Sunday, May 08, 2005
(1:09 PM) | Adam Kotsko:
Give me Pynchon and St. Paul
I've seen the future, and it's murder. As I sit, all broken-hearted, trying to avoid finishing my last assignment before I am quasi-officially a "doctoral student at the Chicago Theological Seminary" and no longer merely that bizarre half-breed among students, the masters-aspirant -- no longer an undergrad, not yet a real grad student -- I think to myself, "Oh dear! Here I've gone to all this trouble, and I'm not even sure what it is I want to study!" [UPDATE (4:07PM): I finished the take-home exam and e-mailed it to my professor. Assuming I don't fail, I have completed my coursework. From here on out, it's just a matter of showing up to a couple events -- there isn't even any more paperwork to do or any more bills to pay.]Sure, I've got my little workaday goals for this summer -- make $21,000 over and above my living expenses so as to enter the PhD debt-free, learn to read German (for what? ah yes, for Taubes -- Scott McLemee, fear not, for I shall translate some Taubes for everyone's favorite Bolshevik!), read everything in the history of theology from the New Testament up to Augustine -- but, as my parents used to ask me a little too often, "What's my passion?!" I don't seem to have any passion, my friends. No passion! And that is a problem. If I'm going to force my way through this crazy academic world, working my ass off, I'd better damn well have a passion, and no, it cannot be Street Fighter II: Turbo.
A passion has to be something over and above what I've already committed to do; even if the initial impetus behind the commitment was something like a "passion," once it is a commitment, it is a duty, and I only perform duties out of pure respect for the moral law, not out of anything pathological like "passion." What I'm after here is a little something that Lacan would call "objet petit a." I want what I still want once I have everything that I ostensibly wanted.
In this case, I have a vague idea. I can't pin it down, and I certainly can't commit to actually follow through on it. But I'll be frank: yes, I'm jealous of Agamben. I eventually hoped to be the one who would write about Romans and the Theses on the Philosophy of History, and now he's gone and done it. I hate that wily Italian for it. I don't know if I'm going to be able to bear to read his book. But you know what Agamben hasn't done? You know what he probably hasn't even thought about doing? What if -- I'm just speculating here, don't hold me to it -- what if Gravity's Rainbow is a commentary on Romans? Did anyone ever think of that? And -- wow, you guys are going to be impressed here -- The Crying of Lot 49 would be Galatians. (Slow Learner would, of course, be 2 Corinthians, but there's only so much you can do in one book.)
I know, ground-breaking stuff. It encapsulates everything that's wrong with literary studies as well as exposing the sheer decadence of contemporary philosophical readings of Paul. My problem is a dilletantish ahistoricism, perhaps unparalleled in this history not only of Western thought, but of the thought of all three other cardinal directions as well. And wouldn't such extraordinary badness be its own type of genius? A kind of blackhole of the intellect, with which one would at least have to reckon, if only to "reckon" the proper course for avoiding it?
Feedback would be appreciated -- the kind where you hold the guitar up to the amp, I mean.
