to be the best way to go -- take a relatively short text, then go through it several times. You'll pick up the vocabulary better that way, and, crucially, you will more quickly come to the point where you are reading rather than haltingly translating in your head and looking up the same word in the same sentence three times because it's so hard to keep all the pieces in place.

Of course, this is "cheating" because you're not really sight-reading (the ultimate goal), but it's great for your confidence to be reading something in the language with a certain degree of fluency, pretty early on -- and it frees you to see how the grammar fits together more easily, as well, without a lot of this moronic stuff of consciously labelling every noun as "masculine dative" or whatever. The endings, etc., become associated with a meaning and a function rather than a spot on a chart.

With Latin, I have gone straight to the repetitious reading of short sections, based mainly on the demands of the class for which I learned Latin, and I have been really happy with it during this short period. I have probably just gotten lucky in this respect, but I feel like the passage Marion chose for this week happens to illustrate a really broad range of grammatical points, so that's been helpful. (This is kind of luck of the draw: I feel like Benjamin was better in terms of really putting the grammar to work than my initial reading text from Nietzsche was.) But most of all, after reading the same two-page passage over the course of several days, I've gotten a bit of a preview of what it's like to read Latin fluently. That is really important, because during my German learning, I despaired of ever reading German at more than a sentence an hour.

The method of plowing through multiple texts is the best way to go if you're studying for a translation test for grad school, though. But after you take the text, try the "devotional exercise" approach. It can take as little as fifteen minutes to a half hour a day, but it makes a huge difference.

Finally, assuming that you want to learn the four primary "prestige" languages for academic studies in the humanities, this seems to me to be the best order:

1. French
   
2. German
   
3. Latin
   
4. Greek

French seems to me to be the easiest language for English-speakers to learn, especially since learning it for reading brackets the incredibly ridiculous pronunciation issues at first. (It's a good idea to eventually pick up some language tapes or, ideally, Rosetta Stone, to get to the point where you can say the words in your head somewhat instead of just decoding.) So that just gets you used to learning to read another language "as such." German is a good choice for the next one because it introduces the concept of case and flexible word order, but the verbs are really easy -- the irregular verbs have kind of the same "feel" as English verbs, and the system of tenses is pretty simple. You need to have the idea of case down pat for Latin, because it seems to do a lot more work in Latin than in German (if that makes sense), and because the verbs are much more complex. Finally, although I have not gotten to Greek yet, I do get the impression that having Latin under your belt is a big help in terms of the grammar, plus there's the issue of the alphabet.

Yes, that just happens to be the order the I did them. I'll probably try Greek this summer, so I'll let you know how that goes.

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(Adam Kotsko has asserted the moral right to be identified as the author of this post.)

Sunday, April 09, 2006

(8:47 AM) | Adam Kotsko:

Did you know