Parole

BHL on Althusser

2008-07-01T02:38:00.004-04:00

'I came to reinterpret the silences I had taken to be philosophical and the gaze I had thought meditative as expressions of his mental disarray. It's one of the great mysteries of the French intellectual scene how this man of unbridled insanity could have taught us rigour and rationality.'

Rotted Pussy

2008-06-30T10:51:00.000-04:00

This cat has been in this state for two months. I first noticed it near the front of my apartment building in the parking lot that I traverse at least twice a day to reach the coffee shops. It no longer reeks.

Love Prefers Swarovski

2008-06-19T18:47:00.006-04:00

If the willingness of the well-endowed blonde Texan, whose path I happened to cross while the former was on a collector's shopping trip in Dubai for the benefit of her Mayfair townhouse, to accede to the prices of pieces by artists like Farhad Moshiri in Mona Hauser's XVA Gallery can be taken as an indication, the market for 'Middle Eastern' art is, one might justifiably say, 'well-stimulated.' And now, after the Bonham's auction in Dubai in March, Moshiri is 'the first Middle Eastern contemporary artist whose work has sold for over $1 million.'

Dubai—the city to whose sudden growth the surgent interest in 'Middle Eastern' (though largely Iranian) art owes its gratitude—is to Iranian talent what Portland is to Afghan poppy. And, yet, you know all of those old-fashioned criticisms—articulated yet again in Jed Perl's recent review of Koons at the Met and Murakami at Brooklyn—about artists whose only real attribute is self-promotion? You know, where one is too frightened to pull back the Ray Bans for fear of revealing backlit, Swarovski-encrusted dollar signs? Well, I can't get them out of my head when I'm looking at a Moshiri piece. And none of this is helped by the fact that Moshiri cites, but of course, Neo-Geo and Koons and Murakami as his forebears and that the artist has refused to go to the trouble of placing a figleaf before his fixation with 'the market' and, um, cash, and that—oh yes—his work actually does come encrusted with Swarovski crystals.

So what if Moshiri's art is gross? It's his party and he can 'play with the idea of marketing and commodification' (his words from this interview) if he wants to. The typical Moshiri piece consists (if we use the $1 million specimen depicted above) of little Farsi maxims and words plucked out of Hello Kitty's dictionary (technically, the word, 'ashq, is Arabic, not Farsi, and suggests a stronger variant of 'love'). And, yes, a typical Moshiri piece might come with 'stunning Swarovski crystals and glitter on canvas' (Bonham's words). Isn't that, but of course, the point? Why, the joke would not—could not—be on the artist himself, right? 'After all, the idea of making work that is about the packaging of art has been there since pop art,' Moshiri assures us. But should the audience not expression apprehension when the disjuncture between jokester and joke ends up looking pretty flimsy? And must we really go through this yet again, only this time in a more 'exotic' location? So long as we have artists like Haerizadeh, why bother?

Writing and Titillation from the Bench

2008-06-18T06:15:00.013-04:00

Perhaps it should be taken as an especially portentous sign that Scalia's dissent in Boumediene v. Bush was bereft of the justice's traditional portentousness, and was, rather, drab and lifeless in a fashion most uncharacteristic of our favorite justice (for whom any occasion to furnish his text with a literary flourish makes weak the berobed knees). Portentous indeed. For Scalia, I would suggest, was sexing down his text to fit the dissent's constituency: By which I of course refer to the national security fetishist crowd.

The polemical portion of the opinion—for, as is his "usual practice" (Scalia's words there) the justice's dissents are typically accompanied by a foreboding exegesis on a given decision's "disastrous consequences" (again, his words)—followed the contours of the B-Movie, all fear and flash, zombies lurching, bullets flying, while, at the end, resembling something pretty crude and pandering and unnecessary. After all, Roberts had already cited the decision's "modest" (and, therefore, unnecessary) result, effecting as it does a mere administrative shift from a congressionally-mandated review process under the Detainee Treatment Act of 2005 to a yet-to-be-determined appellate review process in the federal courts. Scalia busies himself with the apposition of the Suspension Clause, a question itself inapposite given his ultimate conclusion that its burdens, were, in any event, met under the DTA.

