Fellowship opportunity: Biblioteca Ambrosiana in Milan

by J J Cohen

Alison Locke Perchuk emails:

I am writing to introduce you to a new resource for research on topics connected to the holdings of the Biblioteca Ambrosiana in Milan. Founded by Federico Borromeo in 1609, the Biblioteca Ambrosiana holds manuscripts from late antiquity through the early modern period, touching on disciplines ranging from art, theology, and philosophy to science, medicine, and law, and on the Latin, Greek, Hebrew, Arabic, and other cultures of the Mediterranean region. The Ambrosiana Foundation has been established to promote public awareness of and scholarly research at the Biblioteca Ambrosiana, in part by offering an annual fellowship to a scholar at the graduate, postgraduate, or professional level to support research in Milan. I am hoping you might be willing to circulate the notice attached below to the membership of your medieval studies association or university medieval studies list, as well as to any other colleagues and students whom you believe might be interested in the Biblioteca or the Foundation.

A membership society, the Foundation offers stipends to graduate, postgraduate, and professional scholars to conduct research at the Biblioteca Ambrosiana in Milan (next deadline: October 15, 2008) and at the Ambrosiana Archives at the Medieval Institute, University of Notre Dame (rolling deadline). It also sponsors conference panels, scholarly lectures, exhibitions, and other events in the United States.

For further information about the Foundation, its fellowship programs, or other activities, please contact Anna Beth Rousakis at 718-434-1660 or send an e-mail to info@ambrosianafoundation.org.

The Past in the Past

by Karl Steel

In her post below, Mary Kate writes:

On the final page of the book, CD defines “getting medieval” as this: “using ideas of the past, creating relations with the past, touching in this way the past in our efforts to build selves and communities now and into the future” (206). This conception seems to get us into the thick of a problem of temporality – how does the unidirectional “arrow of time” stop being so unidirectional upon closer inspection? How, to borrow from CD in her reflection on the book, “Got Medieval” (published in the Journal of the History of Sexuality, No. 10), do we identify and examine the “copresence of different chronologies to explore the power of multiple temporalities in a single moment?”

This leads me into my next, brief question. In GM, the medieval past touches the present in various ways. However, as much as CD corrects the homogeneous premodern of Bhabha, Baudrillard, and others, as much as she demands that the so-called modern allow itself to be or realize that it is touched by an abjected, mobile past, her own medieval strikes me as homogeneous as well to the extent that it is not itself touched by its present pasts.

CD writes well about the Lollard assault on the 'crimen Sodomorum' of institutional religion, on its wealth, on its alimentary excess. I don't believe, of course, that CD presents this material as if it sprang ex nihilo (or ex Wycliffo); after all, she cites and uses Penn R Szittya's important The Antifraternal Tradition in Medieval Literature. At the same time, I don't think there's enough mobilization in GM of one of the most peculiar aspects of medieval textuality, namely, its habitual, even constitutive reuse of centuries-old writings, and of the mnemotechnics in which production was always a rearrangement of pasts. Antifraternal critique reuses moral approaches from the twelfth-century Parisian critique of bad living clerics, which itself redeployed work by Gregory the Great; no doubt we could keep pushing this further back, or expanding the lines outward to form something more rhizomatic than genealogical. I also imagine--although I haven't done the legwork--that Lollard ecclesiastical critique, especially its antimendicant critique, derives at least in part from the work of the Spiritual Franciscans, and thus we would have seen critiques internal to the Friars turned against the Friars as a whole, and from there, turned against the whole of the Church.

GM is already a big book, and it's certainly a great book. It seems ungracious to complain that it should have been bigger, more capacious, that CD should have loosened the 40-year boundary she set for her medieval analysis. We would have needed another 100 pages. I should, then, present this not as a critique but as a call to be inspired by GM to keep on pushing. Readers of ITM know that this work is already being done, especially with JJC and MKH's attention to the polychronicity of ruins and stones, of the distant past of ruins and the very distant, unfathomable past of fossils inhabiting and confounding various medieval presents, whether they're 8th or 10th or 12th century. Although this question might remind us too much of the postmodern inability to break with the past, we might also wonder in whose voices the Lollards speak when they think themselves using their own voices?

Around the blogosphere

by J J Cohen

Stephanie Trigg on Lauren Berlant's blog, Bioephemera on the Lego repair of Roman mortice, Nic D'Alessio on that Baswell paper we've all been talking about, Dr Virago with much better castle pics than the ones I posted, and Dr Nokes on the pleasures have your offpsring return to the pedagogy machine.

