So it's been a while. This year's been kind of rough, moving away from the people I love and like to a city completely foreign to me with nobody I really know here. And grad school's been a lot of work; but it's good work. It's stuff I really love doing and getting into, it's just that you realize that you spend 8 hours a day immersed in it and kind of wonder what the point is.
The main proprietor of this pressure and confusion was, in a way, brought on by a lack of anything to write papers on. It was getting to a point where I needed to have something started, and hadn't, and should have started figuring stuff out a while ago. So that got to be a bit much. But I sat down and really hammered out paper ideas this past weekend, and began to outline their structure a little bit throughout the week so far.
For Heidegger I initially thought I was going to do this critique of Being and Time, focusing on his use of Discourse as this constituitively primordial structure of Being-In and Being-With. It was going to take on a similar form as the Levinas paper I wrote last year as a writing sample for applications. Basically using trauma discourse as a problematization of traditional conceptions of discourse. But as I kept working with it during the school year, it just wasn't laying out well. There were parts in the book where I could destroy him, and then there were other parts I just couldn't see myself being able to get beyond. He just seemed to have a way to get out of it. So I struggled and struggled with trying to find a way into this critique and couldn't really resolve the problem I was having. And it was beginning to bum me out because it was getting to the point where I needed to start writing, but I had spent so much time trying to work a way into it to no avail. So then I realized I don't have to critique him, but could use his project as a way of facilitating a clearing for traumatic discourse, opening up a space within which it and other ethically demanding discourses could build, grow, and develop. So the beginning of the week was trying to find a way to start heading in that direction, followed by a couple pages written.
For my Walter Benjamin class I haven't really been too worried. Class is really laid back as are the paper requirements. But I hadn't really laid out the structure of the paper yet, so that was worrying me. I was able to do that earlier today, and began writing, with about 8/9 pages pumped out this evening. I decided to try and trace his use of the image of the "threshold" throughout the Arcades Project. And it's been really interesting. It sort of forms this thread throughout the work both implicitly and explicitly. What I'm really interested in is the way in which it could be tied into deconstructive notions of sovereignty. I've read a little concerning it, and just read a paper by Michael Naas last night that addresses Derrida's notion of laicite vis-a-vis sovereignty. Agamben's work seems to be operating within this horizon also. I'm sure a million others. Anyways, I see a similar concern for issues of boundaries and exclusion in Benjamin. I don't think it'll develop in this paper, but the possibilities for future work are definately there.
As for Hegel. No clue. Nobody has any clue what to do with that book, Phenomenology of Spirit. The books goddamn impossible, not to mention the fact that Hegel seems to be able to incorporate anything thrown at him into his project. So who knows. I'll eventually just have to throw something together with blinders on and pump out a pile of proverbial shit.
But making progress on these papers has lifted my spirits.
I can't wait for break and friends.
