I had an upsetting dream last night in which my undergrad advisor was calmly relating to me his dissapointment in my many failures as a graduate student. I felt like shit. Then my brother showed up, but he was all like 17 and beardless and rolling his eyes at me. It was all very disconcerting, well, except for Lev rolling his eyes at me, because that's a fairly common occurence.
I went to hear Judith Butler speak last night in Hemmerdinger Hall. The last time I was there was for this. Hemmerdinger's really not all that large, and the cops locked the doors as some folks banged on the glass trying to get in, and it looked for a few moments as if there might be some real violence exercised on people's bodies even as Butler spoke eloquently about torture, photography, Abu Ghraib, and the limits of the secular - specifically secularization's coercive aspects and the ways in which torture is constructed as a coercive technique/technology of modernization. Butler's speech was very smart, at times funny - she cracked a couple of jokes at the expense of Thomas Friedman (who has "apparently never read Boaz" - an offhand reference to the racist essentialsm inherent in how Friedman constructs "The Orient") and Bill O'Reilly, and very much on point - she even joked about her own writing at one point. which was slightly surreal. The last time I saw her speak was this lecture she gave on Nietzsche in the Whitney Humanities Center in fall of 2003 and i had no idea what the fuck was going on. Whether I got everything and appreciated it and thought it was really smart this time around because i've read Precarious Life and found it really useful, or because it just wasn't on Nietzsche, or because Butler was simply talking about politics in a much more immediate and tangible sense of the term I will leave to the reader to decide. After the lecture, another GSOCer and I went up to Butler and thanked her for her support for our strike last year, and she wished us luck moving forward.
I'm really swamped at the moment - a presentation on C.L.R. James (aka J.R. Johnson) in MarcoPoco next tuesday immediately followed by a paper due Wednesday, so if I have been bad about getting in touch with folks or returning e-mails, i apologize and will get my shit together asap.
In the meantime, please respond to this post with, in addition to any salient points, your favorite original song by the (English) Beat. No covers - i.e., no "Jackpot," (originally by the pioneers) "Rough Rider," (Prince Buster, but you knew that already,) "Whine or Grine," (also Prince Buster) or "Tears of a Clown," which was originally performed by Smokey Fucking Robinson and the Miracles.
Mine's "too nice to talk to," although it switches every five minutes.
Great presentation! I was in such a state of anxiousness that I jumped in and said stupid things at various times, even often when I wasn't sure of the context of the conversation. Just a question: Don't you think CLR James could have written a play that, after the list of characters, just said: "hey, do whatever you want, i don't want any text or stage directions to stifle your own interpretation?" I was thinking of how oppressive anything more would be to my own interpretation of the revolution.
ReplyDeleteThanks.
ReplyDeleteApparently I met CLR James as a baby, according to my mother.
I thought your comments were extremely smart and moved the conversation out of a rather vacuous morass and into more interesting territory. You should talk more in that class.
The Freire fight, during which i was semi-tuned out, seemed kind of intense.