Life These Few Days Previosuly Not Mentioned.

Thursday was the dentist, the bank, and back to the apartment for a nap and some writing.

Fall in Muncie: 

Friday was the group session, grocery shopping, and back to do some reading of emails. I did some work on the novella. When I got home, the belt buckle broke. 

Saturday, I got out the Gorilla glue and tried to fix the belt. Not that I went very far even when I thought it was fixed. So, I used my time writing.

Sunday was Liturgy, an over-long nap, and a walk down to the laundromat with a bag of laundry. Someone had all the washers tied up. I went over to the convenience store and found out my debit card had been left at my apartment. I walked back to the apartment, back to the convenience store and returned to the laundromat. The same person still monopolized the washers. I had been gone for maybe 20 minutes, and the person had not returned to remove their laundry to dryers. I went outside, read a little about J.M. Synge, and smoked two cigarettes. Then I spotted an open washer. I had put in my laundry and dropped $1.25 into the machine when I saw it was a $6.50 machine. I budget five dollars for my laundry. Out came my laundry and I waited a bit longer. It all worked out after about another 30 minutes. I went back out to my book and smokes. Only when I sat down, my belt buckle broke again. Not being able to be fully mobile, I called J and KH. It was a long walk home with my laundry in one hand and the other hand keeping up pants. This is what my luck looks like.

I started Black Doves on Netflix. I find it a rather good spy story. 

Monday, I meant to do some running. All I did was get to Walmart for a new belt. I bought a couple of items from the grocery, too.

I went to Vespers. An idea came to me that led to a piece I want to put into my novella. So, I did a bit of writing last night, just some dialog. 

I woke up on Tuesday and what am I thinking about? My novella. Some parts of Tuesday I have already written about today.

I calculated I could have the thing done by the end of the week. That I could get started this afternoon. Then I looked at the calendar. Instead of seeing the eye doctor was for this morning, it was this afternoon. Okay, I can start after I get back from the doctor. And I have to readjust my schedule. Off to the insurance agent and the grocery this morning before the appointment rather than after. Oh, well. 

Instead of the novella and the insurance agent, I worked on a few blog posts. I still need to get at my Friday session notes. 

I submitted “The First Day of Feeling Free” to Split Lip Magazine. 

The eye doctor gave me good news about my glaucoma; it seems to have abated. I may celebrate tomorrow. 

Going through a few other items in my tabs: 

Parker Posey Talks with Michael Schulman (The New Yorker)! I think Parker Posey is an amazing actress - never quite what she will do with a character, so you have to keep your eye on her. The video does a grand job of showing what makes her special. How much do I like her? We watched the Netflix Lost in Space while I was in prison. I kept hoping the Robinson family would die and she take center stage in the show.

Wondering at Philosophy With Kafka’s Dog (The MIT Press Reader) left me thinking I have nto read enough Kafka.

In your book “How to Research Like a Dog: Kafka’s New Science,” the connection between you as a philosopher and Kafka as a storyteller-philosopher is significant. You highlight the deep intersection between your philosophical outlook and Kafka’s narrative world. Because Kafka chose fiction to express his ideas, have you ever wondered what his philosophy would look like if liberated from storytelling? Have you ever wished he had written formal philosophical treatises instead?

No. Kafka comes closest to such pure philosophical writing in his Zürau aphorisms. There you can find propositions that are akin to the conceptual abstraction usually associated with philosophical thought. But my point in writing my book on Kafka’s philosopher dog was not to lament that Kafka is a failed philosopher, or that he should have written a philosophical treatise instead of a story. Instead, I wanted to appreciate what he did produce, and to extend it in a new way.

The story “Investigations of a Dog” is a wonderful parable of philosophy, and reading it can shake up our ideas about philosophy and help us appreciate the strangeness of its practice — especially given its current state of academicization. Philosophy begins in wonder, as the often-repeated line goes; what Kafka’s story allows us to do is to wonder at philosophy. Philosophy becomes an object of wonder for itself.

Now, the problem of the relationship between philosophy and literature is in fact an ancient one. It goes back to Plato, who had a real literary flair, composing not straightforward treatises but playful dialogues, and employing myths at crucial points. Maybe more than anything else, it’s these myths that have had a profound and enduring impact. In the book, I invite us to read Kafka’s myths like the Platonic myths, but for the Freudian age. Instead of the allegory of the cave, Kafka gives us the burrow (as Mladen Dolar has argued in his great essay on “The Burrow”); instead of the myth of the origins of the human being and the cosmos, Kafka gives us Odradek (Jean-Claude Milner writes brilliantly about this). And, instead of the myth of Er, the myth about the transmigration of souls choosing their next lives, we have Kafka’s prenatal hesitancy, expressed in his stunning line: “My life is a hesitation before birth.” That’s how I read Kafka, as a creator of new philosophical myths, or a new mythology of reason.

 ***

First, about nihilism: it’s clear that, for the characters themselves, this is not a problem. None of them thinks that “nothing matters.” On the contrary, they are totally obsessed with their different quests and pursuits! They follow them to the bitter end. When things go badly for him, does the hunger artist complain that fasting is stupid and meaningless? Just the opposite: he dreams of a fast breaking all records, and in a way, he disappears into this dream. Nothing is more foreign to a Kafkian protagonist than giving up in despair. On the other hand, this is a running joke throughout the fictions: why not “give it up” (the title of one of Kafka’s stories)? Sometimes there are friends or onlookers that marvel at the main character’s incapacity to just walk away from his troubles. Although it might look like they are being oppressed by external forces and inscrutable systems of power, on a certain level, they do it to themselves. Kafka’s characters “freely” encage themselves.

***

Let me raise a more general question: Where do individuals meet society? I would say, it’s not simply in their formation, education, or socialization, their Bildung. Becoming a subject is not only a process of internalizing rules, customs, ideologies, and habits — what’s called the social construction of the self, or the process of ideological interpellation. Rather, where this meeting really takes place is at those points where socialization fails, as it inevitably does. Not only because the individual is unruly and rebellious (which is true), but also, and above all, because the rules, norms, and teachings of society are contradictory, ambiguous, and riddled with gaps. A crisis in the life of the individual meets a hole in the symbolic order of society: It’s at these neuralgic points that the real encounter between self and community takes place. You could conceive of it as a kind of borderland, the “borderland between loneliness and community” (Kafka’s phrase). Here the individual is forced to be inventive, to create its own ad hoc solutions to its problems, in the margins of history, culture, language, and the normative solutions that society prescribes. You could also call this the borderland between psychology and sociology, their failed intersection. That is where the unconscious lies. 

Good night and good luck. 

 sch