Thursday, June 01, 2006
(9:26 AM) | Adam Kotsko:
My Intense Philosophical Research
Jean-Luc Nancy sometimes writes things that puzzle me. (Both of the following quotes come from A Finite Thinking (Stanford, 2003).)First, in an essay called "The Indestructible," he talks about the place of destruction in our culture, and here is the parenthetical list of destructive events that he gives:
(the genocides, the camps, the Armenian catastrophe, the Jewish Shoah, Hiroshima and Nagasaki, the Stalinist deportation, the shelling, napalm, defoliation, and oil fires that characterize modern warfare, the gassing of the Kurds, and so on--a litany that's both unbearable and entirely necessary).My question is about "the gassing of the Kurds" -- how does this make the list? And in such an awkward spot? This essay was written in 1992, when the first Gulf War was over -- I know that Saddam's gassing of the Kurds became an issue this time around (with the WMD connection), and presumably it came up during the propaganda push for the first one, too. If anyone can shed any light on this, I'd be interested.
Second, in an essay called "Elliptical Sense," originally written for a festschrift for Derrida, we find the following:
Happiness succumbed to the killing fields, to grocery stores and to crack. The stench is still with us.Grocery stores?! It sounds like something from a Godspeed voiceover. I like it -- maybe it'll make a good away message. Plus, if anyone asks me about this Nancy character I've been reading so much of, it provides a convenient capsule summary.