Now why are you hanging around at this post when you should be commenting on this one?

The Ruins and the Past

by Mary Kate Hurley


When Carolyn Dinshaw’s Getting Medieval first came out in 1999, I was still in high school – I wasn’t even sure I’d be a medievalist yet, though I think by my junior year I’d decided I wanted to be a professor. I’d never heard of queer theory, much less queer history. Moreover, I’d never seen Pulp Fiction. Granted, I still haven’t seen Pulp Fiction, but there’s only so much one can do in nine years. It took me nine years years to come to this text – though while I was reading it this past weekend, it felt familiar, and strangely so. I’d imagine that at least a part of this strange familiarity is because the work resonates with more recent work that I’m also familiar with (if hard-pressed to identify), but the greater part is probably because of a course I took with CD last year at NYU. The course was on "Time and Temporality" in medival literature – and so the ideas I take from Getting Medieval are largely concerned with time. How might we think through what this text means in 2008, and what does it mean to encounter a groundbreaking text later, though still not late, in its reception critically. Moreover, what questions does the text enable us to ask in 2008, nine years after its entrance into medieval studies? What does it do to our relationship to the past as an object of study, when it too now comes to us from a past?*

On the final page of the book, CD defines “getting medieval” as this: “using ideas of the past, creating relations with the past, touching in this way the past in our efforts to build selves and communities now and into the future” (206). This conception seems to get us into the thick of a problem of temporality – how does the unidirectional “arrow of time” stop being so unidirectional upon closer inspection? How, to borrow from CD in her reflection on the book, “Got Medieval” (published in the Journal of the History of Sexuality, No. 10), do we identify and examine the “copresence of different chronologies to explore the power of multiple temporalities in a single moment?”

One of the things that most struck me about this book is that it inspired not a sense of argument in my response, but a more general sense of assent. If I’ve identified it correctly, I think a part of that reaction is bound up in the question of methodology – CD is outlining a methodology that uses texts, not using a methodology to uncover something about a specific text, as Dan Remein formulated so brilliantly in his comments to JJC’s post below. If I’m touched by this book, it’s not in terms of how I view a specific medieval text – Dinshaw outlines a theory of texts which resonates with my experience of them, but if the book is rewriting my sense of the past, it is doing so on a much more global level, like a techtonic plate shifting in the course of centuries, not a minute phenomenon that has quantifiable results.

Still, there is a moment in the text that I think materializes, or at least localizes, the idea that I find most intriguing. Quoting from Glück’s Margery Kempe, CD cites one of the moments in which Glück feels, most profoundly, the articulation of the self-as-performance in relation to Margery Kempe: “But the main interest of the novel lies in the melding of the narratives, characters and voices, most passages in Bob’s voice, one in Margery’s (Chapter 9), others in a hybrid of those two voices: ‘I’m Margery following a god through a rainy city. The rapture is mine, mine the attempt to talk herself into existence.’ (MK 13)” (167)

To talk herself into existence. Depending on how you take this phrase, meanings begin to crop up right and left – to talk so that she might exist, to talk herself into wanting to exist, etc. The question here – raised explicitly in the interview CD cites with Robert Glück—might be phrased thus: “That quandary over what experience means and how the authority, or whatever authenticates experience, runs back and forth between yourself and the world” (GM 170). As Dinshaw herself points out in the chapter, there is a kind of community-forming impulse that goes along with the text, one that is specifically related to the distension or extension in time performed by the text: “The work is thus an “open form,” opening the possibility of relations between characters and readers, not all of which are controlled by the writer” (171). CD goes on to cite Glück in another essay, “Fame,” and she asserts the following: “If ‘the fragment of language evokes the melancholy pleasure of a ruin,’…its ‘eternal’ and ‘shared’ qualities here are nonetheless limited at last.” (173)

