Wanderings

I try my best to stifle my USian tendency towards seeing everything in apocalyptic terms, but Glenn Beck’s perverse speech last weekend at the Washington Mall puts me in mind of Yeats.

I can’t shake these words:

The best lack all conviction, while the worst
Are full of passionate intensity.

and there’s something deaf in me, even as I write this, something unable to react as I believe I should.

I remind myself we’ve been through worse bouts of xenophobia and “purification,” and sometimes transcended it magnificently.

But that all happened during this country’s ascension, not during its decline. So I’m not sure there’s good precedent.

Aging gracefully seems to depend on an acceptance of oblivion, and a happy marvelling at the diversity that keeps life roaring on.

But there is no way to communicate, in political terms, a mature vision for this country without running afoul of our need for pep-rallies.

the falcon cannot hear the falconer

There’s that deaf feeling, circling and yet pin-pointed.

The figure of the dangerous lover crops up in blockbuster movies, pulp fiction, harlequin romance novels, as well as more literary fiction and films. He is a staple figure of our collective imagination and his presence seems almost synonymous with romance–excepting perhaps feature films of the romantic comedy variety.

Strange then, that this book by Dr. Deborah Lutz should be the first and only one I’ve run across to explore and dissect this figure, his character and history.

An academic book of this nature could easily become just an exercise in collating footnotes and obscure material; instead, Dr. Lutz opts for a more meditative, essayistic approach to her subject, something akin perhaps to Didion, Barthes, or Benjamin. The method fits the subject matter well as the dangerous lover could be considered part of our collective dreamscape and therefore benefits from a study that ambles through our cultural sensorium and recollections in a fashion largely informed and choreographed by the character of the dangerous lover himself. What is thrilling about the book is its ability to deal in Heidegger as well as harlequin romance without missing a beat or without making these different literary realms seem incongruous or affected.

While at times the arguments in Dr. Lutz’s prose can meander disconcertingly as it explores her topic, it nevertheless is guided by a prevailing wind of deep, thoughtful, and studious reflection on her subject–a subject that, whether we like to admit it or not, has an incredibly deep hold on our inner life, whether in our romantic attachments, our sense of self, or our consumption of entertainment.

I found it very well worth the read for its ability to both broaden my understanding of various literary genres, as well as helping me understand aspects of my self and self-development in new and interesting light.

Romance teaches us that love, like philosophy and thinking itself, is never completed. Each declaration of “I love you” is finite and utterly singular, yet in its abundance of meaning, it means both everything and nothing. To say “I love you” points to a singular place and time, with a unique and always changing self that speaks, an “I” and a “you” whose status is always uncertain. In this sense, its meaning is so fleeting; we might say that we can never agree on a meaning for this utterance. Yet, everyone knows what love means; to love is, as Nancy writes, to exist as such: to think, to be , to philosophize. The “I love you” is what can be repeated, perhaps must be repeated. “Love in its singularity, when it is grasped absolutely, is itself perhaps nothing but the indefinite abundance of all possible loves, and an abandonment to their dissemination, indeed to the disorder of these explosions” (Inoperative Community, 83). The prodigiousness of the “I love you” is that, while it ends a particular love story, it also stretches beyond it, indicating a future “I love you.”

About A Border Passage, my friend writes me:

“it’s a memoir
it was very interesting how she went over
the history of the middle east
and what being ‘arab’ means

her critique of said’s orientalism was interesting

as well as her comment on the state of feminism in the
US in the 70s
…
if you ever read it,
i’d love to know what you think of it
for me, the good part came at the very end
in the beginning, i was worried she was
going to be another amy tang (joy luck club)”

I am sending this for Christmas to three people close to me. The time to take the time for something like understanding.

