Stunted Growth

Do I do personal posts anymore? It seems like all I ever do that's "personal" is to rattle off a list of things that I need to do. To wit:

1. Write a review of The Parallax View for JCRT
   
2. Write up notes for Nancy directed study
   
3. Read Derrida materials about Nancy; take notes on those

I hope to get step one done within the next couple days and to get step two (and possibly three) done by June 7, when my advisor returns from a trip to Korea. All of these tasks strike me as rather joyless at the moment, as do the remaining tasks for the summer: writing a paper for 20th Century Theology, then beginning to prepare for the exam. I see what it would look like to get stuck in a rut, and the prospect does not make me happy -- Zizek already takes up too big a chunk of my CV at the moment, for example, and I just don't know how much really new stuff he has forthcoming. There's only so many times you can make an argument in the style of "list two positions that are supposed to be the relatively common ideas about something, then make an italic statement about how the real truth is the very non-coincidence between these two positions!" (Extra points if the italic part is a rhetorical question.)

Perhaps this is connected: I've been feeling nostalgia of late for my sojourn in Kankakee, in large part because of the intellectual exploration. Interestingly, though, that was also the place where I was most miserable. Yet there's a certain nostalgia for the misery, because it seemed to lend life a certain kind of meaning or urgency that it lacks right at the moment. I'm perfectly happy and content, and at the same time, I'm bored. There are certain kinds of misery I don't want, of course -- the deeply distressing money problems I faced over the course of last summer did not grant me any existential insight, for instance. But there was just something about the way problems presented themselves in Kankakee, a certain (largely unwarranted) weight that they had there -- due almost entirely to the involvement of religion.

Here in Chicago, for example, it doesn't matter that I'm not married. I'm with someone right now, and I know that I'd be deeply sad if we were to break up for some reason, but still, it seems clear that after the mourning process had run its course, the experience of singleness would be different -- a simple absence. By contrast, in Kankakee it often felt as though there was some deep religious significance to marriage, as if I was not only failing to discharge my duty, but was missing out on a uniquely meaningful experience. Since I am a person who read Jude the Obscure at a very young age and followed it up with far too much Kierkegaard, I obviously looked at marriage with quite a bit more skepticism than some of my peers -- despite the fact that my parents have been happily married for my entire life. In Kankakee, however, this very skepticism about marriage had to take on a religious significance -- it couldn't just be one choice among others, but instead had to be some kind of statement, perhaps an ascetic observance, perhaps a prophetic witness.

The language of self-actualization never made much sense to me, probably because my religious frame made the stakes seem too small. A failure to self-actualize may present a deeper meaning -- a decision to allow myself to remain emotionally stunted as a protest against God would have been a possibility, for instance.

Now, ironically enough, I'm too much of a Christian. People find me incomprehensible for that reason.

I'm going to read a novel. The Zizek review can wait until tomorrow.