I want to question that quotation for one moment. I wasn’t able to find the entire essay on short notice, but I did find the text cited elsewhere, and the lyric beauty which characterizes that first fragment continues through the line: “the relinquishing of meaning, the falling away and recontextualizing of human scale to include the non-human, the unshared, mysterious and unsharable…which is shared.” It seems to me (and I am hardly an expert) but a part of what is so touching, if you will, about a ruin, is that it insists on touching you, without letting you into the reality of its own existence**. Out of time, and therefore, out of place in a landscape that has already outlived the ruin’s first time, if you will, there is a certain untimely-ness about the ruin, the way it impinges on the present in a way that asserts not only that the past endures but that the past continues, and does so with or without the will of a (fictive) present. It suggests, perhaps, that time is a fabric, not an arrow, or a stream. Moreover, it’s a fabric that is remade as parts wear thin, with threads of a past so intertwined with our own that separating them out can unravel reality itself. Now, I’ve taken the metaphor a bit far, but what I think matters here is the gesture: I wonder if, having looked back to see the ways in which we can forge a relationship with the past, part of what we can start to see in 2008 as we re-encounter Getting Medieval –or in my case, are touched by it for the first time—is the way in which what survives from the past is like a ruin, the ways in which Medieval Studies itself might be a kind of ruin***. Untimely in a world that insists on the past AS past, the Middle Ages can profoundly trouble our sense of a the Modern – by asserting, with Bruno Latour, that we’ve never been modern in the first place. The question – perhaps without definitive answer, but still useful for all that – is what are we to do with the past? And what is the past to do with – or to – us?

Footnotes

* - Thanks to Jeffrey for helping me formulate this -- I'd be interested to hear how other readers felt concerning the book, because I had a very hard time finding a way to interface with it...
** - I thought this might particularly resonate with Karl's work on animals.
*** - I know I'm profoundly influenced by Eileen on the past-as-ruin, but can't come up with specific citations.

It is not often that the Archbishop of Canterbury is your fellow blurbist ...

by J J Cohen

... but such is the case with this forthcoming book, a volume I highly recommend. Helen Cooper, Jeffrey Cohen, and The Most Reverend and Right Honourable Rowan Williams, Archbishop of Canterbury, agree: it's good stuff.

Touching Carolyn Dinshaw

by J J Cohen

Karl's post foregrounded the haptic, and wondered about phenomenology. The excellent and wide-ranging discussion historicized tactility well, emphasizing its similarity to both sight and smell, a kind of medieval synesthetic array.

My way of entry into the discussion is to hesitate at the welcome mat. Quite literally.

I first met Carolyn Dinshaw when I was a graduate student. This was just when the Dark Ages were becoming Middle. Dinshaw had been invited to my university to lead a discussion of a precirculated paper at a medieval colloquium (a paper that would later be published as "A Kiss Is Just a Kiss: Heterosexuality and Its Consolations in Sir Gawain and the Green Knight"; it was my first real exposure to Judith Butler's work, and made a convert of me). Chaucer's Sexual Poetics was making its big splash. Liz Scala had commanded me to read that book now, so I did (Liz is always right when she commands you to do something) -- and I was blown away. Reviewers would not always be kind to the volume (one of Dinshaw's faculty hosts was preparing a not very favorable one for Speculum at the moment she was visiting, as I recall), but I loved it for its unabashed feminism, for its new readings of works that were beginning to feel familiar, for its panache.

As a prelude to her paper presentation, Dinshaw was invited to an informal lunch with faculty and graduate students. (These lunches, dubbed for obscure reasons the Chester A. Arthur Appreciation Society, were always held at a restaurant more beloved for its inexpensive wine than its good food.) Dinshaw sat directly across from me ... and I was seized with panic because I was just a graduate student, and what the hell could I say to Carolyn Dinshaw? I so love your work, it's the most exciting stuff out there, will you sign my copy of Chaucer's Sexual Poetics? My eyes were drawn to her book bag, which was actually a rubber welcome mat that had been folded in half and welded into a kind of brief case.

"I like your welcome mat," I stuttered. It is possible that we then went on to talk about Judith Butler. Or Bertilak. Or cheap wine. I don't really know, but I do remember this: she impressed me as someone with whom you could speak about all of these things, and in return she would gently suggest that you were wrong and maybe ought to rethink what you were assuming to be true. She would always do this with such interest and intensity that it didn't matter that the ground was being systematically removed from beneath your feet. This loss could be disconcerting, could be queer (in the sense of estrangement, productive disruption -- to steal some synonyms from Getting Medieval). You might feel the roiling effect of that which will "shake up the ground of traditional categories and actions" (157).

But something about that welcome mat bent round into traveler's case was reassuring. Even if the destination was not necessary known in advance, stepping through that door to the unknown (a door that seemed as much in the past as the future and present), giving up on pilgrimages to certain knowledge: these commitments have their rewards, their pleasures, their lingering touch.