And yet it becomes difficult to ignore the dissent's polemical ambitions and still harder to dislocate it from the political scene: "America is at war with radical Islamists," Scalia intones in the first line of the polemic. He proceeds to cite "the enemy" twice in the same paragraph and to set forth a questionable history of the US's engagement with "the enemy," beginning with the 1983 Marine barracks bombing in Lebanon. Sounding like a greater bore than Nietzsche on the subject, he continues: "It has further threatened attack on our homeland" and, elsewhere, "our countrymen" and "our Armed Forces." So, here we have these mutterland flourishes, written, in an unusual gesture, with a rhetorically yielding hand, and, the next day, we have McCain characterizing the ruling "as one of the worst decisions in the history of this country."

How are we to reconcile this unbecoming effort to excite the sympathy of a rather unbecoming constituency—this convenient provision of election season soundbites ("The Court's decision most certainly will cause more Americans to be killed")—with the justice's oft-proclaimed belief in political restraint? Not easily.

Looking for the Perfect Flower

2008-06-17T16:26:00.007-04:00

I stared up at a swirling fluorescent light snickering for three hours when I read this bit from a 2002 interview with Donna Tartt in The Guardian:

She describes how her great-grandfather, the great patriarch of her family, 'had a nearly unlimited faith in the magic of pharmacy' and has spent the last years of his life constantly dosed up with antibiotics, 'believing them to be a kind of healthful preventative, or nerve tonic.'

Wh-wh-whither Miss Tartt? Apparently penning a Daedalus and Icarus entry for the Canongate Myth Series. While 'tis sweet to have us a noveliste who avoids pathologically the status of publishing factory...just do the third of the five already!

Hurts So Good: Academic Bookstores

2008-05-19T13:35:00.003-04:00

The academic bookstore: Never to buy—online and used is of course the way to go—but for wandering and wallowing when in need of bibliographic inspiration and a setting less grave but nearly as abundant as the stacks. Unfortunately, these oases must be shared with the people who actually run the places—invariably insane seventh-year graduate students who might pen something like this. The worst offender would have to be Columbia's Book Culture (formerly Labyrinth), where the sneer I received several years ago when buying Writing and Difference from the clerk has left a remarkably vivid psychic etch. True, blank stares from the clerks at popular bookstores are infuriating: I'll admit to a bit of blood boiling when, in Mumbai, I was trying vainly to locate a copy of Écrits, but before I could utter past the 'La' the request had been eagerly filled in by the clerk as '...nce Armstrong!' But at what price must we suffer those who commit what is, of course, the worst sin of all—seriousness?

Meanwhile, a dispatch from the front lines in Berkeley (italics mine):

Hi Henry,
I spent a pleasant 20 minutes in the Berkeley UC bookstore browsing the shelves and noted the many structuralists titles and Frenchmen with whom i have become so intimately familiar over the past years of intense proximity (I have several critical texts in storage) but ended up buying two books on Buddhism and another one on Piracy under Elizabeth I. She was quite the Pirate Queen you know. Just ask the Spanish. There is however little i need add to my knowledge of the Structuralists who have done so much undermine and indeed subvert my comfortable Logical Positivism and Wittgensteinian Ordinary Language background. I did however purchase Leo Strauss' book Tyranny which I have been meaning to read for years. "Are these all for you" inquired impudent coed at the counter. My answer was unmemorable and need not be repeated but it is a wonder anyone reads anything any more.
Hope all is well with you.
Love,
Dad

Snort.

