thoughts on Sartre's "Why Write:

Some things I didn’t want to say last week, lest I spoiled our amiability towards our readings:

Sartre’s take on inspiration doesn’t sit right with me. Sure, the writer should not artificially affect his reader; but what prompts the reader to be thoughtful, capable of “catching” the text? (We will hold off the on the question of reader’s responsibility, since Sartre’s primary concern is with the author’s attitude.) Sartre defines inspiration, that which prompts the reader’s self-application to create, to lie at a text’s “height of silence”: “It is the absence of words, the indifferentiated and lived silence of inspiration, which the word will then particularize, whereas the silence produced by the reader is an object.” Yet what is this silence if not the white noise predetermining a text—a shared understanding of prose and an expectation of its narrative trajectory? For all his language of writer’s self-abnegation and not writing for oneself, writing for Sartre is an appeal to a spirit of “generosity,” a trust between the reader and the writer to fulfill his respective role--in short, a gift economy of sorts. This is impossible for me to swallow, since 1.everyone’s idea of producing, thus realizing freedom, is different (I think the we had a dilemma about this Kantian take on aesthetic judgment last week as well—p65 “every man, in so far as he is a freedom, feels the same pleasure in reding the same work”) and 2. trust in another is a luxury that is so very easily abandoned when push comes to shove; generosity is a rather flailing concept easily mistaken with self-indulgence. But I wouldn’t want to project my ressentiment onto his vocabulary. I only think that the coherence and power of his writing derives from its abstraction and intangibility (literally, not made concrete and thus not pointing to specific cases but hinting at all).

Hence, in On Violence, Arendt’s (strident but not perhaps unwarranted) critique of Sartre’s “irresponsible” and poor adaptation of Marxism in his discourse on violence (especially in his introduction to Fanon’s Wretched of the Earth) does not stem from some middling prudence and social vigilance. Granted Arendt is rather pessimistic about realistic possibilities of rebellion and resistance to begin with (calling out them out as “escapist”), much of what she’s talking about has to do with exercise of interpretation or its unscrupulous applicability. I think we can extend her political critique of Sartre onto “Why Write” and his notion of engaged writing. How susceptible is this “generosity” to overstate itself and to be overconfident in its durability? The promises of freedom (or at least the faith that reader and author are each possible of such) take much for granted, least of all a trust in sharing a similar vision of freedom. And this is why Sartre feels so 'of his time' to me.

In this end, the idealism towards freedom feels downright oppressive (where’s my freedom from commitment?) Idealism—that a work exist in so far as the reader can magnetize it (a kind of a reverse of magnetic chain metaphor presented in Plato’s Ion) and hence entrusting the writer to supply a pure presentation and the reader a responsibility that is more akin to fidelity—in Sartre’s writing trespasses humanism to a kind of man-centeredness. (Hm, at least that’s in line with his atheism. Or not really—it’s just transposed into a literary Passion in the writer’s self-sacrifice and reader’s experience of his freedom in the rapture of reading). Am I missing a link when I think existentialism and engagement are thus at odds with each other—or at least, existentialism can only present an egotistic engagement? This isn’t bad at all—just that engagement can best serve oneself more than others. That is to say, I will accept Sartre’s “freedom” if it has no social dimension.

Foucault and Chomsky; Arendt's _Life of the Mind_

Thanks to Tacuma, Gillian and, of course, Professors Falci and Goldsmith (and Soo, my partner in reading group crime) for attending the first meeting of our summer/fall reading group! We had a really interesting discussion that focused on the selections from Arendt's _Life of the Mind_.

Here are some of the main questions we thought about today. For those of you following along from afar, feel free to let these questions direct your thoughts (or not!).

1. What is Arendt's idea of consistency? What does she mean by positing consistency of the self in a system in which the self is always split (during thinking) in conversation?
2. What implications are there for how bounded and hidden an activity Arendt makes thinking out to be? -- Her distilling of individual into soul (separate from body, but the way in which emotion attaches to body) and mind form the foundation for how she conceives of thinking as removed, even, from body.
3. What are the special emergencies that make thinking into a political act?
4. Is thinking always a form of friction via negation? Is there any formulation, in Arendt's thinking, in which thinking contributes positively to society?
5. We also talked about how the larger project of the book is an extended refutation of Plato, by way of endorsing a Socratic way of being with oneself (aiming towards unity and consistency)
6. Is thinking the only realm of authentic action (inaction) for Arendt?
7. How can thinking be manifest in society?

