My Life and Thoughts

Well, there is good news and bad news. The good news is, the 11/20 issue of the LRB came out today. The bad news (at least, bad for those non-subscribers to the LRB who still wanted to read my article) is that my 8,000+ word discursion on Elisabeth Roudinesco’s Philosophy in Turbulent Times: Canguilhem, Sartre, Foucault, Althusser, Deleuze, Derrida (Columbia UP, $26.50) is only available by online purchase, or possibly by cutting a deal with the Widener minotaur. Imagine my feelings when, as I was writing the previous sentence, I experienced a moment of doubt about whether discursion was really the word I wanted, and, upon looking it up, found that the very definition is also only available to paying subscribers!

discursion can be found at Merriam-WebsterUnabridged.com.

Click here to start your free trial! Click here to search for another word in the Merriam-Webster Online Dictionary.

Learn more about “discursion” and related topics at Britannica.com
See a map of “discursion” in the Visual Thesaurus
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It is certainly very thoughtful of them to help you find a job, so you can afford to use the secret fatcat dictionary. On the other hand, if you, like me, don’t have a real job, then you may enjoy whiling away some minutes by typing in random words, to see which ones constitute the true discourse of power and privilege as defined by Merriam-Webster. On still another hand, the fact that you are unemployed is probably a reflection of the fact that you don’t know any of those words: I personally tried all the most obscure and aristocratic words I could think of, and all of them were in the free version of the dictionary accessible to any homeless dude in the SFPL. Finally, in despair, I looked in Google for a list of “ten-dollar words,” and although most of them were also in the free dictionary, one of them, croodle, is, like discursion, reserved for the elite.

But the class system never has been able to confine the intellectuals, who hover so ambiguously between the toilers and the exploiters! Take me for example. Although I don’t exactly have a real job with health insurance, I do have a part-time teaching job with unlimited OED access, and so am in a position to inform you that “The cushat croodles amourously” (TANNAHILL Bonnie Wood Poems (1846) 132), meaning that it produces a “continued soft low murmuring sound.” You read it here and you read it for free.

Philosophy in Turbulent Times	Cushat (Columba palumbus)

You know what else you can read for free, is Keith Gessen’s piece about his grandmother and also about Moscow politics and the financial crisis, where you will find the following anecdote:

This week Eduard Limonov, the charismatic poet and cult-like leader of the National Bolshevik Party, wrote up his impressions of a party held to celebrate the courageous radio station Ekho Moskvy. Across the crowded hall at the Prague restaurant, he saw his old friend and nemesis Vladimir Zhirinovsky, the long-time leader of the fake opposition party LDPR:

Seeing each other, we grinned, and, Vladimir Vladimirovich pushing aside his dinner, and I handing my glass of wine to my bodyguard, stepped towards one another and embraced.

Zhirinovsky: So your time has finally come!

Me: And yours also, Vladimir Vladimirovich, don’t you think?

Zhirinovsky: Yes, ours too, but you’ll precede us to the barricades . . .

Me: And you’ll follow . . .

Zhirinovsky: Yes. And you’ll all die on the barricades, and we’ll seize power.

Me: Except we won’t all die, and we’ll seize power.

Because Russians always remind me of other Russians, this reminded me of an anecdote about Chekhov and his editor, Suvorin, at the Hermitage restaurant, also in Moscow:

Everyone knew that Chekhov had tuberculosis. “It’s probably just a cold,” Chekhov would say, but his coughs brought up blood. One night in 1897, while dining with his editor in Moscow’s best restaurant, Chekhov had a severe lung hemorrhage. He was rushed to a private clinic and diagnosed with advanced tuberculosis in both lungs. He survived the attack but was, for some days, extremely weak and unable to speak. Only family members were admitted to see him. Then Tolstoy turned up, wearing an enormous bearskin coat. Nobody had the nerve to tell Tolstoy to go away. He sat at Chekhov’s bedside and talked for a long time about “immortality of the soul.” Chekhov was unable to reply. Chekhov later stated that, although he personally did not believe in the immortality of the soul, he was nevertheless touched by Tolstoy’s solicitude.

So… who really has tuberculosis? Which of them will die first? The question has been formulated by Derrida, who is quoted in Roudinesco, who is quoted in my review: “To have a friend… is to know in a more intense way, already injured, always insistent, and more and more unforgettable, that one of the two of you will inevitably see the other die.” (”That’s how I always think of friendship, anyway.”) Thanks to Limonov and Zhirinovsky, we now see that you don’t even have to be friends, in order to share this unforgettable knowledge.

Speaking of Zhirinovsky: you know when Zhirinovsky was constantly in the news, was in 1998. (I’m just saying, if you want to read about my experiences in Moscow in 1998, you really need to buy n+1 Issue 7 and read “Summer in Samarkand.”) Well do I remember that April, when Vladimir Volfovich made headlines with a daring rhetorical feint: blaming WWII on the Jews (”It was not6 clear why Zhirinovsky called the news conference, which he turned into a monologue about his vision of the history of the Jews and their role in contemporary life. His only explanation was that ‘many Jews were born in April’”).