Regarding the current situation with the United States’ undeclared war on Iraq, perhaps a quote from the German National Socialist (Nazi) Hermann Göring is in order:

“Naturally, the common people don’t want war, but after all, it is the leaders of a country who determine the policy, and it is always a simple matter to drag people along whether it is a democracy, or a fascist dictatorship, or a parliament, or a communist dictatorship. Voice or no voice, the people can always be brought to the bidding of the leaders. This is easy. All you have to do is to tell them they are being attacked, and denounce the pacifists for lack of patriotism and exposing the country to danger. It works the same in every country.”

—Hermann Göring, at the Nüremberg trials after WWII

My cynicism about computers and the power hungry ways of operating system (OS) manufacturers have tended to temper my willingness to enter the “PC vs. Mac” debate. However, I have just read the most articulate and beautiful exposition as to why Mac OS X is so much better than Windows, and I have found it reverberating in unexpected ways in terms of how I think about all the little things I immerse myself in daily. Compared to what computers should be, both OS options (as well as Linux, Solaris, etc.) are quite terrible. But within the general failings, there are differences, and significant differences. Some differences might even lead to inspiration. An excerpt:

Ever feel like so much that passes for ‘thoughtfulness’ are just sound-bytes of gathered cultural trinkets, or that much of what passes for scholarship is a narcissistic exercise in second-hand verbiage? Well, there’s always Pataphysics. The collection of essays in Pataphysica is as good an introduction as any. Might as well give it a try, or a push.

Hermeneutics as Politics takes note of something most American academics seem (tone) deaf to: The political nature of continental philosophy. Our continuing fear of genuine political thought leaves us all the more vulnerable to appropriating the latest in critical theory like so much fashion. This book tries to address this synaptic deafness, and in so doing perhaps takes an unnecessarily strident tone of argument. But I can overlook the slightly paranoid edges to what is otherwise an excellent book. Stanley Rosen’s analysis of post-modern hermeneutics from a politico-historical perspective is nothing short of brilliant. The chapter “Platonic Reconstruction” is worth the cost of the entire book.

The Gift of Death is a rare glimpse into Derrida’s attachment to, and estrangement from religion. His discussion of Kierkegaard, while somewhat facile, provides a safe entryway for him to discuss Abraham, and how faith and the gift share a unique, and (dare I say) an-economic relation. The book builds on and presupposes many of the themes in Given Time: I. Reading it together with Stanley Rosen’s Hermeneutics as Politics is a treat.

Godric is one of my favorite books because it is a unique entry point into a consciousness and mindset that is difficult for us to understand or respect: Creaturely-ness and repentance.It’s language is a brilliant achievement in it’s own right.

In an age of disaffection, Taylor’s serious and reverent study Sources of the Self seems strangely out of place. In it he offers us an exploration of self-hood which draws as much upon a phenomenology of the self as it does upon a genealogy of the self. This enormous undertaking is unified by his concern with values in the shaping of the self. Perhaps the central argument of the book is that one must value to be a self. Valuing can take the form of denouncing any values which conflict with others already held (however hidden the already held values may be), and it can also take the form of implicitly or explicitly affirming some set of goods. The implicitness/explicitness of moral values lies at the root of some of our society’s core concerns, as do the issues of identity and cohesion. Both issues are related. All sides carry useful knives.

Taylor’s contention is that the modern self is not one which has banished all values or goods from intellectual pursuit, but rather one which has suppressed any articulation of goods in the interest of furthering the goods of universal benevolence, freedom and the affirmation of ordinary life. Through his genealogy of the modern self he shows how the rejection of goods does not come about arbitrarily, but rather follows inevitably from the “progress” a culture wants to make. This progress comes about through sifting through those goods which have been seen to be destructive or unsatisfactory or most importantly, inhibitive of the goods one wishes to promote. In other words, the naturalism so prevalent today is not, as commonly conceived, a discarding of primitive value assertions for the sake of the intellectual possibility and epistemological semi-certainty that values may not exist, but rather because the destruction of hyper-goods enhances the goods of freedom, universal benevolence and ordinary life.You can read the entire paper here: http://brokenhill.net/wanderings/value.html.

Next Page »