Avital Ronell

There was this toss-off story the other day on the front page of The New York Times -- "What Happens to #MeToo When a Feminist Is the Accused?" by Zoe Greenberg -- which happened to be the most read story on Tuesday. It tells the tale of academic superstar Avital Ronell sexually exploiting one of her NYU grad students. A choice passage reads:

The problems began, according to Mr. Reitman, in the spring of 2012, before he officially started school. Professor Ronell invited him to stay with her in Paris for a few days. The day he arrived, she asked him to read poetry to her in her bedroom while she took an afternoon nap, he said. 

“That was already a red flag to me,” said Mr. Reitman. “But I also thought, O.K., you’re here. Better not make a scene.” 

Then, he said, she pulled him into her bed. 

“She put my hands onto her breasts, and was pressing herself — her buttocks — onto my crotch,” he said. “She was kissing me, kissing my hands, kissing my torso.” That evening, a similar scene played out again, he said.

I was at Berkeley in the 1980s the same time Ronell was teaching in the university's Comp Lit Department and making her rocket-like ascent.

Some thoughts about this time are contained in a review I wrote of David Mikics' Who Was Jacques Derrida? (2010) for my public library's website:

This is a solid, readable intro to Jacques Derrida, the French post-structuralist powerhouse. I studied Derrida at U.C. Berkeley in the 1980s and read most of his major works, books like, OF GRAMMATOLOGY, SPEECH AND PHENOMENA, DISSEMINATION, WRITING AND DIFFERENCE, but once I left school and entered the rat race I failed to keep up with his new output. Mikics does a fine job establishing the continuity of Derrida's thought, from an Algerian Jewish childhood to international celebrity. But this is not an adulatory book. Mikics is critical about what he sees as the underlying skepticism of Deconstruction and dismissive of its Leftist political tilt. But then again, he's a Comp Lit guy. When I was in school Derrideans were divided into two camps: literati, who wore studded wristbands and black leather and studied in the Comparative Literature Department [Avital Ronell], for whom the philosophical tradition was not the main concern; and students like me for whom the history of philosophy was the whole point. Derrida's writings make sense, truly, as part of the Western philosophical canon, which is the chronicle, going back to the Presocratics, of man's attempt "to sing a song that says it all at once." So read this book and enjoy it as I did but use it as a springboard to read Derrida himself.

The Colt 45 Chronicle #91

This weekend was devoted to filing of federal income taxes. Saturday and Sunday were burned in front of the laptop entering a lot of data from brokerage statements.

The letter below, like the one posted last week, is to my buddy Niall. I confide to him my love of reading philosophy and Jacques Derrida.

Autumn 1989

A fist full of fortune cookies. I just tossed a fist full of fortune cookies into the trash. They came individually wrapped in plastic and they looked fresh. But I tossed them unopened into the trash anyway. I figured that any future they could let me in on wasn't worth the trouble involved in prying the plastic wrapper apart with my fingertips and then spilling the shattered cookie crust onto the kitchen floor. I'll be honest with you though, it didn't feel good tossing them into the trash like that; it felt like spitting in the aisles of a church; it felt like driving a pickup truck off an ocean cliff. I don't know why. I wish I did.

I started a letter to you but I was too drunk to get past the second sentence. I had been drinking with the boys at work. I had had about six bourbons and who knows how many beers. But I made it home to Washington Heights safe and sound (sound enough to careen into the corner deli for a three-quart pick-me-up). The first thing I thought of when I sat myself down was that I owed you a letter. I don't why since I'm still waiting on your recapitulation of the quake drama. But like I said, I only made it to the second sentence (too much bourbon).

I'm starting to read a lot of philosophy again. I had never given up on reading the shit, I just diminished the importance of it in my life. It's a big responsibility. It takes a lot of energy to read; and even after you've done a nice thorough and clean job of underlining and making notations in the margins, there's no guarantee that you're going to remember anything 24 hours hence. It's not like reading a story -- as you know, having read your Plato and Nietzsche and Weber -- everything's conceptual; there's not a whole lot for your brain to sink its teeth into. Your best bet is to try to make it into mantra -- rehearse and talk to yourself of what you know of what you've read, and then keep on reading.

