letters
so.... with regard to my deceptively humble relationship with philosophy--how i often don't see myself doing it--perhaps i spent way too much time thinking precisely about the singularity of some stances and how traumatic histories (trauma more in the sense of fanon, which was brilliant) overdetermine what one says. my views on this are bleak, so perhaps it's good that my first project was killed. they are bleak in two ways, externally and internally: the first has to do with how others relate or rather fail to relate to this and the second one has to do with some sort of strange violence that goes hand in hand with such thinking. you know, this is all very kleinian in a way, but i simply don't know how else to put it: when there's pain, the world is fractured for you, it's seen in stark contrasts, and the level of screwedupness here--precisely at the level of thinking--can be frightening. do you see what i'm saying?
i've been thinking about the cfp you sent me, which is quite poorly written, if you ask me. the whole problem always risks becoming an empty debate about usage and terminology--and i've seen it happen. as for me, one of the problems that interest me is understanding evil as what is unacceptable, as we see in arendt. the failure or refusal (which is it, in each case?) to accept something is just so thought-provoking...
adorno's pronouncements on suffering were a bit of a letdown... :) i did get his (rick's really) point, but i guess i wanted to hear something else.
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for sure about privilege... but the wall of privilege or dumb luck is hardly penetrable, not even philosophically or perhaps--let alone philosophically.
ok, i'll tell you what's in the back of my mind when i hear adorno talk about 'harm done to the object'... wtf? what about benjamin? *i* would never feel at home at this kind of generality or abstraction if something like this happened to someone i knew well.
oh, i go livid when i hear that nonsense about terminology viz. the problem of evil. you know that the boys even mocked it a while ago, when i was still around? that whole group laughed about it.