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Feb 19

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“Divergent” Subjects: The Individual Against the Collective

Last weekend, I finally watched Divergent.  Last semester, I kept telling students in my Plato’s Republic seminar that someone needed to get on the film version of the dialogue.  It just seems so cinematically rich.  I mean, I know people have made films that are treatments of the cave analogy, but I want the thriller that is the dialogue as a whole.

Halfway through the semester a student told me I needed to see Divergent because it depicted Plato’s Republic.  Let’s just bracket that this film fails as a depiction because any successful film of the dialogue would have to find a way to perform the narrative encapsulation of the dialogue–Socrates narrating the story of the conversation that follows, the argumentative set up to the city in light of the question of whether justice is advantageous.  If Divergent depicts the Republic, it does so because it depicts a community in which people are divided into classes on the basis of their natures and these classes do the different tasks needed for the city to flourish.  Erudite seeks knowledge, Dauntless defends the city, Amity farm peacefully at the outskirts of the city, Candor speaks the truth, and Abnegation feed the poor and rule the city.  The film, which is based on the novel of the same name by Veronica Roth, gets traction from the problem that not everyone easily fits into one category, because you know, they’re divergent!  Like Hunger Games, a story that sets itself up as a revolutionary tale of resistance against oppression, Divergent ends up serving the same neoliberal practically Ayn-Randian celebration of individualism against collective action.  In this film, the collective becomes a problem because it attempts to limit and narrowly define individuals, while individuals succeed only when they work independently of the collective in order to resist it. Read more

Feb 14

The Arab-Islamic Gift: Translating Western Culture OR Thanks for the Roots of Western Culture, Savages, Now Scram.

About twelve different things converged this week to make me excited about thinking about the Arabic and Islamic contribution to Greek translation history.  Obama gave a speech at the National Prayer Breakfast referencing “terrible deeds in the name of Christ” to which critics responded that that wasn’t representative of Christianity and that it ignores how the Crusades were provoked by Muslims, never mind that claims that violence done in the name of Allah is not representative of Islam are roundly dismissed or that it isn’t so obvious that Christianity created liberalism.  Chris Kyle, the hero of American Sniper, regularly refers to the Iraqis he is killing at a sniper’s distance as savages in that film that has spawned a whole new round of people eager to do violence to Muslims.  The standoff between Europe and Greece over debt is currently being negotiated raising questions of what Greece’s relationship to Europe is.  I just wrote the course description for my medieval philosophy course next semester that will take up Christian, Jewish and Islamic commentators of Aristotle. I’ve been re-reading The Autobiography of Malcolm X for a reading group I’m doing on campus for Black History Month with some other faculty and students and I was just yesterday reading the middle chapters about the Nation of Islam and Malcolm X’s efforts to recast the history of race relations and religion. I’ve been teaching about how social context affects perception in my philosophy of race course. Into this constellation of thoughts and events landed an essay by Azzedine Haddour from the 2008 edited collection Translation and the Classic: Identity as Change in the History of Culture.  Haddour’s essay, “Tradition, Translation and Colonization: The Graeco-Arabic Translation Movement and Deconstructing the Classics,” returned my attention to some themes I was thinking of last summer in terms of the question of ‘ownership’ of the Greeks (which I blogged about here and here).  Haddour argues that the Arabic role in the transmission of Greek texts to us, and through Greek texts, Western culture, is effaced when it is considered merely passive, as a conduit that moves what is “ours” through “them” to get it safely back to” us.”  Not only was it not passive, Haddour argues, but Arabic culture brought us many of the knowledge practices that we today think of as quintessentially “Western” and Christian: the inquisitive spirit and the primacy of the text.  If he’s right, we have Arabic Islam to thank for the tradition of  textual criticism.

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Feb 9

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New to You Music in 2015: Pusha-T

One of my New Years’ resolutions was to listen to new music, well, new music to me.  It’s been a busy half decade or so and seriously, I haven’t sought out anything new in a long time.  I gotta say it took me awhile (five weeks into 2015) to find something I wanted to write about.  I bought Lana Del Rey’s album Ultraviolence–it’s fine, I might still write about it, but well, lemme just say I could resist writing about it.  Then I bought Lucinda William’s double album Down Where the Spirit Meets the Bone.  And yeah, I’m glad I bought that because well, it’s Lucinda Williams.  Henry Carrigan over at No Depression compares Lucinda Williams to Flannery O’Conner:

Like O’Connor, Lucinda Williams captures in her songs the ragged, jagged, sometimes twisted and bitter nature of human relationships; like O’Connor, Williams beautifully renders in often haunting prose our aching desires for transcendence, even while we embrace our crippled mortal states. Unlike O’Connor, though, she embraces our constant struggle between flesh and spirit with an exuberance and downright joie de vivre that acknowledges our losses with poignant regret, while at the same time revealing the fervent hope and ardent passion that lies beneath living life fully.