Ghostly Lolita: Leibovitz Returns

2008-05-17T10:28:00.002-04:00

Buried under the criticism—mostly from the subject and the Middle American parents of her constituency—surrounding the Annie Leibovitz Vanity Fair shots of Miley Cyrus are the following: (1) It's Leibovitz's best work in a long while. The photographer has been losing the war against quality control for the better part of a decade: Consider that appalling, pre-Raphaelite-nightmare of a series of celebrities-cum-Disney characters she's been doing. (Leibovitz managed to bring even further into relief David Beckham's perennial unsexiness.) (2) The photos are marvelous gothic chic—those smeared reddish lips, the contrast in which her darkened hair and lightened skin are awash, particularly as against that sheet—and actually work with Leibovitz's obsession with the color green. (3) They take a teen star who is neither particularly attractive nor particularly interesting and succeed in making her appear to be a bit of both. (4) The star's protestations and the coverage of the photos have relied upon the trope of the dominating Lesbian sophisticate de-flowering an innocent. (5) How can we but be pleased?

A Night at the Embassy

2008-05-16T09:26:00.001-04:00

Left: The New Republic. Center: Popcorn. Right: Cheap but good cabernet.

Thank heavens Fulbrighters can enjoy Kuwait's only legal happy hour.

Original Sins

2008-05-15T11:37:00.010-04:00

Antonin Gregory Scalia—who stands at ease among my favorite contemporary authors—is himself such a marvelous character that he will, much like John C. Calhoun, but be remembered affectionately in high school history. Slate's Dahlia Lithwick, who refuses to let politics get in the way of her Scalia love, has penned a paean to the Court's rhetor-in-chief that is worth reading. Want to get into Scalia, but don't know where in the man's oeuvre to begin? Try his dissent in the Court's 2003 sodomy case, Lawrence v. Texas; the justice took the unusual step of reading the polemic aloud from the bench.

Meanwhile, Scalia's hermeneutic compatriot but temperamental inverse—why, Robert Bork, of course—has settled his epically ironic $1 million lawsuit against the Yale Club. Bork, a former professor at the law school, had fallen while climbing onto a dais at some alumni event; the late-Catholic convert and famously anti-tort crusader apparently has an injured head and a hematoma on his leg. Peter Schuck, a Yale law school professor, has an amusing surmising in the Yale Daily News:

'But while Robert Bork may have settled his lawsuit against the Yale Club, it seems less likely that he has settled his long-time grudge against Yale quite yet. Last June, Schuck said the lawsuit was indicative of Bork's "resentment" toward the University. "I think his having elevated his defeat into a now 20-year crusade of resentment and fury seems rather churlish," he said. "I certainly sympathize with his anger in having been defeated in his bid for a seat he had every reason to believe he deserved, but I think that this is in the nature of modern-style high Supreme Court nomination politics, and he should get over it."'

Speaking of originalism, if 'justice' can be an undeconstructible condition for deconstruction, why can't the Constitution be the undeconstructible condition for the US justice system? Why, of course the question is garbage. But so—pace late Derrida and 'deconstruction-and-religion'— is the predication.

Beirut, Interrupted

2008-05-15T09:39:00.005-04:00

A pretty moving announcement on the website of the American University of Beirut. Note the final sentence:

Classes and Work at the American University of Beirut
The American University of Beirut will resume classes as soon as conditions permit. The University will, as of that point, make arrangements to complete the second semester and help students make up for missed work. Medical students are expected to attend to their duties throughout.

It's In the Genes: Criticism Devolved

2008-05-15T06:57:00.008-04:00

In response to William Deresiewicz's dire prognosis in The Nation for criticism's future in the academy—'the number of students studying English literature appears to be in a steep, prolonged and apparently irreversible decline'—Jonathan Gottschall has offered what we might call a more 'diagnostic' response in the Boston Globe. In what is by now a familiar refrain, Gottschall claims to have found criticism's salvation in 'the sciences,' and, specifically, as he later elaborates, in the fertile scene of geneticism.

