I
bundled up for winter for the first time in a couple of weeks and headed out
into the mess. I had been expecting freezing rain, but that seemed to have
passed into just cold rain. O’Hara looked coated in ice, so I opted to take
Queen to University. Traffic was slow and I chose most of the time not to go
between cars and the curb because that space was slushy and possibly slippery.
My ass and knees (pronounced “assaneeze”) were cold and wet by the time I got
to University Avenue.
As
I was heading north and passing the Canada Life building, a sheet of ice about
the size of an extra large pizza box came flying across the street like a
Frisbee. It passed in front of me about ten meters ahead and broke up on the
edge of the street.
As
usual, the lecture theatre was dark when I arrived, so I turned the lights on.
Shortly after that a young woman who always sits behind me in the second row
came in. We’d only spoken very briefly on a couple of occasions. This time
though she said hello and asked how I was. She asked how my essay was coming along
and I answered that it was “essayesque” and that I had “five pages of
something”. We discussed how hard it is to figure out what Levinas is talking
about. I said that I think his “other” is any entity other than oneself,
including god. She said she’d thought it was something different than that.
Maybe I’ll get it when I’d finally started reading him after my essay was
handed in I could have a clearer opinion.
I
asked her what her name was and she told me it was Noa. I asked if it was
spelled the same as the drunk guy from the Bible. She laughed and said that she
was named after a female Biblical character. I looked it up later. Noa was one
of the five daughters of Zelophehad and they may have been the first women to
inherit property.
When
Naama came in she thanked me for sending her my lecture notes, which is
something I’ve done four or five times when she’d missed class. She told me she
was trying figure out where to go to file her separation papers. I was perhaps
a little too surprised to find out that she was married. She seems above
marriage but maybe I’ve idealized her too much. She said they’d just broken up
a few months before and that she needed to file separation papers before she
could get a divorce. I suggested that she try a legal clinic and that if they
couldn’t legalize the papers there they could at least tell her where to go.
She had no idea that such a thing as a legal clinic existed and said she would
check it out.
Just
before the lecture, some students at the other end of the first aisle had just
gotten the news that the class they had after ours had been cancelled.
Professor Gibbs looked up from his phone to ask, “What’s cancelled?” “The class
after this one!” Gibbs exclaimed, “That’s great! Oh! I mean, that’s bad!”
He
started the lecture by returning to the subject of signs. Signs have meaning.
Something in the mind is expressed with a sign. Empiricism or sense experience
comes from the world and a missing piece is made good with experience. For
example, once you know some geometry you can learn more. Signs don’t merely
build and refer. They refer to a network of cultural meanings. Take meaning
from Being in that context. This world precedes experience and is a
linguistified world full of signs waiting to be called into the house of Being.
The
user or speaker is also embodied in the world. The possibility of language
depends upon the body.
This
philosophy is a swipe at anti-Platonism.
Plato
says that there are ideas and historical culture is not important. One should
love beauty itself more than the beautiful boy because meaning is not bound to
the boy. Contemporary philosophy says that one can’t throw out that
relationship.
We
make sense of life from the body; therefore we can’t transcend the body or
culture. I could become a victim of cultural genocide. I can lose education and
overcome that but in some ways I can’t.
Anthropology
draws on this kind of cultural meaning with no escape.
Decolonization
is attached to a thought. When we try to decolonise we don’t get inversion. We
get an intensely complex map of multiple worlds with no order or qualitative
difference. This led him to talk about how both Canada and the United States
thinks their way is best. He said that we are right to think that our way is
the best.
The
anthropologists say to suspend judgement, but who are the anthropologists that
say that?
The
alternative is somebody that understands pluralism. Some say that indigenous
people fit that bill, while others say that’s not true.
1) Reference
2) World/Culture theory
3) Economic meaning. Crude on purpose.
4) Unique road, one-way.
The things that
ground all meaning are human needs. Like water, food, shelter and gumboots.
These needs are ways to foundation from where metaphors come. Call it a labour
theory of value (a reference to Marx). Or what will be the gradient of lifetime
earnings as a result of having studied Continental Philosophy? Economic
orientation not only defends the pigs but also the Marxists who are trying to
overthrow the pigs. Poverty is not a fundamental problem and may be the source
of the solution.
Human needs exist
in something outside of language. There are no pure human needs. Every human
need is from the first interpreted culturally. Science modifies our needs. We
can’t get at pure human needs. What counts as sustainability here might not
count in a small fishing village. Smart phones are a first world need.
Materials extracted at great human cost. We end up back with the concept of
human needs related to particularities.
Is it possible in
the collapse of the orientation of meaning to give language an orientation?
There’s not one
totality but many, each closed off but interacting. Being is historical.
The colonial
attitude is to conquer. There is lots of cultural genocide. If you think it’s
worthwhile learning another language, this is radical. You could always just
kill.
There used to be
one meaning. In English Canada it was England.
In Quebec it was
reason or god.
