An Old School Professor Asks Students to Think

The Thinker is an inspiring profile of a philosopher at Auburn University who has resisted the imperative to instrumentalize higher education, which is undermining humanities departments and cheapening the value of college degrees. A true practitioner of the liberal arts, Professor Jolley challenges his students, first-year undergraduates included, to think through difficult philosophical problems with him. In the process, his best students learn to do philosophy, which they come to appreciate and understand as a way of living, curiously, in the world, rather than just another subject to be mastered on the way to a degree.

La Mort de Jean Baudrillard

Aside from a short, superficial interview in the New York Times Magazine a few months ago, I hadn't read anything by Jean Baudrillard for several years. His post-911 pamphlet published on Verso, I suppose, which was dwarfed, for me, by Zizek's Welcome to the Desert of the Real. Last night, though, something compelled me to pull Cool Memories IV: 1995-2000 off the shelf. I thoroughly enjoyed reading his Zarathurstrian obervations on postmodernity, and found myself laughing aloud, quite loudly.

I need to return to Baudrillard, I thought. My favorite writers, mostly novelists and philosophers, are those who provoke this mad laughter, and I'd forgotten how deadpan hillarious Baudrillard can be. When I first read him in my early 20s, I took him too seriously, despite knowing that I shouldn't. Over the years I sort of lost track of Baudrillard. Perhaps unconsciously, I'd paid too much heed to those who decare Baudrillard's writing to be passe (and in making thinking into a fashion contribute to the implosion of meaning about which Baudrillard wrote so brilliantly...). Anyone who can't appreciate Baudrillard's aphorhisms from the abyss must be tone deaf.

Today, I recevied an e-mail informing me of "Le Mort de Jean Baudrillard." Dead at age 77.

Foucault, Lacan, Guattari, Deleuze, Lyotard, Derrida, now Baudrillard...

I'm still holding onto a small hope that Baudrillard's death will be revealed to be a simulation, the ultimate hoax by this brilliant sophist...

But, until that time, in Baudrillard's memory, a toast, and a few choice words. The first quote is exactly the right reply to the sense and thoughts of the uncanny news of Baudrillard's death provoked:

Thought is nothing but happy coincidence.

In the past, bad literature was made with high-flown sentiment; today, it is made with the unconscious.

Exess of information kills information; excess of meaning kills meaning, etc. But it seems that too much stupidity does not kill stupidity. Stupidity may be said, t hen, to be the only exponential phenomenon - one which even escapes the laws of physics. This is a miracle to rival perpetual motion.

The social order teaches you to keep quiet, it does not teach you silence.

Freedom is not as free as is generally thought: it produces antibodies which rebel against it. Truth, too, is threatened from within, like a state battling with its own police force. If values enjoyed total immunity, they would be as lethal as a scientific truth.

Current events are an incurable illness.

How to have all men against you

George W. Bush, Address to a Joint Session of Congress and the American People (2001):

Every nation, in every region, now has a decision to make. Either you are with us, or you are with the terrorists.

Friedrich Nietzsche, "The Wanderer and His Shadow"(1880):

How to have all men against you. -- If anyone dared to say now, 'Whoever is not for me, is against me,' he would immediately have all men against him. -- This does our time honor.

John Ashcroft On Belief: Why Christianity? It's Easy

In this short but telling interview John Ashcroft basically attributes his embrace of evangelical Christianity to the fact that it provides him an "easy" means of excusing his sins. He explains, "I'm a Christian for a variety of reasons. Maybe because it's easy. What I have to do to please God is to confess that I'm a sinner instead of trying to prove that I am good."

Well, at least Ashcroft knows he's a bad man. But as Sartre would put it, Ashcroft is acting in bad faith by objectifying himself as a being-in-itself, in this case a sinner, whose identity is fixed. By failing to imagine that he could at least work at doing good in the world, Ashcroft denies our capacity for freedom.

Of course, this denial of freedom is completely consistent with his political views and deeds and helps explain his defense of the Patriot Act and, in this interview, a failure to recognize the universal applicability of the Geneva Conventions.