Right now I've got several pokers in the fire. I'm reading this compilation recently published by University of Minnesota Press called REDRAWING THE LINES. It's a bunch of essays talking about deconstruction's relationship to analytic philosophy during the recent (in the last ten years) prioritization of theory in literature departments. I'm about a third of the way through, and it seems good enough, though I did read a really excruciatingly piece on the superiority of Cavell's writings on the later Wittgenstein as a model for the reading and interpretation of literature as opposed to a deconstruction-based model. The motherfucker's 20 or so pages boil down to the idea that reading requires "commonsensicalness," and that since deconstruction is just skepticism made textually fastidious (hence not bald and unrigorous enough) Derrida should be left on the shelf. What a bunch of facile shit, huh? It's crap like that that makes you wonder why philosophy should be read at all; it makes you think that it's all just so much academic jigsaw puzzling chalked up to fear and avoidance of the 9-to-5.

I'm also reading Derrida's introduction to Edmund Husserl's ORIGIN OF GEOMETRY. It was the first thing Derrida published in book form (the introduction plus Derrida's translation of Husserl's little piece of some 30 pages runs 128 pages; so it definitely qualifies as book length). It first appeared in 1962. I bought it because it just came out softbound for the first time, published by University of Nebraska press, a Bison Book (which is a mighty fine book). I read a few pages of it in the Philosophy Library at UC Berkeley not more than two years ago. It was important for me at the time because I was working almost feverishly on my Kant/Frege/Derrida magnum oh. ORIGIN OF GEOMETRY is significant for Husserl because of Frege's criticism of Husserl's first published work, which had to do with the foundations of arithmetic. Anyway, there were other reasons besides the confluence of first works and mentorships that made Derrida's vestal publishing sublime and profound for the purpose of my magnum oh, but I won't confuse and bore by going into them here. Pushing all that muck to the side, Derrida's introduction to the ORIGIN OF GEOMETRY and his SPEECH AND PHENOMENA, which is also about Husserl, are the two best and easiest ways to figure out exactly where he's coming from and exactly what deconstruction is all about. It's all based on a true reading of phenomenology, which, in turn, owes itself to a true reading of Kant. Cut the cloth however you like, for me Derrida is always the right length, someone you know who will always be on the money. And, goddamnit, you can't say that about hardly anyone, short of your conception of the deity. So old brainiac Jacques is pretty special to me.

Even if I'm just pissing in the wind wasting my non-9-to-5 time reading writing philosophicus at least I'll be concentrating hard, and, happy, thinking about the future because I'm so locked up in the present -- a cogitating about the future that's free of constricting simple messages. I don't know, but I guess philosophy . . . at least it'll get me as far as fortune cookies in the trash.

Ta Da!

The Colt 45 Chronicle #77

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.

Nihilism #7

When last we left off, with Nihilism #6, I had mentioned that a perfectly succinct formulation of nihilism could be found in a movie, The Couselor (2013), written by Cormac McCarthy:

"You are the world you have created. And when you cease to exist, this world that you have created will also cease to exist."

But I have been thinking about this, and I should retract "perfect" as a distinction for this statement as a formulation of nihilism.

The founding father of nihilism as a school of philosophy and not just a label (Friedrich Jacobi coined the neologism, seeing it pejoratively as the Enlightenment's strange fruit) is Friedrich Nietzsche. And for Nietzsche the crowning achievement of his philosophy is the doctrine of Eternal Recurrence, the idea that what we do in the here and now will replay itself infinitely.

In other words, this world that we have created will not cease to exist because our existence is forever present.

When I broke up with my last girlfriend I decided to wake up early every morning, around 3 AM, and read from Nietzsche's last work, the posthumously published The Will to Power (1901).

I needed an emetic to cure me of my debilitating addiction to romantic love. I thought at least one page a day of the sagacious bachelor who famously wrote, "You go to women? Do not forget the whip!" (Derrida wrote a book, Spurs (1979) about this line.)

I stuck with it for for a month or two before moving on to something else. But this morning I returned to The Will to Power thinking about this issue of the Eternal Return of the Same.

