I read philosophy while I was at the university, a practice that lasted for five years after my school days had ended. Then, while living in Texas, I shifted to reading American history. But periodically, every three or four years, I would dip back in and try to figure out what I was working on and what issues I was trying to resolve in my lost and unfinished honors thesis on the analytic a posteriori. The last time was during the Trayvon Martin shooting protests. I stopped off and did some research in the Koolhass-designed downtown public library on my way to a rally.
Taking a quick look this morning at some of the big philosophy/theory journals -- Mind, Synthese, October, Representations -- from when I was a toiler in the groves of Academe, nothing much seems to have changed in the last 30 years. The offerings in October -- articles on Alexander Kluge and Oskar Negt -- and Representations -- an issue devoted to how online search tools and big data are affecting research in the humanities and social sciences -- at least seem interesting.
Philosophy takes more time and energy to read than history, politics, or fiction. So it falls to the wayside if you are a worker running the rat race to earn a living.
The letter below is addressed to my friend Shale who is now a professor at a state university in the Midwest. I spent part of the 1988 Xmas holiday with him and his roommate Steve, who were both political science graduate students at UCLA. Other friends would stop over in what turned out to be a four-day bacchanal punctuated by brutal two-on-two basketball games at a backyard garage hoop; also, drunken, competitive ping pong matches.
The letter ends on a note of regret that we didn't keep the party going as I continued my Christmas travels north up I-5 to San Francisco, and from there on up into Southern Oregon. That winter was a particularly cold one for the West Coast. As it turned out it was the dividing line between my years at -- and my friends from -- the university. Life would not be the same; there would be no bacchanals together in the future. I realized that the next time I was out on the West Coast, the spring of 1990, which marks the end of this collection of letters.
Speaking of which, I did the audit of the number of these missives that remain. There are little more than 20 left. If this project is to be completed by the end of the regular NFL season, I'm going to have to start posting two a week. If I stretch the deadline to the Super Bowl in February, I can stick to a single post on Sunday, shifting to a Saturday-and-Sunday schedule in December.
Winter 1989
You know what philosophers are? They're comic book heroes. Plato might as well be Superman; Aristotle, Batman. Descartes, Locke, Leibniz, and Hume are the Fantastic Four. Spider-Man is Kant. Being a little bit away from the academy and that bitch Philosophia, as I have been now for close to 9 months, helped me come to this while I was pissing just a second ago.
I heard the other day when I called up Mark and Niall (Mark had left a message on the here machine in NYC saying that his car had been stolen), that the sadomasochistic love trinity didn't quite make it, that the Belgian waffle didn't get cooked up. Niall did relate to me though the story of Steve puking on -- as I envision it -- the trunk of your body. Whew! You guys are shattering all records and putting together quite a storehouse of memorabilia. I'm glad I was around for a spell to feel a little of that LA effervescence.
But back to the philosophy thing. I read an essay by Derrida yesterday, and it was damn good. He was writing about the whole humanist existential turn-on in France after WWII; you know, about how the Sartre behemoth was spawned; that a lot of the shit boiled down to a systematic misreading of Hegel, Husserl, and Heidegger; that Hegel's PHENOMENOLOGY was read only in light of Kojeve, who taught it as a kind of textbook for a philosophical anthropology and who thereby overlooked Hegel's own architectonic as set forth in the ENCYCLOPEDIA: Phenomenology of Spirit follows Anthropology; that Hegel's Anthropology concludes with the general form of consciousness, "sensuous certitude," which begins the PHENOMENOLOGY.
Oh, what the fuck am I doing? I don't have the stamina to finish this explanation. Anyway, I read Rorty's intro to the THE LINGUISTIC TURN today -- all about Ideal versus Ordinary Language philosophy. It stank like shit compared to Derrida, and I've done my reading on Ideal Language philosophy (Urmson is the guy to read here; he's sweet and clear). I guess what I wanted to say about Jacques Derrida is that I think he is one damn-ass fine historian of philosophy. Now, if you read him as some serious methodologist, a la your hero Weber, you're just gonna be disappointed. But as someone who gives you a good sense of all the important issues at stake in reading Heidegger, or Husserl, or even Nietzsche (who he creatively rehabilitates from all the low-minded snipes of "last metaphysician" cunts), I don't think there is anyone better today.
Just to finish up the poor-man's recapitulation of the essay I read -- Derrida was simply saying that the supposedly metaphysically-free existentialism of the '50s did not escape traditional metaphysics. "Man" was baldly yet deceptively substituted for "consciousness," ontology for phenomenology. Please remember, this is a gross oversimplification, and I really do miss the point, I think. I fail altogether to capture the persuasiveness and subtlety of argument. He whips in a little Nietzsche at the end; you know, the bit in ZARATHUSTRA about high noon and the difference between the superior man and the superman (ouch! that high noon shit is good -- the superman who turns his back on the camera, his tracks disappearing as he walks away). And mind you, Derrida is not one of these poststructuralist sloppy types, the kind who don't footnote, who engage in constant speculation. Derrida always exhaustively footnotes, always entertains all the published secondary, in many languages.
Anyway, enough of the tirade.
I had a lot of fun cruising the Grapevine. I had never done it before. I did 35 mph a lot of the way up the thing, but it was perfectly fucking incredible coming down out of it and seeing those Bakersfield stretches straight as a ruler. Pushed the old bus hard at 65-plus the whole day, no stops. But I couldn't help feeling a twinge of regret leaving the dudes behind like that. Shit, I felt like all of us should have just piled into the old beast, bought a couple cases of the Banquet Beer, had the boom box spitting, and then cruised north. There would have been pillows and sleeping bags back there for you guys, Steve, Colum, you, Jeff to lounge on. I would have been at the wheel, beer nestled in crotch area; empties could have been thrown anywhere; and there was a hole in the floor, about a foot behind the driver's seat where the sink (for camping) used to be, where you guys could have pissed out without even requiring us to stop.
But you and Steve were doing something, Colum was doing something, Jeff was doing the same, and so was I. So we'll chalk it up to "could've been" and look forward to the future.
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