Now, I'm no theologian, but Ashcroft's last sentence is particularly perverse, in the psychoanalytic sense. That is, for Ashcroft Christianity is all about becoming one of the elect who knows how to provide pleasure for the Other. Ashcroft fantasizes that he pleasures God by confessing his sins, which, conveniently, absolves him of having to "prove that I am good."

Note how self-absorbed Ashcroft's framework for conceptualizing religion is. In the individualistic binary he establishes, it's all about him, John Ashcroft. Religion is either about proving that one is good, or, in his version of Christianity, pleasing God. Either way there's no consideration about one's responsibility to act as Christlike as possible in this world, which we share with God's creatures and our brothers and sisters, nor is there any sense of how difficult it is to perform good acts and deeds in a fallen world.

Clearly, Ashcroft needs to ask What Would Zizek Do? and listen to a little of that rock 'n' roll music.

As St. Paul sings, "Absolution is out of the question..."

Caution: Philosophy

Here's a photo loaded with allegorical possibilities. It was shot at the Border's bookstore on State Street in downtown Chicago.

Does the yellow tape express some new managerial position about the dangers of philosophy? And why is the warning applied primarily to philosophy written by Germans whose surnames begin with the letter 'H'? Indeed, why the need for caution? Are the ideas expressed in the books considered dangerous? Or are such weighty tomes simply hazards impeding to the efficient sales of more marketable titles, e.g., the latest fad-diet title, a volume of New Age pop psychology, or the newest Harry Potter book?

As someone working in a U.S. English department I can't help thinking that the images register the shift away from so-called 'high theory' (Continental Philosophy) toward historicist criticism and cultural studies that has occurred over the past decade or so in the humanities, especially literary studies. The rise of historicist criticism and a naively simple modes of cultural studies in literary studies has led, in various forms, to a return of the long-standing opposition between philosophy and literature/poetics. The winner in this battle? In literary studies, anyway, both are losing, as language and lit departments face increasing pressures to churn out students whose ‘literacy’ ‘pragmatically’ enables them to secure jobs writing various genres of corporate copy.

I'm posting these images for a colleague of mine in literary studies (not at UIC) who has recently experienced resistance from his or her departmental colleagues for drawing so heavily upon Hegel in his or her work. Nevermind the fact that the project, is intended to demonstrate how Hegel's dialectical logic informs the manner in which Joyce depicts a day in Dublin unfolding Ulysses. Against those academics who bizarrely claim that Joyce was an apolitical high-modern elitist, this project presents a universalist Ulysses, i.e., Joyce’s efforts to materialize cognition via punning and cunning language experiments can best be grasped through a Hegelian framework that never forgets Dublin’s place within a larger totality – the world circa 1904.

S/he presented material at a departmental seminar and discovered that the many of the attendees hadn't read the larger manuscript circulated before the seminar, apparently because they were put off by the explicit philosophical content of the material. Then, during the seminar, they wasted time by asking this academic to define basic Hegelian terms and concepts that, had they bothered to read the essay, were explained carefully in the text. Moreover, they had the gall to imply that the philosophical concepts were somehow superfluous. It was disappointing to discover these anti-philosophical attitudes are prevalent in Europe as well.

Blurb Writing

This evening Lori Emerson, ebr's current book reviews editor (a job I once held, which is a lot of work) e-mailed me to ask if I would write the blurbs for several pieces I've written that will be published soon. Lori suggested it would only take me ten minutes, as opposed to an hour for her. If only. I'm an obsessive reviser and find that the word constraints that blurb writing impose only intensify my impulse to repeatedly rewrite. After a couple hours, I came up with the following blurbs. We'll see if they appear this way on ebr.

1. “What Would Zizek Do?: Redeeming Christianity’s Perverse Core”: Jokes play a fundamental role in Slavoj Zizek’s philosophizing. Is Zizek joking when he extols the virtues of Christianity to the Left? Eric Dean Rasmussen analyzes Zizek’s pro-Christian proselytizing as attacks on modes of PC-ness – political correctness and perverse Christianity - that sustain an undesirable neoliberalism.