The last section of The Will to Power is devoted to Eternal Recurrence. This from Note #1058:

Everything becomes and recurs eternally-- escape is impossible!-- Supposing we could judge value, what follows? The idea of recurrence as a selective principle, in the service of strength (and barbarism!!). 

Ripeness of man for this idea.

I always thought of the Eternal Return as a regulative concept, the palm at the end of the Western mind, a final refutation of all opposites, something that says the mental world and the physical world are one and all is possible.

Nietzsche solves the riddle of time-past and time-future, much like T.S. Eliot in Four Quartets (1943), by saying both are eternally present. There is a great deal of power to be tapped here. (Next nihilism post, an exploration of barbarism.)

BURNT NORTON

(No. 1 of 'Four Quartets')

T.S. Eliot

I

Time present and time past
Are both perhaps present in time future,
And time future contained in time past.
If all time is eternally present
All time is unredeemable.
What might have been is an abstraction
Remaining a perpetual possibility
Only in a world of speculation.
What might have been and what has been
Point to one end, which is always present.
Footfalls echo in the memory
Down the passage which we did not take
Towards the door we never opened
Into the rose-garden. My words echo
Thus, in your mind.

 

Infinity #6

Recently another blockbuster Marvel Comics crossover event came to an end. Infinity was a sprawling (spanning a dozen different titles) and ambitious (I think too much so) saga of inter-galactic creation, destruction and warfare between superheroes and supervillains. Penned principally by Jonathan Hickman, it factored in Thanos, the mad Titan butcher, in a way that never seemed organic to the main narrative (which was interesting and had do do with the Builders, the primary originators of the universe).

Hickman introduces new characters, both heroes and villains, along the way; Thane, son of Thanos, for instance, whose special powers are unleashed with the detonation of a Terrigen Bomb by Black Bolt and who will likely figure in the present Marvel blockbuster crossover event, Inhumanity. You see, one crossover event gives way to another.

The point of these crossover events is to make money for the parent corporation. The reader is sent on a spending spree in a largely vain attempt to keep abreast of the narrative, scattered as it is over many different comic books. A feeling of immersion in or presence with the story is almost never achieved. The feeling is rather always one of deferral or difference. But in this I guess you could say, in true Derridean fashion, that Marvel is treating its readers to the essence of writing.

Below are ten scans from Infinity #6 covering the climactic final battle between the Avengers -- Hulk, Ms. Marvel, Thor -- and Thanos. But it is Thanos' son Thane that ends up conquering the evil Titan, freezing him in a cube of "living death" that conjures up images of Thanos' demise in his original appearance in  the Captain Marvel of the Watergate-era 1970s. Jim Cheung is the penciler.

The Colt 45 Chronicle #46

I fiddled about on my undergraduate honors thesis for a couple of years before finally leaving the university the summer of 1988 without completing it. I shouldn't say "fiddled" because I worked quite long and hard on that thesis -- a discourse on Kant, Frege and Derrida that argued for the possibility of the analytic a posteriori (a type of statement Kant ruled out) -- though I would frequently say I was working on it when I was actually off drinking and copulating with one girlfriend or another who was not my wife-to-be.

Right before my betrothed and I left Berkeley in a VW bus bound for a quick Reno stopover in order to tie the knot on our way to the married-student housing offered by New York City's Columbia University Medical School, I inexplicably plucked from the fully-loaded bus a box containing the fruits of two years of research and writing -- countless days spent in branch libraries taking notes from academic journals and then spilling my musings into composition books while I drank coffee in Telegraph Avenue cafes -- and handed it to my father with instructions for him to mail it to me when we arrived in New York.

My father did what I asked of him, but the tomato box containing my honors thesis, my "magnum oh" that ingeniously (or so I imagined) bridged the gap between continental and analytic philosophy in au courant fashion, never made it to New York.

A cutout of the front portion of the box containing my father's return address was mailed back to him. My honors thesis had gone missing. The speculation was that the crack-and-peel label containing the address of our married-student apartment fell off the box. But if that were the case why not ship the whole box back to the return address which was still visible? The lid of the box must have become separated from the box itself.