Gone now.
The god that dies
is a transcendent helping god. The one that we needed is gone. The tit for tat
god is gone.
Levinas says there
is more to god. It’s metaphysical but beyond our concepts.
We’re a bi-national
state and the two sides are not obliterating each other.
There is meaning in
a relation that might be fundamental,
Ulysses gets home.
You get to come home. The self comes back to the self. Self-appropriation to
thine own self be true.
We need orientation
that can have one meaning and freedom to go to the other person and freely use
a word. This would be a work. It’s about being able to make something for
another with no backsies and no consideration. What it means to give without
return. It requires the ingratitude of the other. Never getting anything back
is purpose not for me but for the other. Not pure loss but such a work betrays
accounting. An asymmetry of relations. A pushing of the agent beyond their
limits. The one way of meaning is for the future and beyond my death. The
meaning of my work is posthumous. The horizon of my world is shattered by
otherness. A radical departure from me. A liturgy. Public donations. This kind
of work is about free character orientation.
December 1941 is a
hole in history. A man in prison continues to believe in the future.
Franz Kafka said,
“There is an infinite amount of hope in the universe … but not for us.
Contrast between need and desire. Need
opens world that’s for me. The motivation to give to the other comes from
beyond need. Desire does continue complete but empties me and puts me in
question. This is a rejection of understanding the other as enemy. The desire
of other is not to own but is for the other. Insatiable compassion. It doesn’t
mean I ant to meet the other. I desire the other to call me out of myself. No
limit. This possibility of insatiable desire is the third dimension of
language.
Word spoken to another is referring to an
entity and located in a world. The one to whom the word is spoken is the one
for whom language works. To whom is not a cultural signifier and not part of
the horizon. Signifies beyond exegesis. Signifies the epiphany of a face. The
face is like a visitation. The face breaks with its own plastic essence and
divests its form. Shatters the horizon. Does this because the face speaks to
me. It is absolved from society. The nudity of the face cannot be converted
into representation. Something that can ask a question, that can speak and
speaks in return.
On the way out of
Alumni Hall, Naama told me that somebody hacked her Pay Pal account, and she
thinks it was her ex when she didn’t log off right away after an email
exchange. I don’t know how that works but I told her that when I considered
getting Pay Pal, the whole set up seemed weird to me.
We said goodbye as
I turned to the ice covered bike stand to unlock my ride. When I got to Queens
Park Circle though, Naama was still waiting for the light, so I walked with her
to the other side of the park as we chatted about chatted about our essays. We
were both writing on Nietzsche.
The rain had let up
and the way was less slushy, with no backed up traffic on the way home. When I
got there I hung my wet things up and took a siesta. One advantage of having a
hot and dry apartment in the winter is that after a couple of hours everything
but my boots were dry.
It wasn’t raining
much on the way back downtown. Our class would be covering Daniel Clowes’s
“Gynaecology”, and I had just enough time to read it before the lecture
started. The thing with Daniel Clowes’s work is that the writing stands up by
itself, even though the art is also good. The two stories we’d covered on
Tuesday would have been nothing without the artwork.
At the beginning,
Andrew Lesk asked the class if they’d read any Daniel Clowes previously. A few
of us that had taken his Graphic Novel course had read his “David Boring”. A
couple of people had read “Ghost World” but no one had seen the movie. Andrew
was surprised and said, “C’mon! Scarlett Johansson! What’s the matter with you
straight guys?”
The characters in
Clowes’s stories are often cynical.
Transitions between
scenes are virtually non-existent.
There is a
juxtaposing of subplots and ideas that is confusing.
There is an
obsession with god and a direct appeal to the reader at the beginning that
poses a metaphysical question. He speaks here of the “random membrane of
truth.”
The main character,
Epps, thinks he’s special.
“An infinite number
of correct interpretations.” If anything can mean anything then it all means
nothing.
Epps collected
Doctor Disguise dolls when he was a kid and now changes his look a lot. Epps is
also a cross dresser.
Andrew said that he
looked up “Epps” and found that it means “full of fear”. I didn’t find anything
like that. Why would a name exist that means “full of fear”?
William Bendix is
mentioned in the comic. He was an actor from the 50s who starred in “The Life
of Riley”.
Clowes gets away
with doing racist art because his character is a racist artist. Epps claims
that his art is not racist but rather ironic. This is a ploy to not have to
think.
Epps’s friends are
also plagiarists. His former girlfriend tells a story as it were hers that is
lifted from something by late stand-up comic, Godfrey Cambridge.
I noticed that when
Andrew was trying to say “Nazi Germany” he said “National Journey”.
The critic, Daniel
Raeburn, in an essay on the story said “Gynaecology must be penetrated.”
Someone suggested
that the earlier mentioned “membrane of truth” is the panels between the
frames. I don’t think so.
When I got home, my
clothes were a little damp.
That night I
started working on my Nietzsche essay, but I got tired very early and went to
bed at 21:30.
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