I can listen to Lucinda Williams and Lana del Rey in the background while I write or wash the dishes, but neither brought the excitement, the I-want-to-listen-to-this-album-on-repeat, the I’m-in-the-presence-of-brilliance feeling that I got (well, get) when I listen to Pusha-T.   Read more

Jan 18

Friendship, Part II: Aristotle and Romantic Friendship

Cross-posted from Genetic Method.

In my last post on friendship, I responded to my friend Ashley Vaught’s questions about the role of proximity in friendship in Aristotle.  I  consider some questions there about whether virtue friendship is possible when we are still on the way to becoming completely virtuous.  I was left wondering how we can ever become virtuous if we need friends to become virtuous but we can’t be virtue friends before we are completely virtuous.  Perhaps it isn’t just that friendship is impossible, but rather that our friends who help us become virtuous must be more virtuous than we are.  One possibility is that virtue in Aristotle unlike in Plato can be partial and always underway since virtue is practiced and requires a practice of ethical perception which is then limited based on our individual habits of seeing.  Against the view that friends become virtuous and then become capable of having complete and virtuous friendships with us, I think that Aristotelian virtue friends make us have more complete virtue because together we can see better, ethically speaking.  It is not lost on me that my exchange with Ashley over friendship in Aristotle illustrates how friends help us see more and better.  I appreciate the meta-ness of that more and better being about how friends help us see more and better.

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Jan 12

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Friendship, Part I: My friends, there are no friends.

Cross-posted from guest blogging appearance at Genetic Method.

My friend Ashley Vaught sent me a long inquisitive email about teaching Aristotle on friendship. Let me just say to start that I really don’t like thinking about, writing about or teaching Aristotle on friendship. When I teach the Nicomachean Ethics, I rarely teach the friendship bits. I have always wondered what the philosophical point was. And as someone interested in how political life is foundational for Aristotle, I have bristled at readings that maintain that Aristotle’s account of friendship implies a pre-political ethical life. Moreover, I’ve never understood what the purpose of this account was except just explaining more about friendship. And what is the point of that? Do people read this and start pursuing more complete friendship? I can just picture someone sitting down and graphing her friendships to judge which friendships are complete and which are for pleasure and which utilitarian, I don’t know, to keep things organized? I don’t think it makes me a bad friend to not enjoy theorizing about friendship. But I do think good friends respond to their friend’s serious inquiries, so when I got a long email from Ashley about friendship in Aristotle, I agreed to have some thoughts. Read more

Jan 7

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Undue Burdens: Abortion and Paternalism

The 5th Circuit Federal Appeals Court heard arguments today to determine whether the Texas law that requires abortion clinics in Texas to be ambulatory surgical centers is constitutional.  If upheld, the law would cause 80% of abortion clinics in Texas to close, which would mean many Texas women would have to travel hundreds of miles to procure an abortion, as reported by NPR.  Many of the women affected are poor, many are Latina, some are undocumented.  For many, their only source of healthcare is their local Planned Parenthood.  I know this because I used to live in the Rio Grande Valley, one of the places where the local abortion clinic would have to shut down. Read more

Jan 5

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Georgia O’Keeffe at the Indianapolis Museum of Art

Yesterday, I went to the Georgia O’Keeffe exhibit at the IMA they’re calling “Georgia O’Keeffe and the Southwestern Still Life.”  The exhibit situates O’Keeffe among her contemporaries working in American art in the early to mid-20th century in the southwest.  O’Keeffe was an American woman painter when they were few women respected as painters in the US. The exhibit shows how O’Keeffe was influenced by the terroir, the architecture and the Spanish and indigenous cultural elements of the southwest.  By putting her alongside her peers, the exhibit shows how O’Keeffe was in dialogue with the abstractionists of the 20th century while maintaining her own voice (I was struck by the number of O’Keeffe’s peers who just painted guitars like Picasso).  There were three claims that the exhibit seems to make that I took issue with: 1.  that O’Keeffe’s work is not abstract; 2. that her bones are not about death; and 3. that her flowers are not sexual. Read more

Jan 1

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Janus-Faced Part 2: Stuff I’d like to do in 2015

According to Ovid, Janus was the son of Apollo and was born a mortal in Thessaly but then fled to Italy.  He was a Roman god with Greek roots, like many of the Roman gods, which makes the roots of Janus themselves Janus-faced.  I’ve been thinking about Janus a bit this week as I have been writing about and reflecting on what I’m doing when I do the history of philosophy – lots of looking back to look ahead.  Sounds like a country song.