My father was disconsolate; he felt responsible for the loss of the thesis. To this day he suspects some sort of foul play by the postal service. Just the other day he related to me that when he dropped off the box at the post office and was admonished by the woman working the counter for coming in so close to closing time with a such a heavy box that she was expected to lift.

Whatever it was, whether a label that had lost its adhesive or sabotage by a disgruntled clerk, my fate was sealed. I told myself I could recapitulate the pith of what was contained in all those boxed notes, and I made a half-hearted attempt evenings after work during the summer of 1989. But the jig was up. I used to be able to recite from memory the chapters of my thesis, how the argument moved from the analytic-synthetic distinction Kant makes at the beginning of the Critique of Pure Reason (1781); to Frege's logicist program in his Begriffsschrift (1879) and The Foundations of Arithmetic (1884) and the ontological implications of defining arithmetic as analytic; to Derrida's Of Grammatology (1967) and the possibilities for a new, more ethical pedagogy. Now, I can barely remember the barest of outlines. Hopefully, I still have notes somewhere from that weak summer of '89 attempt to capture what was lost in that missing tomato box.

Autumn 1988 

Gentlemen,

The parcel which I'm looking for is a box, approximately 8"x12"x10", with a lid (it's much like an IBM photocopy-paper box). It has air holes on either side (I believe it was originally a box for shipping tomatoes). It weighs about twenty-five pounds.

CONTENTS

The box contains l) books, 2) photocopies of books, and 3) loose-leaf handwritten pages (see next page for sample of hand writing). A list of the authors and titles of the books is as follows:

Saul Kripke, NAMING AND NECESSITY
Jacques Derrida, WRITING AND DIFFERENCE
Immanuel Kant, GROUNDWORK . . .
Gottlob Frege,FOUNDATIONS OF ARITHMETIC
John Sallis, SPACINGS

The package was sent from Fairfield, CA to New York City (10032). My biggest concern is not with recouping any dollar value for the missing material, but with finding it. You see, the box, which I had my dad send to me, had a year and a half's work in it. Without it I can't write this paper; and without this paper, I can't get my bachelor's degree. (A real, honest-to-goodness, tearjerker.) So I would sincerely appreciate any kind of reply, no matter how brief. 

Thank you,

Remembering Jacques Derrida at the Holiday Inn

I did see Derrida. It was at the Holiday Inn in San Francisco. It was early 1988, a cold morning. I went with my buddy Matt. Before the conference began -- it was a big convention space, the American Philosophical Association was the sponsoring organization -- I was able to size up the great man in close proximity in the hallway outside. He was smallish in stature and well groomed and tailored, not in a foppish or dandy way, but in a formidable manner. He warmly greeted old lady Majorie Grene, a UC Davis professor who had written an early influential book in the U.S. on Existentialism, Introduction to Existentialism (1959), a copy of which I had at Berkeley and I think I have here somewhere.

Derrida was on a panel that morning in the big hall with a very nervous Rodolphe Gasche who almost melted down while speaking. Derrida was extremely kind to him up there in front of all the hostile American philosophers.

Derrida took the podium after Gasche, who had written a pro-Derrida book published in 1986, The Tain of the Mirror: Derrida and the Philosophy of Reflection, and in passing the red-faced Gasche who was on his way back to his seat at the table on the dais Derrida clasped him around the shoulders in a totally selfless act of benevolence. I always remembered that. That and Derrida's hostile reception from the majority of the audience who were obviously tenured old professors.

During the question and answer period (Matt took a crack with one about the etymology of genuflection and genius -- moving the seed up to the brain) Derrida responded to a hostile inquiry with what I thought was an incredible revelation for a professional philosopher and intellectual -- "More and more I cannot tell the difference between having read and not having read." Or something along those lines.

My project in my lost honors thesis was to place Derrida as a Kantian; that the Kantian nature of Deconstruction could be understood by looking at -- of all people -- the founder of analytic philosphy, Gottlob Frege. With this argument I would then bridge the divide between continental and analytic philosophy. My end point was to arrive at a new pedagogy, one Derrida points the way to in Of Grammatology (1967), but one that was more explicitly informed by Kant's Critique of Practical Reason (1788), his moral philosophy. Ambitious. Turned out to be too ambitious.