Looking forward to the online conversations!

Reading List

Meeting 1. The First Questions
Noam Chomsky and Michel Foucault televised debates on “human nature”
Part 1: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kawGakdNoT0&feature=related
Part 2: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=43Ai5WPHqWA&feature=related

Hannah Arendt, Selections from The Life of the Mind
“Body and soul; soul and mind” (pp 30-37)
“The two-in-one” (pp 179-196)
Volume II, Section IV (pp 149-218)

Recommended Martin Heidegger, “Building Dwelling Thinking” and “The End of Philosophy and the Task of Thinking”

Meeting 2. When We Write the Questions Down
Edward Said, Selections from The World, The Text and The Critic
Introduction: Secular Criticism
Chapter 1: The World, the Text and the Critic
Chapter 8: Reflections on American “Left” Literary Criticism

Jean-Paul Sartre, “Why write?” from What Is Literature (pp 1336-1349 in Norton Anthology of Theory and Criticism)

Meeting 3. Throw Sartre over Your Shoulder for Good Luck
Merleau-Ponty, Selections from Adventures of the Dialectic
“The Crisis of Understanding”
“Sartre and Ultrabolshevism”

Frederic Jameson, Chapter 5, “Towards a Dialectical Criticism,” from Marxism and Form

For Further Thought “Western Marxism” from Merleau-Ponty, Adventures of the Dialectic; “Versions of a Marxist Hermeneutic” and “The Case for Georg Lukacs” from Jameson, Marxism and Form

Meeting 4. Do You Believe in Ghosts?
Jacques Derrida, Specters of Marx

Meeting 5. Addressing War and Revolution
Selections from Foucault and the Iranian Revolution: Gender and the Seductions of Islam
Michel Foucault, “Is it useless to revolt”
Maxine Robinson response

Jean Baudrillard, The Gulf War Did Not Take Place

Edward Said, “Islam and the West are Inadequate Barriers,” The Guardian, September 16, 2001
Recommended “American Intellectuals and Middle East Politics: An Interview with Edward W Said,” Social Text, No. 19/20 (Autumn, 1988) pp 37-53 and Michel Foucault, Society must be defended: Lectures 1975-6

Meeting 6. Absence and Image
Slavoj Zizek, “Introduction,” Tarrying With the Negative: Kant, Hegel and the Critique of Ideology

Slavoj Zizek, “Melancholy and the Act,” Critical Inquiry, Volume 26, November 4, Summer 2000.

Wendy Brown, “Resisting Left Melancholia,” Loss: The Politics of Mourning (Ed. D. Eng and D. Kazanjian)

Recommended Roland Barthes, Pleasure of the Text

Meeting 7. Technology and New Media
Marshall McLuhan, The Gutenberg Galaxy
TBD

Noam Chomsky and Edward Herman, Selections from Manufacturing Consent: The Political Economy of Mass Media
TBD

Meeting 8. “I’m so excited…and I just can’t hide it”
Judith Butler, Excitable Speech

Meeting 9. Philosophy and Education
Jacques Ranciere, Ignorant Schoolmaster: Five Lessons in Intellectual Emancipation

James Baldwin, Fire Next Time

Meeting 10. Philosophy and Education (II)
Jurgen Habermas, Second half of The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere

Richard Rorty, Selections from Consequences of Pragmatism and Philosophy and Social Hope TBD

The Public Intellectual and Critical Theory in the Twentieth Cenury: Framework

Welcome to our summer reading group and workshop!

The concept behind this blog is to think collectively about the role of the public intellectual in the twentieth century, focusing on critics from a number of disciplines who engage seriously with "critical theory" and the unweildy project of interdisciplinarity. We will read essays and articles published in more mainstream arenas as well as pertinent critical theorists who especially inform (or make appearances in) the work.

Some isses around which to focus our inquiry include: the shifting idea of political activism through intellectualism, how "thinkers" make their work prescient in changing geo-political climates, the changing audiences for that kind of work, and the circulation of "theory" in politics and socially conscious writing.

I'm looking forward to reading with, learning from and being challenged by everyone!