2. “Putting the Brakes on the Zizek Machine”: Eric Dean Rasmussen traces the contours of Hanjo Berressem’s rigorous, bi-tempo reading of Organs without Bodies, which finds Zizek’s philosophical buggering of Deleuze to be wanting.

3. “Liberation Hurts: An Interview with Slavoj Zizek”: A post-9/11 discussion between Zizek and Eric Dean Rasmussen concerning liberation as a an act and a state of awareness. Topics include: biopolitics and belief, ideology and infinitude, violence and vulgarity, and the parallax view required to perceive various posthistoricist paradoxes.

On Interviewing Slavoj Zizek

Been revising an introduction for my forthcoming interview with Slavoj Zizek, which will appear in its entirety online in ebr and in condensed form in the the minnesota review. I'm posting my draft here to get a better sense of the online layout. I need to see if I should break up my three paragraphs for easier reading on the screen.

The following interview with Slavoj Zizek took place on the morning of September 29, 2003 in the Palmer House Hilton, a Gilded Age-era hotel in downtown Chicago. In the hotel's opulent lobby, it was easy to spot the bearded Zizek amongst the nattily dressed businesspeople and well-healed tourists. As befits a self-described "old-fashioned left winger," Zizek seemed to be dressed down for our meeting. Yet when Zizek lectured at the University of Chicago's Oriental Institute later that night, he wore the same striped knit shirt and casual pants and looked even more disheveled. But although Zizek's comfortable attire and his unassuming demeanor lacked the authority and panache of an 'academostar' such as, say, Edward Said (who had passed away just four days before and whose elegant and opulent fashions even The Nation remarked upon favorably), once Zizek began to philosophize he instantaneously grew in stature. He spoke extemporaneously with an arresting verve and displayed the theoretical prowess and outrageous sense of humor that have established him as one of the world's foremost intellectuals.

Not that such academic accolades probably mean much to Zizek, who described himself as a philosopher with "a very technical, modest project"--to reactualize the legacy of German Idealism. After determining that it was too noisy in the bustling lobby to conduct the interview, we headed to Zizek's room. "So, what's your agenda?" he asked me conspiratorially as we entered his room, which appeared almost ascetically empty. Zizek was on the road for several weeks, but he apparently traveled with only a single duffel bag, a laptop computer, and some novels by Henning Mankell, the Swedish detective novelist. Zizek was coming down with a bad cold, and apologized for his sniffling. While I readied my recorder, he climbed into bed, pulled up the covers, and in an comfortably reclined position, cracked a joke about waxing philosophical from his sickbed. His self-deprecating humor helped me to relax, not least because Zizek's posture reminded me of the provocative author's photo adorning on the back cover of The Puppet and the Dwarf. Shot at the Sigmund Freud museum, on the 100th anniversary of the birth of Jacques Lacan, the photo features an intense looking Zizek lounging on a canopied couch covered with a southwestern-style rug. Immediately above Zizek's outstretched legs, affixed to the back of the couch, is a framed picture of the bottom half of a woman's torso with her hairy vagina prominently displayed. I half expected to see the picture hanging above Zizek's hotel bed, but in the interest of professionalism refrained from telling him so and launched into the interview, which lasted just under two hours.

Despite being under the weather, it didn't take long for Zizek to display the vigor and loquaciousness for which he is famous. As he launched into a polemic against the Other as posited in Levinasian-Derridean theory, Zizek lurched up from the bed and began gesticulating with his arms, his strength increasing with each idea that rapidly came to mind. For the remainder of our interview Zizek was extremely animated, and the rapidity of his speech increased with each passing minute. It quickly became clear that I would be unable to ask all of the questions I had diligently prepared and, in retrospect, I wish I'd more thoroughly interrogated him about his animosity towards deconstruction. My sense was that, were I to ask only one question, Zizek would've continued to talk for the remainder of the interview. In order to get my questions in, I had to speak quickly and risk interrupting the verbose Zizek, who was understanding of my desire to direct the interview but clearly wanted to insure that he was able to elaborate upon and clarify his points. Not surprisingly, then, the interview ran over its allotted time by almost an hour. After all, two new books on Deleuze and Iraq were forthcoming, and Zizek enjoyed joking with Irina Rasmussen Goloubeva, my Russian-born wife, about Western misconceptions regarding Soviet-era life behind the Iron Curtain. As he apologetically escorted me and Ira out the door, Zizek was still theorizing at a machine-gun rate. "When does he get the time to write?" we wondered, in awe of our encounter with this sublime, yet humble, Slovenian philosopher.

