You know the drill: you do a mess of amphetamines, you stay up for a few months, and you write the Critique of Dialectical Reason. Sure, you feel bad about it afterwards and claim that you'll come back and finish Volume II, but you never do, do you? You just let the cryptic, labyrinthine language stand, hiding the kernels of genuine insight behind hundreds and hundreds of pages of opaque, impossible prose. The next thing you know, all it takes is one short chapter at the end of Lévy-Strauss's The Savage Mind to take your work apart, and structuralism - and social science as a whole - has scored a crucial victory over existentialism, and with it, nothing less than philosophy itself. Don't you wish you'd stayed clear of the speed, especially at YOUR age?
For next time: This is what happens when you're a towering German classicist in the Weimar Republic.
11.26.2007
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3 comments:
All I read was the title for the introduction chapter over your shoulder and that was enough for me to rant on your behalf all day at work.
I still think it is neat that Sartre's birth date is our wedding anniversary.
I always forget that! Clearly, the weird, be-spectacled specter of J-P was looking over our nuptials...
What can we take from this? Do we need to drop leaflets with a beginner's course in existentialism in the streets of Gresham? How do we get people to write at less than full form rather than, say, mowing the lawn at 3 a.m., knocking over 7-11s, or stealing identities and scrap metal? Could it be that it's simply a matter of descent, and that the problem is that the public education system is so gutted and ineffectual that there is no room for the populace's writing to get any worse, and so the only way down is theft?
Oh dear. How close then am I to a life of crime?
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