Saturday, August 09, 2003
(8:17 PM) | Adam Kotsko:
Link and list
Although sadly my Zizek links page does not come in the top sixty results for Zizek on Google, I did find this nice article on right-wing populism. Sitting in front of the computer on a Saturday night, looking for myself -- it's poetic.
Here is my list of Desert Island Books. I have chosen three:
- Gravity's Rainbow by Thomas Pynchon -- no list of Desert Island Books would be complete without a big thick novel. This one in particular seems to have captured the whole of human history from 1900-1950. I am convinced that it is the equivalent to the entire philosophical output of France in the 20th century, and it also has a lot of extremely funny passages. If I had to pick just one, this would be it.
- Concluding Unscientific Postscript by Johannes Climacus (Soren Kierkegaard) -- I would pick more practical Kierkegaard works like Works of Love or Practice in Christianity, but since I won't be around other people, that seems like it would be more frustrating than anything. CUP, as the Cambridge Companion abbreviates it, has almost the same degree of variety and humor as Gravity's Rainbow; especially humorous is Climacus's chapter entitled "A Glance at a Contemporary Effort in Danish Literature," which is nothing but a survey of Kierkegaard's own body of work up to that time. It's also written from the ethical, rather than the religious, point of view, so it stops just short of staking everything on "Jesus Christ and him crucified," surely a benefit for someone like me who occasionally likes to think about what it would be like not to be a Christian.
- Epistle to the Romans by Karl Barth -- I haven't actually read this yet, but I intend to. It seems to be a true tour de force of biblical interpretation, expouding a whole new theological position out of a commentary on one book of the Bible. I guess if I really wanted Barth and wanted to bend the rules a little bit, I'd just put down Church Dogmatics, all 9000 pages of it. Romans seems a little more manageable, and I don't want to dilute my list by counting as "one book" what is in reality about thirteen.
Now for a comment on influences: If I took the orthodox neo-Keenite position, I would have included The Brothers Karamazov as my big thick novel. I considered replacing Kierkegaard with something by Zizek, but nothing of Zizek's seemed as self-evident as Concluding Unscientific Postscript. Even though I only took four classes with him, Craig Keen is clearly the most decisive intellectual influence in my life, since many, if not most, of the infamous 100 books were "his" stuff. On a campus where only two professors convincingly promote a relatively small number of authors in a partisan manner, this was perhaps unavoidable, and I'm grateful that someone stepped in to keep me from being a completely narrow auto-didact. I apologize to all my non-Olivet readers to whom this paragraph basically makes no sense.
UPDATE:
Another fun link about my man Slavoj.
