(5:30 PM) | Adam Kotsko:

Some Random Remarks

1. It seems to me that Zizek is moving more and more in the direction of Walter Benjamin.
   
   
2. It strikes me that one can best understand Agamben's rather enigmatic (and often frankly creepy) comments on pornography in the context of Benjamin's "Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproducibility" -- a work that Agamben does not, if I remember correctly, ever cite in the books I've read.
   
   
3. In the 20th Century Theology seminar, I volunteered -- somewhat at random -- to read Friedrich Gogarten's Christ the Crisis. It was refreshing, in the context of my usual reading, to have someone take Jesus seriously as a thinker (as opposed to Paul). In my opinion, this is a book that should be read, just in general.
   
   
4. I plan to do my second dissertation on the concept of law.
   
   
5. A Derrida survey like Caputo's Prayers and Tears, except from the perspective of psychoanalysis, would be very useful. Doubtless, in the seething mass of Derrida literature, such a survey exists, perhaps several, but I doubt they're as well-done as Caputo's, nor are they quite what I'm thinking of. I'd want something that could follow up on the discrete references to psychoanalysis in his works that aren't overtly "about" psychoanalysis -- Adieu to Emmanuel Levinas would probably be a good starting point for that.
   
   
6. Last night while browsing in the Co-op, I came across Fire Alarm: Reading Walter Benjamin's "On the Concept of History". It is part of Verso's apparent new strategy to publish very short books in hardcover and charge $30.00 for them. I don't feel I can support such a strategy, personally. I have, however, added the item to my wish list, which everyone is free to mock from whatever perspective they wish.
   
   
7. If it weren't ridiculous, I would love to devote some serious study to Baudelaire. Someone who was so important to both Derrida and Benjamin can't be a total waste of time, and I think it would be funny if I turned out to be a theologian (or religious studies person, or philosopher of religion, or whatever the fuck I'm doing) who instinctively turned to Baudelaire in the same way that Agamben instinctively turns to Benjamin, for instance.
   
   
8. I think that people who take disciplinary boundaries and questions of method very seriously in the context of the academic humanities alternately annoying or amusing. The way I see it, if I wanted to be doing science, I would be doing physics -- or, you know, another science. The only thing that disciplinarity and methodology seem to me to accomplish in the context of the humanities is bureaucratization, meaning a highly questionable parody of "meritocracy" (by which I don't mean to imply that "meritocracy" is ever anything but a parody of itself). This is not to say that I don't want to publish or go to conferences as much as is practicable.
   
   
9. I don't think anything should be run like a business, even businesses.
   
   
10. If it seems like I've mentioned Benjamin a lot in this post, it's probably because I'm reading the "Theses" in German -- more details are available here.

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