Reading Notes: Rei Terada's Feeling In Theory

Prefatory remarks: I was expecting a lot from Rei Terada's Feeling In Theory and after spending lots of time with the book I feel disappointed. Terada could explain my feeling with a de Manian account of how emotion functions. According to de Man’s model, emotions arise as a solution to the inevitable interpretive impasses that we experience as empirical creatures. Upon encountering an ambiguous phenomenon (and Terada recognizes that de Man’s model of textuality ultimately doesn’t distinguish between natural objects in the world, such as an other who appears as a giant, and art works that have been created) my uncertainty will lead me to feel anxiety or fear. This fear will enable me to act and respond to whatever phenomenon I’m perceiving by metaphorically substituting a hypothetical figure that I will take to be a literal fact. I’ll return to this ur-scenario in a bit. Allow me to indulge, briefly, in my emotional response.

Reading Feeling in Theory was a let down, but I’m not sure whether it to hold the book or myself more responsible. That is, I’m not sure I’ve fully grasped either Terada’s project--constructing a poststructuralist theory of emotion--or her fundamental claim--that emotion not only doesn't require a unified subject to do the feeling, but that emotion depends upon the very nonexistence of the subject. At times it seems that Terada’s book boils down to an extended meditation on the de Manian claim that our insights into the meaning of the ultimately undecidable text are a function of our blindness to the figural status of tropes that we literalize.

In other words, her basic critical insight is that whenever de Man works through the play of figures and tropes in his readings, the passages he chooses to analyze are directly concerned with emotional responses. Terada argues, then, that de Man is advancing a theory of emotion as well as a theory of rhetoric and that the two are intimately related, for emotions turn out to be effects produced by the play of rhetorical structures. I was expecting more of a payoff from Terada’s book.

My disappointment, according to Terada’s theory, could be due to my inability to make adequate sense of her book. As a strategy of coping with my experience of the book’s undecidability, which generates an intolerable anxiety, I dub her book a "disappointment." Calling the book a "disappointment," according to this line of reasoning, should not trick anyone into believing that it is literally a disappointment. This is merely a metaphorical substitution that I’ve made as a sort of coping strategy which enables me to being acting (in this case, to get around to writing a response, to reread the second half of Derrida’s Of Grammatology, etc. to finally getting around to actually reading Rousseau, etc.). My act of denomination makes possible a series of metaphorical substitutions that will generate subsequent emotions. For example, once I convince myself that the book is a “disappointment” (perhaps an act of bad faith, but possibly a useful one) I may get angry or I might be inspired, etc.

Ultimately, I’m not sure Terada breaks much new ground regarding de Man. Like Frances Ferguson, she identifies a strong empiricist streak in deconstruction, thoughfor Terada this is precisely why it offers a useful account of emotion. Here, then, are some key quotes from Terada that are particularly relevant to her discussion of "deconstructive passion" and the "nonsubjectivism of emotion."

"If we have emotions because we can’t know what to believe (what texts and people are up to), as de Man suggests, then we have emotions even though we can’t know which emotions we ought to have. if we truly knew which emotions we should have, we would no longer feel like having any" (89).

This quote illustrates that Terada gets the fundamental de Manian move, which is to treat written compositions, artworks, bodies, iconographic representations, and objects in the world as texts, which is to say as objects that seem to signify. However, what de Man’s analyses strive to demonstrate is the complex manner in which these text generate the illusion of meaningfulness. For de Man all off the aforementioned objects are ultimately opaque and meaningless. Terada’s reading begins with the notion that what we experience as emotion begins with instinctive (I think this is the right word) response to the fundamental meaninglessness of objects in the world. (In this regard, Terada picks up on the existential streak that was more prominent in early de Man, which has been described in detail by Frank Lentricchia).

