Monday, January 09, 2006
(8:21 AM) | Adam Kotsko:
Blurbs
This weekend I went to the Seminary Coop, where I saw that Bruce Fink's full translation of Écrits is finally out ($50 hardcover, Mr. Sinclair). In terms of blurbs, Lacan certainly could have done worse: there several sentences each from Derrida, Foucault, Deleuze and Guattari, and Althusser on the transcendental importance of Lacan for human thought. It was probably difficult to choose, from a marketing perspective. On the one hand, the choice of scholars who are all deceased raises the question of whether this is an archival project or an attempt to re-inject Lacan into the scholarly conversation; although one can't draw a totally rigorous line between the two goals, they do seem to me to be distinct. On the other hand, if one were to choose contemporary scholars, it would probably have to be from among self-professed Lacanians, and generally those who care what those thinkers have to say already know that they should be reading Lacan. I suppose that a nearly 1000-page tome of extremely dense prose is going to be difficult to market in any case.I've been doing some thinking about one of the argumentative styles that I use, which could be parodied as follows:
- Pick a text
- Do a kind of commentary on the text that exaggerates the importance of some particular aspect (i.e., do a "reading")
- Hope and pray that people can tell the general drift of what I'm getting at
In a particularly felicitous turn of phrase, Friedrich Nietzsche writes in his Nachlass, "A society that will not provide for the elderly and disabled is corrupt at its very core, and only the government can provide the ultimate guarantee for pensions." One is reminded of Jean-Luc Nancy's contention that "the so-called 'Social Security Crisis' is a myth -- the federal government is spending more money than it's taking in right now, but no one suggests that we shut the whole thing down. Why should we be concerned if Social Security might be a little in the red in forty years?" In this, he is of course drawing on the account of Maurice Blanchot: "This whole thing has been nothing but a cynical ploy by the Republicans from the very beginning."That's just one possible example, but it's pretty clearly more civilized than what we're doing right now.