'Literary studies should become more like the sciences. Literature professors should apply science's research methods, its theories, its statistical tools, and its insistence on hypothesis and proof. Instead of philosophical despair about the possibility of knowledge, they should embrace science's spirit of intellectual optimism.'

The precise solution Gottschall offers has been oft-repeated: Literary theory, to survive in an age where students are evidently turning in increasing numbers away from the humanities, must accept the methodology of the 'sciences' and, specifically, operate upon the exciting and fertile predications of evolutionary biology. In the latter, it is claimed, lie the answers to Theory's originary preoccupations with signification and universality: For every human behavior is physically instantiated by a genetic 'site,' and signification is a universal process coextensive with the 'nature' of the mind. Hence Gottschall claims that the purported 'blank slate' theory of mind upon which Theory is predicated is done away with by the discovery that the tropics of sexism are not particular to 'Western culture.' Rather, the manner in which women's bodies are understood is a universal movement and is located, then, on one level, in culture, but in the final instance on a more or less unchanging 'nature.'

Evolutionism has simply replaced the base with 'nature.' The same troubles with economism, then, are apposite, but perhaps more radically in this case: 'Nature' can only be contemplated within brackets, despite the ambition on the part of the category's proponents to naturalize the concept, as it were...to place it simultaneously outside of signification and yet fix it within a system of nameability. Are we to ignore the fashion in which the limits between 'nature' and non-'nature' have hardly remained fixed since the seventeenth century? Are we to overlook 'nature's' always shifting political significance?

The final irony is that geneticism is itself the scene most wanting in terms of skepticism, restraint, and an awareness of meaning's production. Geneticism and its proponents operate on a sleight-of-hand in which cultural practice is deployed to schematize human behavior, in a movement that claims to be at one with the 'nature' to which it appeals, but which finally is always caught within culture. It can't get past language. It can't get past the abuse of metonymy necessitated by the locating of behavior in 'genetic material'—when precisely the behavior which evolutionary biologists attempt to explain is a culturally specific category in the first instance. Nor can they get past the throbbing and obfuscating will to knowledge—whether manifested in the search for an originary, non-figurative point of genesis for all manner of human activity and its correlates, from moral aptitude to cigarette smoking to masculinity—that inheres in the always also retroactive discovery of a 'genetic' location to explain those precise cultural practices (out of which appeals to nature necessarily emanate, at once at present and in history).

Gottschall offers another appalling preview of 'science's' power of incision in criticism's endeavors. He asks readers to 'consider this shibboleth of modern literary theory: the author is dead,' which he proceeds to incorrectly translate as meaning 'that authors have no power over their readers' and to incorrectly read as suggesting 'there can be no shared understanding of what literary works mean.' He then excitedly announces that the author's figured 'death' is 'also testable'!

'Hijacking methods from psychology, Joseph Carroll, John Johnson, Dan Kruger, and I surveyed the emotional and analytic responses of 500 literary scholars and avid readers to characters from scores of 19th-century British novels. We wanted to determine how different their reading experiences truly were. Did reactions to characters vary profoundly from reader to reader? As we write in "Graphing Jane Austen," a book undergoing peer review, there were variations in what our readers thought and felt about literary characters, but it was expertly contained by the authors within narrow ranges. Our conclusion: rumors of the author's demise have been greatly exaggerated.'

We can only hope that the next time Gottschall and colleagues subject an independent variable to the rigors of 'science' that they would, at the very least, correctly define the 'dependent variables.' The figure of the author's 'demise' suggests neither the impossibility of 'shared understanding' nor the author's lack of 'control' over the reader: Rather, the figure draws from a contemporaneous renewed interest in psychoanalysis to suggest intentional multiplicity. Reader-side, meanwhile, it is rather odd to infer the irrelevance of universality from the author's figured death. After all, Barthes was himself among the most ambitious in making efforts to schematize the structures of narrativity and the processes of semiosis. The findings of Gottschall and colleagues then do not even speak to the author's 'death,' but rather belong firmly within the history and possibilities of structuralism.

