Tuesday, April 27, 2004
(9:33 PM) | Adam Kotsko:
Strange Project
First of all, I'd like to thank Monica for joining the staff here at the Weblog. I encourage all of you to read the remarkably snarky comment section to her first post, which put up much better comment numbers than my posts usually do. I look forward to a long, productive blogging relationship.
Second, I'd like to point you toward a great post over at Spurious, entitled "Why I am not a destiny." It led me to reflect on my own relationship to philosophy. It is demonstrably different from Lars Iyer's or à Gauche's or Anthony Smith's, and I don't know what that means. My true fear in relation to philosophy is not so much lacking the ability to comprehend or engage with philosophy, but rather lacking the proper credentials. I keep seeing myself studying Lacan at some divinity school, or doing my dissertation on Žižek in a department of comparative literature -- just as I'm studying Derrida and Hardt and Negri at a seminary, and fully intend to do my thesis on one of those names that we're all addicted to dropping.
I like Karl Barth and Robert Jenson, and I fully expect that I'll enjoy Hans Urs Von Balthasar and any number of other theologians (though not Moltmann so much, I'm discovering), but I like them in some sense as philosophers, or, better, as literature -- I want to flatten out the distinction, put everyone in the same plane, put together Robert Jenson and Alain Badiou and Thomas Pynchon. I wish I didn't live in America, so that I wouldn't feel like such a jackass for using Christian thinkers, but in the abstract, I'm not embarassed to deploy these people. It's part of the tradition. Augustine is part of the tradition. The apostle Paul is part of the tradition. Jesus Christ? I don't know -- let's leave him alone for the moment -- but the gospels are definitely fair game. (This is partly in response to IB Bill's comment on my last post along these lines -- no, I don't think that Christianity is "true" in the sense that society will fall apart or God will be pissed off if people stop identifying themselves as Christians. In fact, we stand an even chance of being better off if there are fewer Christians, depending on which groups we're depopulating.)
I wonder if Robb has changed his CDs lately.