"I am arguing that a discourse and ideology of emotion exist; that poststructuralist theory shows their relation; and that the effect of this exploration is to suggest that we would have no emotions if we were subjects" (4).

When Terada speaks of poststructuralist theory, she primarily means deconstruction; she argues, for example, that "Derrida and de Man unfold fully the nonsubjectivism of emotion" (7). Terada proposes that, contrary to his reputation for being a dispassionate theorist, de Man was not only particularly interested in emotion, but that his writings offer a "direct" theory of emotion. She notes that de Man's choice of authors in Allegories of Reading (Rilke, Proust, Nietzsche, and Rousseau) was due in part to the emotionality of their prose. In the preface to Allegories de Man informs us that "The choice of Proust and Rilke as examples is partly due to chance, but since the ostensible pathos of their tone and depth of their statement make them particularly resistant to a reading that is no longer thematic, one could argue that if their work yields to a rhetorical scheme, the same would necessarily be true for writers whose rhetorical strategies are less hidden behind the seductive powers of identification" (AR ix). The phrase that Terada picks up on and runs with is “ostensible pathos." As she explains, de Man's larger deconstructive project is to undermine the priority that has been given to "thematic," by which de Man means, "referential" readings and to advance in their place "rhetorical" readings that trace the figural movement of tropes through a text. In Allegories of Reading , de Man aims to deconstruct the "ostensible pathos" in several texts associated, in complex ways that needn't concern us here, with Romanticism. In other words, de Man wants to reject so-called referential readings of these texts in which their meaning "would be located in their author's intentionality and psychology" (48). That is, the typical way of treating the pathos in the texts written by the aforementioned authors is to identify it with real emotions that were experienced by them. De Man regards such a view as being dependent upon a naive understanding of emotions--how they function, why they occur, and how the can be transmitted. De Man wants to expose emotion and affect as a rhetorical effect and to do so he "calls our attention to the deployment of pathos as a persuasive tactic" (49).

(Note: When de Man speaks of rhetoric he does not do so in the usual sense of a carefully crafted mode of discourse aimed at persuading its audience of a particular position. This view of rhetoric emphasizes authorial control and mastery over language; whereas rhetoric in the de Manian sense stresses the extent to which the figurative nature of language eludes control of its users. For de Man, language users are always trumped by the tropes that they employ).

As a critic, de Man is typically interested in foregrounding the extent to which all of our experiences of reality are thoroughly mediated. As Stanley Fish has put it, "deconstructive or postructuralist thought is in its operation a rhetorical machine: it systematically asserts and demonstrates the mediated, constructed, partial, socially constituted nature of all realities, whether they be phenomenal, linguistic, or psychological" (Critical Terms 215). Terada's move, then, is to read Allegories of Reading as a text about the illusory nature of our emotions, which are typically regarded as being immediate expressions of an internal state. Terada argues that such a model of "expression is the dominant trope of thought about emotion" and that as a trope it functions "to extrapolate a human subject circularly from the phenomenon of emotion" (11). Following upon the work of de Man, whose mid to late texts provide "a coherent model of emotion as tropic structure" that conceptualize "emotions as practical interpretive acts which are as yet not classically subjective" (50) Terada aims to expose the expressive hypothesis as part of an ideology of emotion that is to be rejected for perpetuating an outdated model of subjectivity based upon a unified and stable self. The claim that emotions are thoroughly mediated doesn’t strike me as being a particularly novel position, though, to her credit, Terada’s account of how emotions function in de Man’s readings is more interesting. The interest, for me anyway, lies in the move to treat emotions as linguistic or rhetorical phenomena.

Here, then, are some passages that we might turn to in order to extract more from Terada’s account of de Man's theory of emotion:

ex #1) Wordsworth
Terada focuses attention on how de Man’s reading of the "Blessed Babe" passage from Wordsworth’s Prelude—in which the "Babe who sleeps/ Upon his Mother’s breast; who, when his soul/ Claims manifest kindred with an earthly soul, Doth gather passion from his Mother’s eye!"—stages an ur-scene of perception. In this scenario, an emotion, here passion, is figured as a nurturing substance that can be exchanged from one person to another and which makes possible a communion between them. This communion between mother and infant is based upon the sense of recognition that occurs during the exchange, and what de Man would have us recognize is the illusory nature of of the sense making that the emotion facilitates.