Upper West Side Collection Devices

2008-05-06T06:53:00.007-04:00

An impossibly smart matron—who, now that I write about it, may just be precisely Koons's audience—wrote this to me concerning the world's best-selling extant artist:

'To me, Jeff Koons is as good a self-promoter as Andy Warhol and as shallow an artist. What do you think people see in their so-called art?

Are they hoping for a contact cool?'

The oldest story at Sotheby's. And yet: Who doesn't want it? And also: People don't buy art for their health.

Literature in Reaction

2008-05-06T06:42:00.005-04:00

Must one be saved from oneself? What is the excuse? Can we pass off such indulgences with a gesture toward irony? Sensual pleasure after modernism? Is displeasing Terry Eagleton sufficient?

Metaphysics Aren't Gentlemen

2008-05-06T06:16:00.003-04:00

The brief presentation I gave in Tunis this week for the Fulbright conference left the audience, I am afraid to say, rather traumatized. It was not an unhopeful sign.

I very briefly outlined my reading of social distance in Bataille—which naturally required a discussion of feces and Freud and difference's desiring-production—and the structuring role it plays in my present 'empirical' consideration. By the time I mentioned 'hierarchy of filth' in a question-and-answer exchange, gasps and giggles were elicited.

I was later approached by a number of graduate students—who are themselves in the throes of navigating Theory's use-value in both their own research and in social science on the whole— interested in the audacity of (1) presenting a theory of subjection and diachronic humanization purportedly 'over-the-heads' of audience-members and (2) a methodology hostile to verifiability pretensions. The response I gave to the first concern is that no one deserves to be subjected to a writing or talking down. The discussion addressing the second concern ultimately arrived at a point where the conversation stressed the importance of surpassing Theory's overwrittenness.

'Bad Theory' abounds, especially in the banal and tired overtures to Foucault and Said (both of whom are, in multiple senses, overwritten at this point) passing for engagement with post-structuralism so often. The conclusion drawn from the post-presentation conversations was that blank stares in an audience of would-be social scientists is indeed a necessary sign.

Is Minimalism Moribund?

2008-04-30T10:17:00.006-04:00

Sarah Williams Goldhagan, in her review for The New Republic of Sejima and Nishizawa's new New Museum, evidently thinks so. While she finds the project's exterior 'pleasing,' Goldhagan basically determines it to be an unnecessary retread. More significantly, she seems to suggest that the architectural progeny of Judd are spent:

'SANAA's New Museum is a freeze-dried packet of desiccated minimalism. It is in no way miraculous. We are in more trouble than I thought if this is the project that is supposed to restore faith in New York City or point the way toward the future of architecture. The most that can be said in its favor is that in the New Museum, as in the firm's other projects, SANAA raises provocative questions about the value of minimalism in architecture.'

Perhaps programs of radical simplicity, with surprise no longer at hand and maybe impossible altogether, must at this juncture carry rather minimal expectations. Besides, simply because statements literally built have foregone subtlety—the play on transparency and light is quite appropriately apparent, even if one does not read the architects' written statement—that fact does not render them less sophisticated, or, more significantly, less important. Isn't the museum's ebullient appearance on the Bowery's east side enough?

Out With The Bourg.

2008-04-26T18:37:00.003-04:00

Ah, the marital dyad remains a curiously durable structure. I would also say that part of the durability here is that the production of what is designated dominant and submissive—for the boys as well—is formed in anticipation of the structure (regardless of the permissibility of legal initiation into marriage). That is, the dyadic division of sexual labor is an effect of the marital structure both before and independent of the union itself. Hypothetically, were we to desist from recognizing marriage as a legal matter—and, were social convention (i.e., religious organizations) to simultaneously desist—we would still be forced to face this division for a substantial period.

