In These Times

I am a doctoral candidate in philosophy, which is the inanimate love of my life. Alas, because of the radical nature of institutional transformations at the university level, I am leaning more and more towards abandoning my long-held dream of sharing the wonders of thinking for oneself with others. Indeed, I am currently on a hiatus from my studies. I took this time in order to teach full-time at my alma mater. After one semester of dealing with inept bureaucrats and dealing with consumers rather than students, I decided not to renew my contract. Instead, I am enjoying all of the reading and writing that I can possibly fit into my days and nights. I do contract writing and editing to the extent that I must in order to make ends meet. The rest of my time is spent either writing or researching for philosophical projects or reading certain books that I simply have not had the luxury of exploring during my time as a graduate student (a period that was twice put on temporary hold so that I could work on US Congressional campaigns, hence my love of politics, as well as my disgust: but there was no column for listing dislikes). Thus it is that I am currently having to seriously reevaluate whether I will actually return to complete my Ph. D. After all, if I am not going to teach, the actual degree allows me nothing but a pretentious title. I am philosophically mature enough that I do not require to be led by the hand in order to digest most any material I wish to tackle. Moreover, given that my primary area of competence was/is in Contemporary Continental Philosophy, especially the French Post-Structuralists (Derrida, Lacan, Foucault, Kristeva, and so on), but also including their important precusors, such as Nietzsche, Kierkegaard, Hegel, and Heidegger, I am more than familiar with struggling with a text. (My earlier training tended towards a more Anglo-American bent, but I quickly found myself bored to tears with much of the philosophy coming out of the English speaking world. Don’t give me syllogisms; give me creativity, make me think differently than I thought prior to investing myself in a text.) What’s more, there is just too much preoccupation in English varieties of philosophy with such inane and clearly irresolvable problems as whether humans have free will; who the hell cares? whether we do or not we must act as if we do (Kant’s famous practical argument). Metaphysical questions should be left in the 18th or perhaps 19th century. Actually, they should have been abandoned once Hume wrote his Essay Concerning Human Understanding. Additionally, I firmly believe that if philosophy is not politically and ethically pertinent to today’s problems, one is just as well off in opening one’s skull and playing with one’s brain. Of course, there are those who continue to deny the ethical or political content, much less significance, of the philosophers I listed above. There are a number of conclusions one may draw about those who make such claims: they are willfully stupid (thus not philosophers at all, but clergy members), they are simply unable to appreciate the fact philosophical discourse may be imminently political or ethical without resorting to supplying a hammer with the text (perhaps this group should consider a somewhat less speculative discipline), and finally there are the intellectual criminals who have not read the authors against whom they spew their foolish invective, they are neither smart enough nor creative enough to think and speak for themselves (in which case they should either be lobotomized or else get a job at Wal-Mart or selling cars). Ironically, I find myself sounding somewhat dogmatic myself, for this I apologize. It is simply that I despise the vices of intellectual laziness and dishonesty above all others. Such people, along with certain war criminals on whom I will not spend my time, will ultimately find themselves in the company of Judas, Brutus, and Cassius, where they may spend eternity encased in ice and so cast from the human community that their perdition is one of absolute silence. What, after all, could be a more fitting punishment for windbags whose only concept of truth is that of their own—or one of their compatriots—feeble construction. What a debt we owe to the great Dante the brilliance of Canto 34. At last I will depart from the level of the polemical and enter into that of the imagination. I have taught a number of classes entitled “Philosophy through Film” and have found film to be perhaps the most efficacious medium through which to elaborate the more complex ideas of the philosophical tradition. Perhaps this has something to do with the visual nature of the current generation of students. I, however, am not convinced of this fact, for these were upper level classes requiring at least the prerequisite of having taken Phil. 101. Freed of the constraints of being compelled to undertake a survey of the entire history of the genre (of philosophy), I have generally used this class to expose students to some of the more unorthodox approaches to philosophical thought. What better way to introduce Heidegger’s “Question Concerning Technology” than to pair it with The Terminator. Sartre’s notion that we are condemned to be free is perfectly posed by the classic Casablanca. Indeed, just yesterday I discovered a brilliant new film—initially, I must admit, there was no small amount of reluctance on my part—to teach a topic dear to my heart (it better be, since Ph. D. or no, it is the primary topic of my research and publications). The film, P.S. I Love You is a brilliant reevaluation of the Western attitude towards death, mourning, and remembrance; one could, in short, draw forth a new “ethics of death” from the work. I see this project as being one of the most significant contributions that Derrida made, not just to philosophy, but to contemporary culture in general. In my opinion, though I make no claim to sanity and even less of one to having communed with the Truth, Derrida is the most important moral philosopher since Kant. And, his point of departure for the development of a new approach to ethics, and even to politics, is a reconsideration of psychic tear which constitutes what is today called mourning. Through a reevaluation of how we conceive of and bear witness for those who have come before us and enriched our lives, whether they be our closest relatives or simply someone whose life or work has transformed who we are by affecting how we think, it was Derrida’s suggestion (implicit though it often was) that we can learn to treat those with whom we continue to share the earth in a more just way. What’s more, this approach forces us to pay special attention to those among us who are most marginalized, the immigrant, the refugee, the stranger and so forth. Who knows? Perhaps with enough effort and self-reflection, I will even come to appreciate the value of those who insist in all of their glorious ignorance that Derrida was nothing more than an ironic anarchist with no respect whatsoever for the philosophical tradition whose books should be consigned to the fire place, along with those of Robert Reich, and other pansy liberals who consider citizenship to be far more a matter of duty than of right (an ironic reversal of the otherwise culturally destructive “mindset of entitlement.”) Finally, I swear, David Lynch, Darren Aranovsky, David Cronenberg, David Fincher (pretty much any film maker whose name includes David, unless David Dukes happens to have become a director), the venerable Pechinpaugh (so I cannot spell), Scorcesse, Kirosawara, and finally, for your sake and mine, the brilliant director whose name is obviously obstinately refusing my recall, but who made such great films Noir such as The Big Sleep are amongst the greatest thinkers of the 20th century. Finally, finally, Miles Davis’s Kind of Blue is the closest that I imagine I will ever come to touching the face of God. A work of perfection in a world of abjection.