As it turns out I was fortunate enough to hear much of Getting Medieval as conference presentations and big lectures before it was published. The book has always had a comfortable feel for me, like coming home -- probably because (as Karl noted in the comments to his own post) to read a book first encountered almost a decade ago is in many ways to meet a temporally disjunct version of oneself. For me, much of what was to come later in my career was catalyzed by my glimpse of a welcome mat at a table in a Cambridge restaurant c. 1991. Returning to Getting Medieval is like traveling back in time, and realizing how much of the past inheres.

So, here is my question for you, dear readers, as well as my welcome mat: did this book touch you in the past? what resonances did a rereading call forth? And -- if you are lucky enough to be giving the book a first read -- does anything I've written do anything besides make your mouth water for cheap wine, and your browser yearn to surf eBay for welcome mat briefcases?

2 announcements

by J J Cohen

Sorry to interrupt our book club conversation, which Karl has launched so well. I hope to post something relevant later today or early tomorrow.

Readers of this blog -- especially those living near Washington, DC -- may be interested to know about the website for the George Washington University Medieval and Early Modern Studies Institute (GW MEMSI). Here we will announce all news of relevance to the institute. Generously funded by GW for an initial run of three years, our first major event will be a symposium of relevance to our current Book Club: "Touching the Past," featuring Peggy McCracken, Julian Yates, Eileen Joy, and Carolyn Dinshaw. As of yesterday I became GW MEMSI's first Director. Yes, that means department chair and director of the institute at once. Next stop: Grand Duke of Luxembourg.

Second, Cultural Diversity in the British Middle Ages: Archipelago, Island, England (which I prefer to call by its initial name, "The Infinite Realms Project") is now in print. Would you ask your library to order a copy?

[nifty GW MEMSI logo designed by Lowell Duckert, the assistant to the director. He is also charged with following me around with a palm frond fan to ensure I don't sweat in the DC heat. He's OK at it, but he hasn't had a lot of practice yet.]

Opening Up

by KARL STEEL

I've a longer post planned, but for now, I offer this, a key moment (for me) in Getting Medieval, one I marked with "a passage to be quoted again and again."

The queer historian...is decidely not nostalgic for wholeness and unity; but s/he nonetheless desires an affective, even tactile relation to the past such as the relic provides. Queer relics--queer fetishes--do not stand for the whole, do not promise integrity of body; they defy the distinction between truth and falsehood, as do ordinary fetishes, but they offer the possibility of a relation to (not a mirroring or completing of) something or someone that was, or that was thought, or that was specifically prevented from being or even being thought. Wrenched out of its context of hypocrisy and stagnant, nostalgic longing for wholeness, the queer Pardoner's preoccupation with the matter of past lives can reinforce the queer sense of the need for and prompt the creation not of the kinds of books that would please 'historians,' as Foucault sneered, but rather of another kind of 'felaweshipe' across time. (142)

I also offer a few (undeveloped) questions provoked by rereading Getting Medieval with two things in mind: the phenomenological turn in queer theory, and Valerie Allen's On Farting.

• Twice, Dinshaw expresses (what looks to me like) impatience with Barthes' phenomenological turn (see 40 and 51), yet I wonder how GM would have looked had Dinshaw attended more to the passivity phenomenology recognizes in touching. Touching brings together, sure, but it is also causes the toucher to be touched. Skin goes both ways, and even to speak of "both" is a limitation. We need a middle voice, a grammar neither active nor passive. Dinshaw of course speaks strongly of affect, but I also feel--at least for now--that speaking of "connection," of "relationships," by preserving the two (or more) separate things being brought into relation, occludes the great altering intimacy of being touched.
• But we can get still closer. Dinshaw speaks of touching as a contrast to sight. Touching brings us into contact with someone or something, and, so long as it is a caress rather than a grasping, it has none of the pretensions to mastery that sight does. We are contaminated by touch (recall: contaminate from con + tangere), each one of us touched, the passive and the active mingled. I wonder, however, how an attention to smell--midway between sight and touch--a sensing at a distance, in which we are contacted by the thing sensed, a sense that seems particularly bodily because particularly animal, would have altered GM. Consider Valerie Allen:

  Like ears, nostrils never shut voluntarily. Permanently open for business, they are how we receive the world. Ears may be stopped for an indefinite period, but without inhalation, we die within minutes. The very act of drawing breath is one with smelling: 'man only smells during inhalation....To perceive no smell without inhaling seems to be peculiar to man.' For as long as we are alive, we sniff the world around us, including ourselves....Through every pore and orifice we wrap ourselves in smell, signing the air. As dogs well know, urine offers the most exact signature, shit and saliva close runners up. To smell the intestinal by-product of another brings one into extimate relation with them; more profound than psychoanalysis, it entails a knowledge of them more intimate than sight or hearing, more detached than touching or licking, a knowledge of the other where their very being participates in yours. (50-51)

(Post removed)

by J J Cohen

Deeply unsatisfied with that first Book Club post, I unpublished it.

