is the word 'diary' better than the word 'blog'? probably not.
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Wood Duck=Feather Squirrel. Falling off the Bicyclette. Cookie Monster Syntax.
Wood Duck=Feather Squirrel. Falling off the Bicyclette. Cookie Monster Syntax.
Today I saw the wood duck fly! There were two bratty white geese bossing everyone around (the white geese are what give geese a bad reputation. Much like the white people?) and finally a bunch of ducks, including my beloved wood duck boyfriend, chased and tail-bit the shit out of the white geese. Of course the white geese snapped back, and there was much ado and quacking and peeping and honking, and then all the ducks and geese had to start flying, around and around in circles. And there was my tiny little wood duck (did I mention that wood ducks are much tinier than other ducks? they are....), with his crazy punk rock hairdo, flying around, not alone, but with all the other ducks! But that ended, and there he was alone again, on the bank of the pond, watching all the other duck couples and goose couples. Why does he have to hurt me like that? Soon he will lose some of his feathers and be unable to fly until fall. This means that my wood duck will REMAIN ALONE ALL SUMMER. What is to be done?
So wood ducks live in trees. Do you know what this means? This means that WOOD DUCKS ARE FEATHER SQUIRRELS, like the Puerto Rican chickens!
It is amusing to me that there is, out there, some collection of people who read this diary and actually know what the hell I was talking about in that last sentence.
Today I went to a wine-tasting party at the Humanities Center, and then, after the sixth wine, was asked to give an impromptu description of the symposium I'm convening next year in March. I have not even written a proposal for the symposium yet. But I think I said something that made me sound competent and deserving of all my funding.
You know what I'm not so competent at? THE FRENCH LANGUAGE! Apparently I no longer speak French at all, but rather some strange language called Levinasian. This was brought home to me recently when I tried to translate a few abstracts submitted in French for a volume of essays on Levinas and Nietzsche that I'm editing with some friends. I was so alarmed by this development that I have decided I must take some form of French this summer while I'm in San Francisco. I'm sure the Alliance Francaise or somesuch organization offers classes for people who don't need to start over but just need to get ass-kicked (in French).
I was telling this anecdote (over email) to my two fellow-book-editors, and my friend B--, who teaches in Montreal, has translated some Levinas volumes, and communicates in French all the time, protested, after viewing what I sent her, that I was exaggerating my unfitness for the task of translation. But she was not there in my head when I tried to read those abstracts! In short, I have somehow forgotten how to ride a bicyclette.
In other news, I recently discovered that the best way to teach students how to understand Levinas' very complicated description of subject formation (how each of us get formed as subjectivities) (what? like that clarifies anything!) is to resort to COOKIE MONSTER SYNTAX. And you all know how much I love the cookie monster.
Cookie Monster Syntax. For Levinas the self (soi) is an envelope containing Ego (le Moi) and Me (moi). Ego likes to think of itself as self-sufficient, sovereign, owing only what it would consent to owe. Ego believes in the history of liberal political theory. It rests back in itself, all complacent in its enjoyment or its jouissance. The ego is comfortable, it eats bread and thinks the bread tastes good. However, there is something more in there, in the self, than the Ego. There is Me. Me is disturbed. Me senses that there are others who need things, and those needs are experienced by Me as directed at Me. Me, however, is no saint, me want cookie, and so Me try to flee from these demands, by retreating deeper into the self, towards self-involvement. In so doing, in fleeing from responsibility, Me finds the Ego. This bums the Ego out. There the Ego is, mouth full of sugary bread, on the couch-of-the-self watching Lost, thinking it is all alone and in charge of its own destiny. But all of a sudden there is this Me there, trying to escape the Other, and thereby jostling the Ego. Ego�s all, �what are you doing here, I am the self.� And Me�s all, �here I am, for the other, give the other that bread.� This is the moment when the ego�s sovereignty is undermined. Ego finds out that it is not alone, in charge of its own self, sovereign and undisturbed. Ego also learns that A?A. Ego does not equal self. Ego plus Me equals Self. But Me is already obsessed by the Other. So the new equation is Ego + Me = Self, where Me = Me + Other. That means that Self = Ego + Me + Other. I am already fractured as a subject, split between Ego and Me, and invaded by the Other, by demands I never chose to bear, disturbed by all this long before I have the opportunity to decide to refuse or take on responsibilities that arise in consciousness. And that is how the cookie monster teaches us what it means to be a subject.
11:38 p.m. - May 12, 2006
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