Wednesday, August 10, 2005
(8:30 AM) | Adam Kotsko:
By Topic
Last night I decided to rearrange my books. The initial impetus was that had been a while since I had integrated new purchases into the bookshelves, but once I started actually doing it, change for its own sake became the goal. I went for four topics:- Religion (theology and Bible)
- Philosophy and Politics
- Psychoanalysis
- Literature
I didn't spend a lot of time agonizing, but there are choices to be made. Is Kierkegaard philosophy or religion? Is Dante religion or literature -- and for that matter, where to put Piers Plowman? Should I put Irigaray under psychoanalysis? Is Paul de Man literature or philosophy? (I can't make an informed decision -- I stole the book from Olivet and still haven't read it. I put it with philosophy because then he falls alphabetically next to Derrida.)
I could have broken it down further, though not much further. In literature, I have a collection of sufficient bulk to support an American, British, and Other section, at the very least (but who gets T. S. Eliot?). I could also easily divide up theology and biblical studies -- or the philosophy section could break down into philosophy and Marxist/political. (The "/political" is intended to account for Chomsky and Thomas Frank, who seem to belong to a class of their own, in terms of my own book collection.) But if I keep breaking down, sometimes I am going to have to make the choice to break an author's works into two or more sections. For instance, God Without Being goes in the religion section, but if I had other Marion books, they would probably go in philosophy -- so would God Without Being go with them? Or Kierkegaard -- some of the early works could be literature, then Fear and Trembling could go under biblical studies, Philosophical Fragments and the Postscript would be philosophy, and the late works would be theology. And with that in mind -- do some of my "philosophy" books go under "religion"? Would I need to do a separate "philosophy of religion" section?
Maybe tonight, or next week, I'll redo the whole thing.