The Clash is Back: Part II

2008-04-26T12:24:00.006-04:00

So it is that the magazine which rarely fails to deliver the latest from the cast of the administration has released upon us all a piece by Jerry Z. Muller, a historian at Catholic University, arguing that 'ethnonationalism' emanates—yes—'from the human spirit' and is therefore ineradicable. In 'The Clash of Peoples' or 'Us and Them' (have your iteration: cover or 'in-book'), the conclusion that Muller conjures from this notion of the 'nature' of the human is that international policymakers should basically accommodate 'ethnonational' claims, because to deny them is to risk exciting a bloodbath between nationalists and the minorities or polities which they hope to do without. 'Partition,' Muller assures us, 'is often the least bad answer.' He later asserts that with it comes finality and a lower price tag in terms of international peacekeeping.

The allusion to Huntington's 1993 'Clash' is more than titular: The magazine is hoping to make a similarly spectacular provocation by employing a seemingly different thesis that, on consideration, seems (if we can steal Muller's unfortunate appropriation of terms with Hegelian baggage) to emanate from the precise spirit that animated 'Clash' fifteen years ago. While Huntington, by his own avowals, was setting forth a bold and provocative description of affairs as they were and would be, it became gradually apparent that he was more deeply implicated and invested in the conclusions than he may have wanted critics to believe.

So forgive me for experiencing a tad of déjà vu with 'Us and Them' and the case at hand:

'But if ethnonationalism has frequently led to tension and conflict, it has also proved to be a source of cohesion and stability. When French textbooks began with "Our ancestors the Gauls" or when Churchill spoke to wartime audiences of "this island race," they appealed to ethnonationalist sensibilities as a source of mutual trust and sacrifice. Liberal democracy and ethnic homogeneity are not only compatible; they can be complementary.

One could argue that Europe has been so harmonious since World War II not because of the failure of ethnic nationalism but because of its success, which removed some of the greatest sources of conflict both within and between countries. The fact that ethnic and state boundaries now largely coincide has meant that there are fewer disputes over borders or expatriate communities, leading to the most stable territorial configuration in European history.'

The retroactive fallacy upon which nationalism is necessarily built—we must, for virtually the entirety of Western Europe, speak of the precession of the state—is at the same time concealed (he presents the European 'nation state' synchronically, as it were) and summoned forth by Muller: The ethnic project arouses, as the above passage makes clear, the author's sympathy, by virtue of its continuing powers of cohesion. And here we see that Muller's piece is also a lesson in understanding Theory's burden in the social sciences. The most basic insights into the dissemination of culture will receive acknowledgment only, by way of that precise acknowledgment, to then receive summary dismissal. 'Contemporary social scientists who write about nationalism tend to stress the contingent elements of group identity,' Muller offers near the end of the essay. 'It is true, of course, that ethnonational identity is never as natural or ineluctable as nationalists claim.' And yet: 'They regularly invoke Benedict Anderson's concept of "imagined communities," as if demonstrating that nationalism is constructed will rob the concept of its power.'

Does this disclaimer near the conclusion of the essay acquit Muller of the work's persistent treatment of ethnonationalism as entirely superstructural? And what of the fact that, with few exceptions, the majority of any given populace remains ambivalent to indigenous nationalisms? Would not partitioning merely defer to those with the biggest guns and largest printing presses? Does Muller's determination that 'partition is the least bad answer' simply happen to coincide with his recognition of ethnonationalism's social benefits? And, if, as is more likely, nationalism 'emanates' not from the 'human spirit' but from configurations among economic strata, would partition solve a problem likely to reiterate itself despite new lines on a map? Nationalism's empire—an absurdity that manages to approach the object—knows no limits so long as the basic fissures of which it is an effect (and thus also an affect) are extant. Its work will complete itself neither of its own accord nor by a simple rearrangement of decidedly novel linguistic categories. Sort of like Theory's.