Sorry, and more to follow.

New Blog: Indirections

by J J Cohen

Nunzio D'Alessio, a BABEL member and a graduate student at UT-Austin, joins the League of Medieval Bloggers with Indirections. His first post is a substantial NCS recap.

Welcome, Nunzio!

Cultural Diversity in Medieval Britain

by J J Cohen

The book's official date of publication is August 5, but why wait? Pre-order! Buy multiple copies! They make great gifts. And very expensive coasters. Or ineffective boomerangs.

For a short overview and Laurie Finke's generous blurb, go here. If you'd like to read the introduction, follow this link. The table of contents is below.

-----------
Introduction: Infinite Realms--Jeffrey Jerome Cohen * Between Diaspora and Conquest: Norman Assimilation in Marie de France’s Esope and Petrus Alfonsi’s Disciplina Clericalis--Suzanne Conklin Akbari * Reliquia: Writing Relics in Anglo-Norman Durham--Heather Blurton * Cultural Difference and the Meaning of Latinity in Asser’s Life of King Alfred--David Townsend * Green Children from Another World, or The Archipelago in England--Jeffrey Jerome Cohen * Beyond British Boundaries in the Historia regum Britanniae--Michael Wenthe * Arthur’s Two Bodies and the Bare Life of the Archives--Kathleen Biddick * The Instructive Other Within: Secularized Jews in The Siege of Jerusalem--Randy P. Schiff * Subversive Histories: Strategies of Identity in Scottish Historiography--Katherine Terrell * Sleeping with an Elephant: Wales and England in the Mabinogion--Jon Kenneth Williams* Chaucer and the War of the Maidens--John Ganim * The Signs and Location of a Flight (or Return?) of Time: The Old English Wonders of the East and the Gujarat Massacre--Eileen Joy

Speaking of medievalism ...

by J J Cohen

Richard Burt writes that his new book is out from Palgrave. Here is a blurb and some endorsements:

Medieval and Early Modern Film and Media contextualizes historical films in an innovative way--not only relating them not only to the history of cinema, but also to premodern and early modern media. This philological approach to the (pre)history of cinema engages both old media such as scrolls, illuminated manuscripts, the Bayeux Tapestry, and new digital media such as DVDs, HD DVDs, and computers. Burt examines the uncanny repetitions that now fragment films into successively released alternate cuts and extras (footnote tracks, audiocommentaries, and documentaries) that (re)structure and reframe historical films, thereby presenting new challenges to historicist criticism and film theory. With a double focus on recursive narrative frames and the cinematic paratexts of medieval and early modern film, this book calls our attention to strange, sometimes opaque phenomena in film and literary theory that have previously gone unrecognized.

“A marvelously rich and surprising book. Combining formal attentiveness with the giddy pleasures of the improbable detour, Burt's analysis of what he terms the ‘philological uncanny’ takes us from medieval illuminated manuscripts to digital media, from Shakespeare to spell-check, from the copyright page to the interpretive industry itself. Burt opens central, expansive questions about the logic of texts, about the character of historical time, even about the ongoing vexations of the academic unconscious.”—Christopher Pye, Professor of English, Williams College

“What if it was now possible to psychoanalyze our compulsive desire for historicism (old and new)? What if the arrival of the new media with its complex paratextual apparatus made legible the unconscious filmic techniques of contemporary literary critics? Burt’s astonishingly ambitious Medieval and Early Modern Film and Media makes just this argument, moving effortlessly between seemingly disparate fields (historicism, film studies, and digital technologies) to offer a symptomatic reading of the ‘historicist uncanny.’”--Julian Yates, author of Error, Misuse, Failure: Object Lessons from the English Renaissance

“This playful and lucid venture into the enduring popular appeal of the Middle Ages on film offers close readings of canonical works, but also brings refreshing energy and perspective to academic modes of critical reception. In this ground-breaking volume, Burt digs deep in the media history of medievalism, unearths the decomposing paratexts of cinematic representation, and confronts the uncanny middle-ages crisis of new historicism.”--Peter Krapp, Associate Professor of Film and Media Studies, University of California, Irvine