Terada summarizes de Man’s reading, which puts pressure on the ambiguous nature of emotion, as such: "...emotion coincides with the shaping of sense, suggesting that emotion is itself a figure—here it serves as a prosopopoeia and as metaphor—that consolidates an outside, a face, an inside, and a precarious means for getting back and forth between them" (5). The conclusion de Man would have us take away from his reading is that "one’s own emotion does not really provide access to the feelings of others or reflect the structure of reality... but the affective force of emotion understandably persuades us to think so" (55). In other words, the force of an emotionally moving experience creates a powerful and convincing illusion, namely, that we have direct access to the inner life of others and by extension to reality itself. However, the very experience of emotion, of being affected and feeling intensely, is always and already thoroughly mediated. The sense of being overcome by emotion is a form of making sense, and sense making, for de Man, is a linguistic phenomenon that involves being seduced by the movement of rhetorical figures and tropes. This Wordsworthian moment is particularly important for de Man as it illustrates the trope of prosopopoeia and the role that the face plays in the interpretive process.

This raises a question posed to me by my lovely wife, Irina Rasmussen Goloubeva, in an e-mail: "What about babies who have not yet entered the mirror stage?" As I understand it, Terada and de Man are relatively uninterested in psychoanalytic accounts of the prelinguistic subject, though they do share a belief with thinkers like Lacan and Kristeva that the entry into the symbollic order is a foundational moment in human development. If I read Terada correctly, she would argue that until they acquire language infants do not, in fact, experience emotions, though they obviously are affected by their sensory impressions of the world.

ex #2) Rousseau
The key moment in deconstruction’s engagement with emotion is the moment from Rousseau’s Essay on the Origin of Human Languagesin which a primitive man first encounters a man from another tribe and reacts with fear. In Rousseau’s parable of denomination, the primitive man’s fear leads him to perceive them as bigger, stronger and as a potential threat to his welling being. As a consequence of his fear and distrust, he dubs them giants. Only after repeated encounters with the other man and members of his tribe will he discover that these men are not actually bigger or stronger. At that point the man will invent a word, such as man, that will apply both to himself and the other. The point of Rousseau’s parable is the figurative nature of the first word: "This is how the figurative word is born before the literal word, when our gaze is held in passionate fascination; and how it is that the first idea it conveys to us is not that of the truth" (42).

ex #3) Kant and Schiller

In "Kant and Schiller," de Man criticizes Schiller for misappropriating the Kantian sublime for "practical psychology," a move that dephilosophizes the sublime by neglecting Kant’s concern with the limitations of the faculties of reason and the imagination and instead focusing on the problem of coping with a terrifying experience. De Man is full of contempt for Schiller’s use of the sublime. He acknowledges the usefulness of the "topological figuration." Schiller posits in which a fictive or hypothetical danger substitutes for a literal danger. Such a move, we have seen, occurs in Kant as well, and at times the ability to come to terms with a real, but uncertain, danger by providing a fictional figure can provide a strategy for self-preservation. However, de Man opposes the manner in which Schiller deploys the trope of the sublime so that self-preservation becomes a purely idealized state in which the powers of the mind are entirely divorced from the material body, which remains in physical danger (65).

Terada understands De Man’s late essays on Kant to be addressing the aforementioned fear “by tracking the consequences of Kantian apatheia” (82). Kant takes care to distinguish between affects and passions. The distinction lies in the fact that affects are "impetuous and unpremeditated, passions persistent and deliberate" (Kant 132n39). Surprisingly, perhaps, in Kant’s system, affects are valued more highly, because the deliberate pursuit of passion threatens to become an a manic obsession for repetition, that is a from of addiction. Kant’s discussion of affects advances a hierarchy of value that privileges "emotions the less arbitrary and coercive they are" (83). Kant’s criteria for judging emotions lead him to praise apatheia "when found in a mood that adheres emphatically and insistently to its principles, cannot only be sublime but most admirably so" (quoted in Terada 83).