The Clash is Back: Part I

2008-04-22T14:55:00.013-04:00

Theoretical moribundity makes me think of International Relations—the academic field, that is—with awkward pretensions that find its practitioners caught between the 'hard science' pressure to identify independent variables (that language!) sufficiently robust to survive localized controls (i.e., that are sensible across circumstances unfortunate enough to be deemed [ahem, and produced] 'case studies'), on the one hand, and to grandly pronounce sonorous and significant theoretic narratives on the other. The IR impulse is what brought us some of those eccentric and entertaining 200-level course debates over such creations as 'rational actors' and other bewildering anthropomorphizations of the state, generally pilfered from economists and adorned with some strung out Enlightenment gestures toward 'human nature.'

These debates are so broad and therefore vulgar that one can but sympathize with the recent clamoring among IR faculty over 'game theory,' which, one supposes, is sonorous and clever enough, but which, at the same time, might remind one of set theory's deployment in early Kristeva. These fads—which may, in another context, bear a vague semblance to some Malcolm Gladwell piece in The New York Times Magazine—tend to take hold of a discipline desiring more precise-sounding adornments to explanatory powers whose capacity does not much change. Perhaps I am, after all, also writing of Political Science on the whole. Who cares? Slaking the desire for a topping of the gram with the matheme has generally produced unattractive results. The question must become: Just how many metaphoric layers must one be forced to lick to reach the center after all?

Meanwhile, I have no trouble heaping the blame for Foreign Affairs, the Washington Consensus magazine with, I suppose, a rather severe case of journal anxiety, at the door of the IR department. I will refrain from hammering home the point that virtually the entirety of Foreign Affairs looks to be ghostwritten, an observation charitable neither to the magazine nor to the would be foreign-service members sidelining for celebrity authors. The entire thing could be produced by the human relations department in the basement of State. In any event, Foreign Affairs is always given top-shelf treatment—yes, that's it, just to the right of US Weekly, the not-necessarily-less-worthwhile magazine celebrating celebrities of another variety—and it seems to give its readers the feeling of reading some thorough academic research of some sort. One can rarely be fully certain of a publication's constituency, but I would venture that the chap most likely to be impressed by Foreign Affairs would be what Christopher Guest might call 'of the catalogue generation,' replete with latte and chinos and Borders on a Sunday afternoon. Oh, the image is too much already.

Brown Bunnies

2008-04-22T14:44:00.006-04:00

Jeff Koons is online.

CNN Gets Foucauldian [Limit Experiences]

2008-04-20T12:25:00.004-04:00

From a disreputable news source:

'CNN personality Richard Quest was busted in Central Park early yesterday with some drugs in his pocket, a rope around his neck that was tied to his genitals, and a sex toy in his boot, law-enforcement sources said.'

Cheers.

Positively Gaudily

2008-04-20T11:10:00.009-04:00

Amid fanfare and deferential treatment that have performed the seemingly impossible feat of transforming Manhattan into some thirteenth century eastern French village, it is worth remembering that beyond the gold jewelry and God-awful sixteenth century art lie a man and an institution that continue to hold sway over a not-insubstantial share of a billion people. And I do not mean to detract from the brilliant and agreeable rhetorical turns offered by the pontiff—the Church badly needed some good stateside spin.

Todorov Finds Politics

2008-04-20T09:37:00.010-04:00

Tzvetan Todorov—perhaps best known stateside as an interlocutor for Russian Formalism—gives a fascinating and pugnacious interview in Critical Inquiry's winter issue. The interview, conducted by Danny Postel, finds Todorov asked the manner of question that one wishes Derrida were given more often and more pressingly and giving the sort of responses that nearly vindicate Derrida's political reticence. While Todorov punts the opening question on his general reluctance to "get political," as it were, he more than makes up for it in his responses to subsequent questions on the Danish cartoons and the November 2005 banlieues riots—yeah, it's that kind of interview.

