I suppose we should be grateful America’s latest obviously demented gun-bearer only killed two.
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[E]very country contains mentally ill and potentially violent people. Only America arms them.
People seem to have tired of talking both about the Derrida Professor’s having been found guilty by NYU of sexual harassment, and the lawsuit the grad student she harassed has filed against her and the school. But Ronell’s animating intellectual commitment – deconstruction – is worth revisiting, and here are two comments on it, from very different political positions.
First: Martin Jay, reviewing, in 2011, a book of interviews with Ronell.
[Ronell] depends … heavily on mobilizing the tired rhetoric of combat that animated the “theory wars” of the 1980s. AR herself seems frozen in that moment, a bit like one of those Japanese soldiers on a remote Pacific island still fighting for the emperor long after he surrendered. There are, after all, just so many times you can act out Zéro de conduite before the audience gets tired of adolescent rebelliousness as a mode of critique. Intellectual mooning grows as tedious as the real thing. It is fair to say that the ranks of her regiment are in fact getting thinner and thinner as the scandal and provocation of deconstruction recede further into the past.
Second, Francis Fukuyama, in an interview with the Chronicle of Higher Education:
Q. You have an unusual background for a political scientist. You majored in classics at Cornell, then did graduate work in comparative literature at Yale, where you studied with Paul de Man. Later you spent time in Paris sitting in on classes with Roland Barthes and Jacques Derrida. Any memories from this journey through deconstruction?
A. I decided it was total bullshit. They were espousing a kind of Nietzschean relativism that said there is no truth, there is no argument that’s superior to any other argument. Yet most of them were committed to a basically Marxist agenda. That seemed completely contradictory. If you really are a moral relativist, there is no reason why you shouldn’t affirm National Socialism or the racial superiority of Europeans, because nothing is more true than anything else. I thought it was a bankrupt way of proceeding and decided to shift gears and go into political science.
The superannuated subversion both men evoke suggests a reading of Ronell’s recent troubles in which, perversely, she rather got what she wanted: A new lease on academic deviancy.
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Which, Jay notes, Ronell believes Derrida invented.
“One cannot imagine how whited-out the academic corridor was when Derrida arrived on the American scene. There was really no room for deviancy, not even for a quaint aberration or psychoanalysis,” she asserts, blithely erasing Norman O. Brown, Herbert Marcuse, Noam Chomsky, C. Wright Mills, Hannah Arendt, Natalie Zemon Davis, Hayden White, Florence Howe, etc., from memory.
At no point in a long article about an insane drop in participation does the reporter even vaguely, even tentatively, allude to some of the likeliest reasons UM’s incredibly expensive newish (2009) stadium stands more and more empty.
Of course the stadium almost never filled up for football (it can seat 80,000! but they count 50,000+ as a sell-out), never made the money its boosters said it would. Goes without saying. Boys will have their big toys, and students will pay for them.
But now it’s really getting bad. Embarrassing, in fact, as cameras pan vast viewing deserts, and as the university hemorrhages money.
The reporter duly writes down what the athletics people tell her about all the shit they’re doing to make it ever so much more fun to sit in a hellhole full of troublesome drunks (UM has already desperately made booze freely available) than watch on your phone, or, best of all, not watch at all. She says nothing about a raft of player and coach sex scandals, enormous buyouts of said coaches…
Somebody needs to tell her that spending a lot of time and money cheering on really gross people and programs isn’t an attractive prospect for a lot of students and locals. You can throw all the incentives you want at people, but if your program keeps pumping out scandals (and what program doesn’t?), you’re going to keep losing your audience.
Yes, that’s what we always think of first when we think of Berkeley, isn’t it? Sports.
… that school must be pleased that it’s back to familiar high-profile campus stories.
As with the dying Goethe, so with the dying college football game, the famous final words will be:
Mehr licht … bier!
Throw more beer at the little shits! Still more!!
Whether it’s the real game, at a high school, or the virtual game, at an entertainment complex, football and Florida go together like Smith and Wesson.
Put America’s most violent game together with virtually universal gun ownership, throw in an open public venue, and POOOOOF! Mass shooting.
The shots and shrieks are recorded by all the dying people, so the soundtrack of America writes itself: Concussive hits from the game; RATATATATATATATATA; fuck they’re shooting run; bodies running; grunts; bodies falling.
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And Parkland’s only four hours away! The Sunshine State’s full of opportunities – at many of the same locations! – to get killed in a large-scale event.
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Their flagship university.
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[E]very country contains mentally ill and potentially violent people. Only America arms them.
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SEVENTEEN TRILLION
“How many mass shootings in your state will it take for you to do something?” David Hogg tweeted to U.S. Sen. Marco Rubio (R-Fla.).
That’s a contemptible statement. It’s like saying Uriagereka supports American democracy and occasionally votes. Now he wonders if he and his fellow Americans – engrossed in their daily lives – perhaps naively took a smooth running executive branch for granted.
No professor who teaches at a Big Ten university can avoid noticing the sickening corruption that runs their school. It’s precisely because it’s so disgusting that almost all professors eagerly look the other way (the exceptions, as you know, are econ professors, who can’t help running the numbers) — until the coaches are caught fucking little boys in the athletic department showers, or they run a player to death one hot summer afternoon. Oh then! We were so naive; after all, university athletic departments are notorious for being run so smoothly…
And that’s why the University of North Carolina Chapel Hill is naming their basketball stadium after the coach.
No one knows how to play the game like ol’ Roy.
No, no, don’t go all Macbethian! Eliot Cohen confuses farce with tragedy; and thing of it is, he knows he’s wrong.
To be clear, these are very different people. Macbeth is an utterly absorbing, troubling, tragic, and compelling figure. Unlike America’s germaphobic president, who copped five draft deferments and has yet to visit the thousands of American soldiers on the front lines in Afghanistan or Iraq, he is physically brave. In fact, the first thing we hear about him is that in the heat of battle with a rebel against King Duncan (whom he later murders) Macbeth “unseamed him from the nave to th’ chops.” He is apparently faithful to his wife, has a conscience (that he overcomes), knows guilt and remorse, and has self-knowledge. He also has a pretty good command of the English language. In all these respects he is as unlike Trump as one can be.
Uh, yeah; and that’s why the play du jour ain’t Macbeth, you silly, but Alfred Jarry’s incomparable travesty of Macbeth, Ubu the King!
King Ubu is a stupid babbling conscienceless coward, a walking abomination of vulgarity, appetite, grandiosity, and paranoia.
The real script is nihilism, mes petites; nothing tragic – or even particularly meaningful – about it. The real script is not with a bang but a whimper.
Creeks, rivers, lakes, bays, and the Atlantic Ocean.
Today, an unusually cool and low-humidity day,
UD explored with her sister Chesapeake Beach.
First, of course, they went to a local tea room.
Then we walked the
Chesapeake Beach Railway Trail.
… witches, Mia Farrow, alluding to her most famous film, comes up with the very best meme of all.