The Colt 45 Chronicle #22

Last Sunday I was on the road in the Bay Area running around Lake Merritt with my father and then later taking in an afternoon Giants game with my buddy Oliver. So there was no post from an archive of letters dating back to the end of the 1980s when I first arrived in New York City. We resume today with letter number 22, a thankfully brief note to my girlfriend Stacey. In this missive I self-indulgently compare our authorial aspirations to those of a young Johann Gottlieb Fichte. (At least Stacey realized some success. Today, she's a prize-winning author.)

At the end of my time at Berkeley when I was trying to finish my honors thesis on the analytic a posteriori, I figured out that what I was trying to say about understanding Kant filtered through Frege (logicism) and Derrida (grammatology) could be found in Fichte and his explanation of the I as thing-in-itself.

At our last dinner together in Oakland, I tried unsuccessfully to describe to Stacey what I had discovered reading Fichte. Hence, the letter below, written a few months later, after I had relocated to New York City with my wife.

Summer 1988 

I told you a story about Fichte once in a car on the way to dinner; I even tried to feed you the moral, about how there's no difference between things that change history. -- A little perfection on I-80 on our way to shitty food and shitty debauched, defeated jocks. And then there's beer, always beer, which is a vacant-lot heaven full of Egyptian-dead cats and dog-shit pyramids; we share it and love it and are alone in it. But the story about Fichte was designed to inspire, both of us: something about youth paying off in a mundane way; that we can do what we're doing and still make our name; all we have to do is take one fair-sized risk. Fichte gambled on writing something (he wrote AN ATTEMPT AT A CRITIQUE OF ALL REVELATION in about a month) and then abased himself at the feet of the master. He figured something out. I'm not pushing institutional prostitution; I'm saying, shit, pump something out. If it's shit, get rid of it. But if it's decent, fork it out to the master. Unfortunately, and hypocritically, I never listen to my own lessons. I could go into a sizable self-deprecating diatribe, but it would bore . . . Let it end by saying that I'm a shithead, an asshole, etc. . . And that I'm a shithead, an asshole, and on and on . . . for doing the Christ-ed, fuck-up, can't-do-it routine. My problem is that at twenty-three I feel I go all the way back to Moses. I feel that life is largely lusterless. I feel that my sword is always already beaten into a plowshare.

Metatron

What does it mean that the only time the light on my answering machine is blinking is when a credit card company has left an automated message asking if I want a lower rate? It means, I think, that I'm either doing something very right or pitifully wrong. At times I secretly hope it's an old flame calling to rekindle a romance.  But by now I know better. The only recording angel for me is a bank robodial.

Below are scans of the front and back of the Foreign Agents Series edition of Sol Yurick's Behold Metatron, the Recording Angel along with an interior page listing the Columbia University campus address of Semiotext(e). At the time I read Metatron I was working on my honors thesis, my magnum-oh on the analytic a posteriori, a Kant-Frege-Derrida synthesis.  My ex-wife, who at the time was a live-in girlfriend who had just moved out, was living in a one-room outhouse working as an au pair for a financially well-off family in southeast Berkeley.  The head of the family was the wife who was a physician and her husband was a contractor; they had a little boy and a newborn (whether boy or girl I can't recall).  The outhouse was actually a completely renovated small one-room living space with a portable toilet.  It was located in the backyard beneath healthy old trees. This is where I read Metatron. I believe if I was thought about at all by the husband and wife I was considered a persona non grata, a self-indulgent bohemian in the Groves of Academe.

Consciousness Without Identity

The ego is poison, but we're stuck with it.  We can't live without it.  It wants to insert itself in every thought we think.  Haecceity.  It has something to do with how the will to live manifests itself.  The sex drive.  The only thing we can do is wrestle with it.  Put it "under erasure," as Derrida says.  Use the I against I.

Consciousness without identity, as Ani DiFranco sings, is the preferred state, but it's tough to get there.