tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-21165575.post7515896042088723821..comments2024-03-10T20:46:19.274-04:00Comments on In the Middle: On Natality and the As If: To My Friends With LoveCord J. Whitakerhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/06224143153295429986noreply@blogger.comBlogger5125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-21165575.post-27048096313606119882010-05-18T18:16:43.150-04:002010-05-18T18:16:43.150-04:00Wow, Eileen, if you can come up with a working def...Wow, Eileen, if you can come up with a working definition of love then I will hail you as the greatest genius I ever met. There is possibly no more socially important question the humanities could ask!Anonymousnoreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-21165575.post-47708489924935583202010-05-16T21:15:42.190-04:002010-05-16T21:15:42.190-04:00Lovely and loving thought, Eileen, and a beautiful...Lovely and loving thought, Eileen, and a beautiful formulation that I've been considering some myself (a la the Lydgate paper). I'm wondering these days if natality itself, as in the newly born, isn't already queer and is somehow 'unqueered'? These are not well articulated thoughts on my part, but I believe I understand and receive this love.<br /><br />And Karl, have you read O'Donnell's Augustine biography? Marvelous.dtklinehttps://www.blogger.com/profile/14754509776199786016noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-21165575.post-79150033479461119052010-05-16T15:10:32.892-04:002010-05-16T15:10:32.892-04:00"if the BABEL Working Group had an office, or..."if the BABEL Working Group had an office, or a home, or a stalagmite-studded cave or cloud somewhere, this "sign," which is also a portal, "Sinners Welcome"--this would hang over the door."<br />This reminds me of the beautiful Mother's Day Poem that Brantley wrote. I just want to say, there are so many immensely brilliant people in that cave/cloud (present at Kzoo and virtual). It is a privilege and an immensely lucky break to be around you.anna klosowskahttps://www.blogger.com/profile/09611569607945164280noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-21165575.post-56927251808178111692010-05-16T14:17:58.993-04:002010-05-16T14:17:58.993-04:00Eileen, thank you for bringing me back to natality...Eileen, thank you for bringing me back to natality, and Karl, thank you for juxtaposing the non-break of historical natality with Aelred and his production of a Ciceronian/Christian friedship that is such a site of contested histories. To what extent is he rewriting Cicero? Rewriting Ambrose? Breaking with Augustine? In the light of natality, these might be the wrong questions inasmuch as rewriting equates to copying and production always figures fissures. Thank you for this.Anonymousnoreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-21165575.post-51566503434436372592010-05-16T13:05:54.797-04:002010-05-16T13:05:54.797-04:00Lovely, and thanks Eileen.
Maybe I should come ba...Lovely, and thanks Eileen.<br /><br />Maybe I should come back round to my reading of Aelred's work on friendship, which really is, I think, about certain object choices lighting up and others concomitantly, inevitably darkening, and then Travis can finally have his proper go at me. Maybe I should ALSO wonder about 'lighting up' and the regime of the visual, while remembering that the visual is ALSO haptic in medieval optics (so far as I know). Maybe I should, also, talk about the way the "sicut/aussi comme/as if" of so many of the texts I read produce authenticity as the other side of the "as if" (if it was "as if" the animals were speaking, then humans can pretend to occupy the site of <i>real speech</i>).<br /><br />I could do all those things, and I will, someday, but I want to do them all not as a gatekeeper, not as a critic, not as a dialectician, always encountering you and a future through struggling through a negative, but as a fellow traveler on the way to who knows what, remembering that we're in this together. <br /><br />(one thing, by the way, I like about natality is that it admits that the new or future or what have you doesn't come from a break with the past, but through a production--NOT identical reproduction, despite the 'natal' element. It's a trope that finds hope (or indeed the fear of something going wrong) in the past and present both)medievalkarlhttps://www.blogger.com/profile/12440542200843836794noreply@blogger.com