(8:07 AM) | Adam Kotsko:

Friday Afternoon Confessional

I confess that at one point I told Anthony that my goal for the Weblog was to reach 400 hits a day, at which point I would shut the site down immediately and without warning. Traffic peaked in the 380s later that week and has been heading downhill ever since, for reasons I can't quite discern -- the quality of my posts has been uniformly poor throughout the study period.

I confess that yesterday I killed some time by watching Strong Bad E-mails for the first time since Robb introduced me to the concept in late 2001.

I confess that I am almost done with the initial reading for the Agamben half of my Nancy and Agamben directed study -- all I need to read still are Potentialities, State of Exception, and Homo Sacer. Easy! No problem! I confess that I'm not quite sure what a contemporary Italian intellectual is doing making casual references to first century Gnosticism. I confess that the Nancy half of the directed study seems much more intimidating.

I confess that I'm thinking of setting aside Italian after a brief foray and picking up Latin instead, because I plan on taking a course on Augustine next semester. The only immediate use for Italian would be Agamben, but his writing style doesn't lead me to believe that there is this wealth of nuance and meaning that is incommunicable in English -- and probably, due to the geography of intellectual life, I can count on someone not writing things that are purposely partly untranslatable if they are writing in a language other than English, French, and German, because a person writing in a non-privileged language and who is as ambitious as Agamben is would know that his works would primarily be read in translation.

I haven't been sleeping very well. I haven't visited Kankakee in a while, and frankly I haven't driven or even gone to check on my truck for a while. For all I know, it's sitting in some tow yard somewhere.

I confess that I initially spelled it "toe."

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