Yesterday, I looked back at 2014 to list the things I was proud of last year.  I know most look backs cover the year in literature, in politics (Cuba is open for further colonization, the GOP is taking over the Senate, and yeah we did torture all those people and how), in public life (Ebola, police finally getting called on killing black men with impunity), in the academy (Steven Salaita), and philosophy, but I went the personal route.  So this Top Five list is the personal follow-up to look ahead and consider what I’d like to do in 2015.

5.  Keep blogging regularly.  My goal is to continue blogging once a week.

4.  Run outside through the winter.

3.  I’d like to take advantage of the proximity to Chicago to attend philosophy conferences there — there are two conferences this spring at DePaul, the History of Philosophy Society and the graduate student conference on affectivity that Jason Read is speaking at, that I’d like to attend.

2.  I’m heading to the Collegium Phaenomenologicum in Città di Castello, Italy, in July and I’d like to visit Crete and some of the other Greek islands while we are in Europe.  Last year I went to Greece for the first time, which was amazing.

1. I was going to make number one thinking about pedagogy, but while I really do want to do more of that and I probably will, it sounds pretty boring.  So as I was telling some friends last night at the New Year’s Eve party / bonfire I went to, I think this year I’m going to pay some more attention to music.  I am going to buy an album a month from a musician that I’ve never listened to before (recommendations welcome).  I’ll blog about that too.

Here’s to a good year.

Dec 31

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Janus-Faced, Part 1: Stuff I’m Proud of from 2014

Janus is the Greek god of doors and gateways, beginnings and endings, looking back and looking ahead.  To be Janus-faced is to recognize that the ending is a beginning, and the beginning an ending, to hold together what has come with what will come.

So much for the lofty start.  Here we are: year end reviews.  Everyone’s doing it.  I don’t like to be a cliché, but I do like to look back in order to look ahead and to do so in a way that addresses what was significant to me rather than the kind of thing I would put on a salary review.  I realize that what I don’t like about these kinds of things is how much they are about individuals–what I did this year–when what seems important is what we collectively have done, or more, how what we’ve done has been collectively accomplished.  So I’m trying to think about how the things that I did were also collective efforts. Read more

Dec 8

Sara Ahmed On Racism and Institutionalized Diversity

As I was writing my book on Aristotle’s political thought, I became interested in how and why institutions fail to achieve the end they purport to achieve almost as a matter of course.  Institutions seem to shift their goal from the end they were established to fulfill to merely preserving their existence.  What happens is that the desire to preserve their existence contravenes their efforts to fulfill the goal for which they were established.  I wrote about this in a critique of Stieg Larsson’s Girl With a Dragon Tattoo series.  The notion that institutions become more concerned with their preservation than their proclaimed goal now resounds from every corner (eg., protecting the police force trumps the peace and justice the police force is meant to maintain and enforce).

Over the last two months, I have been making my way slowly through Sara Ahmed’s book On Being Included: Racism and Diversity In Institutional Life (Duke University Press 2012).   Ahmed argues that institutions institutionalize ‘diversity’ as a way to protect and preserve themselves without ever adequately recognizing diversity.  Ahmed exposes the ways that what seems to be institutional recognition becomes institutional justification of ignoring its grave problems.  So the rest of this post isn’t so much a review (good reviews can be read at Society and Space, Graduate Journal of Social Science, Erina Frost, Hypatia Reviews Online and the American Association of University Professors), as a list of the ways that diversity works that contribute to how  institutions fail to diversify through appeals to their instituted diversity projects.

So the list includes three things: 1) diversity statements function as non-performatives; 2) diversity programs and policies are implemented to protect the institution rather than to further diversify the institution; 3) the language of diversity comes to have commercial value and to reflect the commercial value of the institution.

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