Sunday, April 24, 2005
(4:52 PM) | Adam Kotsko:
Sweets
I don't eat sweets every day, unless frosted mini wheats count. I want some, though. I want some cake with nice moist frosting. I want ice cream. I want one of those fancy kinds of ice cream with the chunks of candy or cookie dough in it. I want some coconut cream pie. I feel like I'll never be happy again unless I have some baked goods. Thankfully, Hayley is making some to go with dinner tonight, but I wanted it even before. I've been slightly cranky all day and generally "thrown off," and this is why.Follow-up on that quiz I had everyone take, about what book I should read next -- yeah, I haven't so much as opened Interpretation of Dreams. In fact, I am thinking of starting Mason & Dixon. It's interesting that "literature" figures so heavily in my desert island list, since I never read the stuff. With philosophy or religious stuff, I am reading it because I want to get to the bottom of something and want to share the results with others -- if I were on a desert island, with no one to talk to, then who cares if, at bottom, Badiou is right about Paul or not? I would just want to read for the sake of reading, to enjoy the play of language -- any information or insight gained would be purely secondary; in fact, part of the pleasure would be that all these little insights pop up in such a way that they don't have to be threaded together, that something can appear to be true, indisputably true, purely on the strength of having been said, at random.
That's why, if I ever get done with a PhD and fail to get a job in academia, if I'm going to be locked into some meaningless job that will give me carpal tunnel and where my primary care doctor won't give me the referrals I need to get it fixed -- you know, if I ever get stuck on that desert island, which I have been stuck on before! -- then I'm going to read nothing but novels, all the time, or maybe the occasional poem. I only started reading philosophy and religion shit because I felt like I was in a situation where I needed to talk to people about it.
It's like eating cake. I know some people prefer pie, but I prefer cake, and I don't want to talk about it. If I'm going to be on the desert island, though, I want to have dessert every day, my favorite dessert.
Here's what Derrida says on this matter:
Literature I could, fundamentally do with out, in fact, rather easily. If I had to retire to an island, it would be particularly history books, memoirs, that I would doubtless take with me…. But if, without liking literature in general and for its own sake, I like something about it, which above all cannot be reduced to some aesthetic quality, to some source of formal pleasure [jouissance], this would be in place of the secret…: there where nevertheless everything is said and where what remains is nothing—but the remainder, not even of literature…. Literature is a modern invention, inscribed in conventions and institutions which, to hold on to just this trait, secure in principle its right to say everything. Literature thus ties its destiny to a certain noncensure, to the space of democratic freedom…. No democracy without literature; no literature without democracy.I really feel like this is cake vs. pie, though. Maybe Derrida would have gotten lonelier on his desert island than I will have gotten on mine.
UPDATE: In consultation with Robb, I have decided that wedding cake is my favorite type of cake. As such, I am going to start up a wedding planning company as a front, in order to have easier access to the cake.
