is the word 'diary' better than the word 'blog'? probably not.

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generally speaking, pretty serious.

I worked pretty hard, while writing my book, to develop a style that could capture the depth and nuance of both the argument I wanted to make and the testimonies I cite in making the argument, and do all that without alienating readers with the jargon of any one academic specialization. It took 5 years or more to do the writing and thinking that went into it, and during that time I presented the work-in-progress to lots of different kinds of audiences—philosophers, lawyers, political theorists and political scientists, interdisciplinary groups of various kinds. I learned a lot (sometimes the hard way) about how to talk about work to a wide array of persons. It matters to me to do that—to write something that isn’t only aimed at the group of people who have read the same books I have for the last ten years. I also think that the choices I made have an ethical value.

A philosopher-friend of mine recently suggested to me that there is something subversive about the way I treat texts by philosophers, theorists, and people giving testimony in trials, truth commissions and archives of testimony in the same way—putting them on the same level. I had not considered that. It just seemed to me to be the only way to do justice to what I was trying to show by using philosophy to talk about testimony (and vice versa). If it is subversive, I’m fine with that. But it is also interesting to consider what that then says about philosophy, if it is subversive to give as much weight to the words of someone who has undergone a trauma as one would to someone who has theorized something about the world (and who may or may not have experience of the thing being thought). I don’t think experience gives anyone an authority, necessarily. But I also don’t think having a Ph.D means that your ideas are necessarily better than someone whose areas of knowing and doing were developed otherwise.

One thing I want to say up front: I do not think it is wrong to want to write a book aimed at people deeply involved in a specialized area of a field of inquiry. Who knows, maybe I’ll do that some day. It is important that there is space for those books and those conversations, and sometimes I am very happy to find myself involved in precisely those conversations—the ones where you can start much further along in the thinking because you are in a group with a shared set of knowledges. It’s why I’m in a small group of people who get together every year or so to spend a few days discussing in great detail texts by the philosopher Emmanuel Levinas, for instance.

But in the process of getting the book published and getting tenure I’ve learned some things about how the larger world may judge the choices I’ve made in writing the book that I had not yet learned from talking about the work to various audiences. While I was traveling around talking about the book-in-progress (Ethical Loneliness) the work was always met with enthusiasm and good suggestions and occasionally some helpful pushback, but no hostility or doubt about my capacity to do what I am doing. In fact, during those years of talking to different audiences, I kept waiting for someone to point out to me what I was doing wrong—it simply can’t be the case that the book is just “right.” (However, I suspect that if there will be any criticism, it will emerge in a year or two, since that’s pretty much how long it takes a book to be digested, reviewed, and the review published.)

If anyone decides to tell me what I did wrong with the book, I’ll be happy to hear it. I just hope that the review will be generous, by which I mean: I hope it will also address what the book actually tried to do, in addition to pointing out any of its failures. In any case, it will be fine even if I get some ungenerous reviews. Hannah Arendt will have prepared me for this with her descriptions of the paradox of action (that once you send the thing you’ve created out into the world, you lose the capacity to control how it will be received) and the web of human relationships (that I don’t get to have the last word on how the world views me).

So I just said that in the process of getting a book published and getting tenure I’ve learned some things about how the larger world may judge the choices I’ve made. In both cases (the manuscript review process and the tenure review process) there were scholars who appreciated the work but had some serious reservations about its form. I was told that my work was generalist and thus unscholarly, and I was told that the focus on style detracted from its seriousness. I also heard that at least one reader thinks the argument gets qualified too often (to “qualify” an argument is to explain the ways in which a claim made is not universal or absolute). These are anonymous reviews, of course, so I don’t know who authored them. But if one or a few persons think this then it is likely that many more will as well.

[I want to point out that the people who lodged these criticisms did so in the context of positive reviews. Also, even when I disagreed with them, the criticisms helped me understand something vital about what I was trying to do.]

There were various other points of disagreement or recommendation, but they were more of the kind one would expect: they pointed out things I might want to think about more carefully or change altogether, etc. The criticisms I mention above, however, do something different. They seem to me to be trying to show what academic writing must be.

Part of what I was trying to do with the book was show that academic writing—scholarly engagement—can take many forms, and some of them need not be alienating to a more general audience. It’s true that my book tries to create a space where people with all kinds of different backgrounds might have something to talk about and some things to think about with regard to their own histories or their own current implication in patterns of injustice. I don’t think that renders it “unscholarly”—and, if anything, this book is probably “too scholarly” for some of the audiences I might like to have. After all, every page is engaged in close philosophical reading of a variety of texts. I also wanted—this is a choice I made--the book to operate as a kind of meditation on harm that could be applied by other people to cases I never dreamed of thinking about. To be able to operate in that way, the text would have to be what some would call “generalist.” And it would have to qualify its arguments. In other words, it would have to leave room for other people to add their own thoughts. This has already happened almost every time I’ve talked about the work with an audience—someone always suggests a new application. This is important work that a certain kind of a scholarly book can do! It is serious!

The book also qualifies its claims because it is unethical and irresponsible to make universalizing claims about how harm is experienced and what it takes to recover from it. Any good answer to a question about harm and recovery will be relentlessly anchored in a context, a history, and a set of present possibilities. When I qualify a claim, it isn’t because I don’t want to make a strong argument. It is because it would be irresponsible—perhaps even unforgivable—for me to do otherwise.

I’m discussing all of this here not because I want to disparage people who disagree with me about scholarly writing, but because I think it matters that we take the time to talk with each other not only about our work but about why we do the work, and why our choices of approach to the work matter too. We should make room for this.

I have taken seriously every piece of advice or criticism I have ever received about the book except this one: that its style detracts from its seriousness. I am not willing to live in a world that has decided that only something that is no pleasure to read deserves to be crowned with the epithet “serious.” I believe that we all build the worlds we live in every day by inhabiting them in certain ways, and making choices about how to do so. I chose to write this book in the way I did for very serious reasons.

2:10 p.m. - December 08, 2015

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