“Mapping the transition from medieval and early modern media onto the transition from celluloid to digital cinema, Burt offers brilliant and very witty close readings of a wide variety of major historical films. This breakthrough contribution to media studies reveals a history that is much, much stranger than heretofore imagined.”--Bryan Reynolds, Professor of Drama, University of California, Irvine

Trigg and Prendergast on Medievalism

by J J Cohen

From Humanities Researcher, a preview of an important new essay on medievalism, presentism, and all those temporal -isms we salivate over here at ITM:

We talk about the opposition between medieval studies and medievalism studies, and argue that medieval studies often abjects the latter as involving too much pleasure to be taken seriously. The real "work" belongs to medieval studies proper. "Contemporary medievalism is now tarred by the same brush that in conservative circles continues to dismiss cultural studies as mere chat about television, cinema and the Internet; that is the accusation that there is too much pleasure, too little work in its study." We also suggest that while the opposition between the medieval and the post-medieval is a crucial component in the formation of the modern subject "who thus emerges as capable of both forgetting and remembering the past," this dynamic also characterises the relationship medieval men and women had with their own past; that the medieval is just as often medievalising, as it is not. That is, that the opposition between medieval and post-medieval, medievalist or even, we might say, the non-medieval, is never as crystalline as the strictest medieval scholars might like to maintain. That in fact, the medieval is always being made, by medieval scholars, as well as by popularising medievalists.

And, what's more ... the essay is followed by a response from Carolyn Dinshaw, which in part takes up some of her paper given at the New York NCS, on Rip van Winkle, engaging with the pleasure of this text, and its "temporal heterogeneity", courting the dangerous threats to one's professional identity as a medieval scholar that might ensue from engaging with popular fiction. What's not to like about that?

Read the whole essay in New Medieval Literatures (volume 9, for 2007).

Everybody's Reading Dinshaw

by J J Cohen

The Tiny Shriner is deeply absorbed in Getting Medieval. He's seeking "affective relations" and "another kind of 'felaweshipe' across time" (142). He's "using ideas of the past, creating relations with the past, touching in this way the past ... to build selves and communities now and into the future" (206). Are you?

ITMBC4DSoMA begins on Monday. Earlier if one of us gets bored and posts something before then. You have your weekend reading assignment. There will be a quiz. And we don't care if you read the book in 1999. This is 2008, and it is time to revisit the medieval future.

Strange Conjunctions: Patočka/Derrida and Sancho Panza

by Karl Steel

(Okay, so I've been writing. And reading. And standing to the side, just over here, watching our blog get along fine. Good! Warning: what follows is just plain silly)

Last night, reading The Gift of Death, I ran across something too familiar in the midst of one of Derrida's paraphrases of Jan Patočka. He writes "Death is very much that which nobody else can undergo or confront in my place."

Please compare:

"Since your grace has been locked in the cage, enchanted, in your opinion, have you had desire and will to pass what they call major and minor waters?"

"I do not understand what you mean by passing waters, Sancho; speak more clearly if you want me to respond in a straightforward way."

"Is it possible that your grace doesn't understand what it means to pass minor or major waters? Even schoolboys know that. Well, what I mean is, have you had desire to do the thing nobody else can do for you?"

"Ah, now I understand you, Sancho! Yes, I have, quite often, and even do now. Save me from this danger, for not everything is absolutely pristine!"

Don Quixote, Part I XLVIII, Grossman trans.

I'm reminded in turn of a scene in the film Derrida where our hero, when asked what he'd like to see in a documentary about a philosopher--say, Heidegger or Kant--responded, "their sex lives." It's funny, and would no doubt be telling, given the evidence of the picture above. One imagines Kant, by whose regularity in his daily constitutional the housewives of Königsberg would set their watches, as being as dutiful as Walter Shandy, who, contra the opinion of his son, generally "minded what [he was] about when [he] begot me." I'm sure that whatever Hannah Arendt did with her Martin, or Simone Weil did with her God, would give us something.

And yet: sex and death. It's a bit operatic, don't you think? How would philosophy had [grammar edit!] have been different if it had built itself upon what else no one can do for you? Where would philosophy have tended if Patočka or Heidegger had remembered eating and its natural end, a kind of being-toward-supper (Sein-zum-Abendessen?)? If Plato had imagined creation as something other than a globe consuming its own waste?

When the sequel to Derrida comes (something like this), if someone asks me his question, I know what I'd like to have seen: Adorno in his kitchen, and perhaps elsewhere.