Here's a good bit on the Paris riots:

The particular forms of violence displayed are also worthy of note. At no point were political, ethnic, or religious demands expressed. The gangs of youngsters did not come to Paris where the rich live, and they didn’t attack city halls or other institutional buildings. They hardly stepped out of the housing projects where they live. Instead of taking their anger out on symbols of the French Republic, they did so on their neighbors who resemble them in every respect but age and on structures of social order that are there for their benefit. They burned cars on their streets and their parking lots, cars that belonged to their uncles or neighbors. They tried to destroy sports facilities and other meeting places intended for their use. They set fire to day-care centers and schools where their younger siblings went and to state employment services that were meant to help them. All these acts have an evident self-destructive character (even if their agents do not always realize it). When they burn buses that connect (however poorly) their housing projects to the outside world, they and their families are the ones to suffer, not the people residing in the upscale districts.

Thanks to DP.

Birthdays Were the Worst Days

2008-04-20T09:04:00.002-04:00

Just not for E. Nellie Bowles. Happy Birthday, little sister.

Faust To Attend ROTC Ceremony

2008-04-19T11:35:00.005-04:00

Given the many ironies of 'Don't Ask, Don't Tell'—not least among them the central position telling has played in military life 'from time, from time,' if we translate literally a wonderful Levantine expression—one can only hope that the next administration will quickly do away with the oft-mocked policy. Meanwhile, Harvard's president, Drew G. Faust, will attend what is called a 'commissioning ceremony,' following—and perhaps in light of?—the right's flamboyant outrage at Harvard's various slights of the military. From the Crimson:

University President Drew G. Faust will attend this year’s Reserve Officers Training Corps (ROTC) commissioning ceremony during Commencement, continuing a new precedent set by her predecessor Lawrence H. Summers.

According to Harvard spokesman John D. Longbrake, Faust will be “part of the program,” although he did not say what her precise role would be. Summers spoke at the commissioning ceremony each year as Harvard president in an effort to show support for students participating in ROTC.

Harvard has had a fractious relationship with ROTC since its removal from campus in 1969 in the wake of strident anti-war protests. ROTC remains banished due to the military’s “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell” policy, which Harvard considers discriminatory, and is not deemed an official Harvard organization.

Harvard students involved with ROTC conduct their exercises with a battalion at MIT.

Moot in two years? Let's hope so.

Badiou: Unreformed, Unbowed

2008-04-18T14:07:00.005-04:00

Critical Inquiry is preparing to publish an interview with Badiou on the rather grand topic of philosophy's relevance to politics. The interview is noteworthy, although perhaps mostly for an accessible take on what is presently on the mind of the former philosophy chair at the ENS. While refusing any sort of renunciation of old-guard communism, Badiou appears to have largely redefined the term in his usage to refer to more 'cultural struggles'—à la Laclau. The interview also gives treatment to Real Existing Socialism—Badiou is critical of Leninist praxis—and to the thinker's hopes and fears for the communist project at present. Here's part of what he has to say about events and the socialist possibility in the Middle East:

The attacks of September 11, for example, were not accompanied by any political discourse addressed to the entire world, nor with any declaration of war—such declarations are the condition for politics. What we have instead is a violent destabilization whose concept is ungraspable. The only declarations that followed the event were completely rooted in a religious particularism that I read as exclusively negative. I won’t have anything to do with this type of practice.

I don’t confuse this phenomenon with the theological character of certain mass organizations in the Middle East. But I do think that the fact that the organizations that are the most active and most rooted in the “people” are of this type is part of what I have been calling the contemporary crisis of negation. In this case, religion presents itself as the surrogate for something else that has not been found, something that should be universalizable, should be able to uproot itself from the particularity of religious limits. It is for this reason, I think, that Marx still seems so current. Communism, according to Marx, is essentially internationalist in character. With religious dogmatism, in this case with Shia Islam, we are confronted with a collective messianism that I know and recognize is quite powerful but which is, finally, intrinsically limited. We need to consider these phenomena on their own terms, but also understand their limitations. I think these movements represent a passage that bears witness, in a very vivid way, to the limits of our thought on the problems of the negative, critique and political organization.