What Happens When Your Name Becomes an Adjective?

Is there a price to be paid for being so incredibly bright that you become really famous and people start using your last name as an adjective, as in Freudian, Derridean or Foucauldian?  Does a certain notion of what your writing practice is, in functioning as a descriptive, modify and limit the reception of your works to what readers expect to find?   Foucault said the more famous he became the less widely he was read.   Derrida frequently said of his critics that they hadn't read him.  One can read Freud with Freud or Freud against Freud, but can one read for unFreudian moments in Freud?  Cane one read / not read the writer / not writer?   I have found moments in Derrida's works that strike me as being very unDerridean, either because they contradict his practice or turn it into a patois (this usually happens in interviews).  For example, he regular questions a Heideggerian distinction between the human and technological, between physis and techne.  But when questioned about his paradoxical critical practice bears on his political commitments, he responds: "If every project were a reassuring project, the logical or theoretical consequence of a knowledge that  was guaranteed--euphoric, without paradox, without aporias, without contradiction, with no undecidability to be resolved--it would be a machine functioning without us, without responsibility, without decision, ultimately without ethics, law, or politics. There is no decision or responsibility without the trial of aporia and undecidability."  Bad reading is mechanical, good reading is not.  Are moments like these to be dismissed?  Or may they be used to produce productively resistant (un)readings?  In the case I cited above,  there seems to be a potential danger in characterizing one's reading practice in stark binary terms, the danger of being unnecessarily dogmatic, of limiting resistance to one's work by charaterizing it in entirely negative terms; that is,  the oppositions Derrida draws self-deconstruct:  what Derrida describes as not being a machine could easily be described as a machine or program without resistance.  Hence,  you find your aporias, paradoxes, contradictions, and so on.  Are unreading and nonreading the same thing?  Is unreadability a quality one wants one's writings to have?  

Burt in a China Shop?

Sometimes I'm afraid I act like this when I make a new friend: "Out of flowers?  OK, let's play 'throw each other in the pond!' Oops, you don't know how to swim?! Oh no, neither do I!"

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MA9opHsLACk

Then I'm afraid this will happen to me as a result:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JzIG2_nxApM

Dead Friend(ship), R.I.P.

Did you have ever have a good friendship that died?  I did.  I had a friend who connects with friends by disconnecting from them. After tiring of being repeatedly disconnected, I tried to force through a better connection and called him (to re)collect.  But my friend refused to accept the charges and so the operator hung up on me.  After awhile, because I missed my friend, I tried to force a connection again.  But this time, my friend got really angry at me and cut the line.  I got a "this number is no longer in service" recording when I dialed his number.  I think my friend misheard me and mistakenly thought I was making an obscene phone call.  Anyway, the phone friendship went dead.  Perhaps it was a phoney friendship all along.  Still, I miss it. It was weird to delete his number from my cell phone.  

Please Rewind Me to Tell You!

Isn't it interesting that we use other people (very politely, of course, and kindly) to remind us to tell a story as if our memories / stories were stored somewhere else and had to be postponed to an undefined but near future time before being retrieved and activated by our listeners?  As if we were inviting our listeners to press play in the future and rewind us so we could then playback our already taped before a non-live audience story for a now live audience?  Here the postponing of our storytelling us in the name of displacing responsible for the telling of it on to a listener with a promise that the story will be good shows us that as  narrators of stories we want to retell, we are broken tape machines in need of rewinding and sweeding by and for our listener.  All we want is more time to tell.  Again.  Does this mean that our repetition compulsions are really death drifts rather than death drives since our compulsive narrative repetitions require the listener's hand or voice to (re)activate us?

Against Using

In a somewhat recent issue of PMLA (2007), Peter Stallybrass responds to an article in PMLA on the database with a polemic entitled "Against Thinking."  It's worth a read.  But here's a thought about not thinking.  By refusing to think the database, Stallybrass presents a host of symptoms, release their own fantasies about data storage, data retrieval, and research (as use, as data processing).  Once archival documents have been copied, they assume, a researcher will work on them continuously only his or her research is completed.  The data will never be corrupted.   Completetion and perfection of archival research (outside the physical archive) are not a problem.  Data processing promises a beginning and an end in terms of orienting a research project (you go to the archive, then you go home).  Home trumps the library (or the library as Borges imagines it); you can go home again, but apparently you never have to go back to the library because you need more documents or because your photos were degraded or destroyed.  This "historicist" account of the archive and database leaves itself up wide open to a psychoanalytic and deconstructive broadside:  being against thinking is a necroacademic fantasy of the archive as tomb, the researcher as mummy.  The user, once again, reveals the uselessness of his own so-called historicist scholarship masquerading and misrecognized as productive.  If you don't think, you sink.  Better to think more about the value of uselessness and frivolity.  See Derrida on Condillac.  I will post soon on uselessness.

(Un)Thinking the Unthinkable

Is thinking the unthinkable unthinkable because the unthinkable is worth thinking if you could or because it isn't? Is the unthinkable thought the most valuable or least valuable of thoughts?  Is thinking about the unthinkable the next best or the next worst thing?

ADMINIS-TRAITORS

What to do about university administrators who betray the mission of the university, who mismanage higher education because they could care less about it and who hire more administrators to do more harm?