Pluralizing
I just tagged along for some drinks after a panel talk featuring the Famous Intellectual who’s in town for a couple weeks. It was a little frustrating, since I think I disagree pretty strongly with most of his main ideas, and yet I’m not sure enough about his work to really engage him. But in that last few days I’ve been reading his work and suspect that he’ll probably be taken to task in the final chapter of my dissertation, on which I’ve lately been working (lucky him). Yet everyone seemed so jointly enthusiastic about one another’s ideas that I kept almost entirely quiet. I concluded that the enormity of my own sense of his wrongness must surely point to something embarrassingly confused about my way of understanding him.
And there are other little things that confuse me about his work. He often uses the work “bicameral.” Bicameral? Like Julian Jayes bicameralism? Or does Deluze or someone use this term in some other sense?
I guess I decided to avoid launching into a long winded but ill-informed critique of a well known thinker who I plan to discuss briefly in my dissertation. This is a little unlike me, and in a sort of bad way. Probably he’d have enjoyed a bit of disagreement. On the other hand, I suppose there was also a pretty high likelihood of my appearing to be terminally confused. All in all, incredibly frustrating–enough to make me resort to this seldom used blog to complain into a hole in the earth.
February 10th, 2007 at 12:09 am
Now I wanna know who said famous intellectual was. Come on BFD! Tell me and I’ll let slip some dirt on yer pal Dickie G.
February 11th, 2007 at 10:58 am
That would be cheating! Besides, I’m sure I’ll get that dirt from you one anyhow, one way or another…
I will say this however: this guy acts like and resembles you, to a kind of disturbing degree. Not quite the same scale, and a bit less, erm…emphatic in his disagreements with people, but he had many of your mannerisms down pat, imho. I suggest you be on the lookout for any attempts at identity theft by East Coast intellectuals.
February 11th, 2007 at 5:30 pm
Well, it is always my emphatic nature (and I so appreciate your diplomacy) as well as my suicidal devotion to an ethos illegible to the vast majority of academic toadies busily bowing and begging for the scraps that are thrown their way that will distinguish me from the mere impostor. That and my razor-sharp intellect and scintillating wit. And yes, next time I come up to visit CU, you need only pour a few beers in me to discover what my experience in the great man’s archives have uncovered. The photos from Springfield are nice by the way. His entrance into the race gives me some hope. Now as long as he doesn’t turn into a democratic centrist of the Clinton variety (isn’t her recent refusal to admit error in her vote for invasion disgusting?), that hope will be a real one.