is the word 'diary' better than the word 'blog'? probably not.
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Is All Recognition Enslavement?
Is All Recognition Enslavement?
Posting twice in one day! Free wireless!
Here at SPEP, I walked into a room to watch a panel given by three friends of mine, one of whom I hadn�t seen in over two years. When I walked in he gave me that wide-eyed look of happiness that people sometimes give to each other when they truly like each other. It�s a look that says something like, �damn, you look good, and I sure do like you too!� This made me very happy. Upon reflection, I think I was probably giving the same look back to him, though I wasn�t aware of giving it. Which means he may not have been aware of giving it either. Sometimes people affect us in good ways and there is no hiding it.
Stop trying to hide such things!
I have seen many, many people here whom it is so good to see. During the aforementioned panel, I was thinking to myself how lucky I was to have gone to the three-week philosophy conference in Italy all those summers ago, where I met many of the people I know at this conference. I was sitting there, marveling at how wonderful so many of those people are, and wondering whether it�s that great every year at the Italy conference, or whether we had an exceptional year. After the aforementioned panel I walked up to the table where the three friends had been sitting and delivering papers and arguing with each other, and I said, �Hello, my friends. Who is ready to eat food and drink booze with me!� They all stood up abruptly and we went in search of food!
That took some time because, turns out, we were all so hungry that we couldn�t decide where to go, so we wandered the streets of Salt Lake City like a gang of over-educated ruffians. Two places told us we had to wait 45 minutes. We said NO WAY MAN. The third place said the same, so J asked that most important of philosophical questions, �do you have a bar?� We stayed there and ate some snacks and waited. It was worth it, because it was an Italian restaurant run by mob caricatures, one of whom was very fond of us as a group. We had some free things, and some things that we paid for, in more ways than one.
At some point I looked around the restaurant and realized that there was a meeting of the women philosophers all at a table together. The boys I was with all looked at me like, why aren�t you over there? And I responded: �Wasn�t invited? Didn�t know? BOYS NIGHT OUT!� And we got some rosso umbria and made a toast to our luck to be together.
The dinner took hours. We missed the 8pm guest lecture, but made it back in time for the reception with the free beer and wine. At one point during the reception, M leaned over and said to me, �Have you ever thought about how great the people were at the Collegium?� I looked at him and smiled and said, �Yes, I have.� He continued, �Do you think it�s always that good?�
Then another of our Italy compatriots walked up, another one whom I had not seen for over two years, and in the course of conversation we realized that we both live in Philadelphia. Plus he�s in a rock band that is currently in the top 30 of some list or something. So he took my numbers and promised to introduce me to lots of good people. Because you all know how much I need some rock stars in my life.
Have you every tried combining Sting and Madonna, so that you sing �we are living in a material world� to the tune of The Police�s �Spirits in a Material World,� or �we are spirits in a material world� to the tune of Madonna�s �Material World�? You should. It will really help you understand just how crappy both songs are.
Also, I�m a really good songwriter. Today while I was at a panel on the work of Judith Butler, a conversation broke out about Hegelian �recognition.� And that made me remember the song I made up to entertain fellow graduate students when we were taking a Hegel seminar with Judith Butler. It goes like this:
I�d like to recognize you
Mutually recognizing me
But yet I wonder still
Is all recognition enslavement?
Unfortunately my particular genius doesn�t shine through here, because you need to hear the tune and see the dance steps that go with it. I wish I could say that I had modeled this after an identifiable existing song so that you could then imagine how it goes, but I didn�t. A muse spoke in me one day, and I simply belted out these words and that tune, with a little soft-shoe, in the Teaching Assistant room in the old Rhetoric Department in the basement of Dwinelle Hall. The bare words alone tell us nothing about the overall composition. In fact the bare words leave us in the predicament we face with Greek lyric poetry. We can read the words but we have no idea what the poetry was actually like, because the music is lost.
No, I am not really trying to compare myself to Sappho or Alcaeus. Here�s one of my favorite Sappho poems, though. It�s really good about love and jealousy and loss, and its very romantic name is Sappho 31:
That man seems to me the equal of gods,
who, sitting close by you, hears
your sweet voice and laughter,
indeed it makes my heart flutter
in my chest. For when I see you
but a little, my voice gives way;
my tongue is useless. At once
a delicate fire races under my skin,
my eyes see nothing, my ears ring,
a chill sweat pours down me
and a trembling seizes all my body.
I am paler than dried green grass and
seem in my madness to be only a short space from death.
But everything must be dared, even by one so enslaved ....
That�s my translation, OK? It�s no recognition song, but it�s pretty darn good, don�t you think?
Must present my paper at 9am tomorrow. Time for re-reading and sleeping now.
10:57 p.m. - October 21, 2005
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