Another feature of Moscow in 1998 is that everyone was going around saying “odnoznachno,” a word used idiosyncratically by Zhirinovsky, all the time, to mean something like: “yes.” If you Google odnoznachno and Zhirinovsky, you find this page of remarkably unfunny anecdotes, including this one: somebody, for some reason, asks Zhirinovsky whether the number 45 is a double-digit (dvuznachnoe); Zhirinovsky replies: odnoznachno (which means “single-digit”… or “synonymous”… or “unambiguous”). I guess it’s a story about getting what you deserve.

Still speaking of Zhirinovsky: some time ago, in the office of my fellow blogger Grisha Freidin, I noticed a slim volume titled Odnoznachno, with a profile of Zhirinovsky looking like a Roman emperor (except don’t the Roman emperors usually face right? Towards Zhirinovsky’s political leanings?). Of this book, which contains some of Zhirinovsky’s more celebrated utterances, Freidin observed: “Not a day goes by that I don’t turn to it for some wisdom.”

Speaking, now, of Prof. Freidin, those readers who like reading things for free should definitely check out his blog post on “Russia Under Stalin: Thoughts on Revisionism in American Historiography.” It’s about American histories that detotalitarianiaze Stalin’s Russia and make it sound like this enormously fulfilling place to live, and includes a really great quote from Zoshchenko:

Every epoch has its own psychology. And in every epoch, it was equally easy or, rather, equally difficult to live. Take, for example, some truly troubled century, say, the sixteenth. When we look at it from afar, it just seems unthinkable. In those days, people fought duels almost on a daily basis. Guests were thrown off battlements. And there was nothing to it. All was in the nature of things…

I’ve been thinking a lot about whether it is “equally easy to live” (to live meaningfully?) in any epoch, since it’s one of the big questions in Roudinesco’s book as well. Roudinesco’s implication is that, for the philosophers of existence and the person, life will never be as fulfilling as it was during the French Resistance—a time when, as in Stalin’s Russia, the daily life of ordinary people involved a battle between good guys and bad guys. As Zoshchenko points out, this was also the case in sixteenth century, when daily life might include a bad guy inviting you for tea and then throwing you off a battlement… in other words, when you look back at the good old days, you have to remember to erase all the gains of historical progress (assuming you actually believe in progress, which I think a lot of French people don’t). To quote myself again: “Thanks to hygienisation, sex has become less spontaneous . . . but we don’t all have syphilis.” On the other hand, one is still sad about the passing of interesting times. So OK, this is the last time I’m quoting my own article—if you want to read the rest you can pay £2.75:

From a Marxist perspective, it’s really the same problem that drove Flaubert to write such depressing books. According to Georg Lukács, for example, Flaubert suffered the genuine historical misfortune of reaching creative maturity after 1848, into an already ossified bourgeois capitalist apparatus: a world with no heroes. Flaubert’s meticulously detailed portraits and natures mortes were the product of socioeconomic alienation – the same alienation which eventually reduced Zola to ‘telling’ rather than ’showing’: to the journalistic-novelistic illustration of ready-formed social messages. A generation or so earlier, Stendhal and Balzac were the ones who had all the historical luck. Born into the moment of revolution and flux, they lived and wrote out their times.

…The thing is that Stendhal, who had marched as a young man with the Grande Armée, and witnessed the burning of Moscow in 1812, and couldn’t possibly have been any closer to the heart of his historical moment, nevertheless wrote his novels from and about the perspective of historical belatedness. ‘I fell with Napoleon in April 1814,’ Stendhal wrote in the 1830s, and the defining circumstance of Julien Sorel’s life is that he was born too late for Napoleon. Two centuries earlier, in Spain, Cervantes had lived out the same situation. A hero of the most cowboy-like historical triumph of the Spanish Empire, the Battle of Lepanto, Cervantes outlived his own heroism and, thirty years later, invented a hero of belatedness: Don Quijote, who was born too late for chivalry.

In short, Roudinesco’s historical situation – she was born too late for the Resistance, and has long outlived 1968 – seems less like a particular crisis, than like the general condition of modernity. Some times may be more ‘turbulent’, or historically interesting, than others… but simply by being born at all, and by being young first, and then less young, we are none of us spared from belatedness.

Well, now it is time for me to go do the work that keeps me subscribed to the OED, namely, reading undergraduate theses in the Stanford interdisciplinary humanities program. I have already learned so much about subjects such as “Male Aggression in the Early Novels of Fanny Burney and Jane Austen,” “Albert Schweitzer’s Pluralism,” and “Marcuse’s ‘Critique of Neo-Freudian Revisionism’”! This week’s topics are “The Postcolonial Bildungsroman” and “Self-Deprecating laughter” (ha ha).

Till next time, Platinum Members!

Emperor Balbinus (238 AD)

Tags: academic life, animals, birds, comparative literature, Don Quijote, glands—diseases, Keith Gessen, money, n+1, politics, publications, Russia, Russian literature, Stanford, today's youth, Tolstoy, w00t!

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