Schooly Don

Schooly Don

Well, just got back from a very successful, very exciting trip to Belgium and the Rhetoric, Politics, Ethics conference at the University of Ghent. This event featured 5 or 6 of the biggest names in the history of deconstructive theory, including J. Hillis Miller, Derek Attridge, Carol Jacobs, Hayden White, and featuring a refreshingly (if not well thought-out) against-the-grain presentation by Dominic Di Capra. I presented on a panel entitled Power and Emprise, consisting of myself and Marc Redfield. Our papers were "Ethics in Empire: The Ethical Rhetoric of 9/11" (mine) and "War on Terror" (Redfield's). The conference papers will be published as a collection, so you can read all of the highlights when it comes out! One of those highlights was Carol Jacobs' de Manian reading of Plato's _Republic_. It was really marvelous, and featured one of the most accutely modern readings of the problem of Ethics, Politics and Rhetoric, illuminated through the most ancient text dealt with in the conference.

BOOKLIST...

Here is my pick for good book of the month that everyone should read:
Judith Butler's Undoing Gender. Butler has recently turned to the question of "humanity" and what qualifies as livable life, themes that dominate both this book and her other concommitant release Precarious Life: The Power of Mourning and Violence. In fact, there are blatantly plagarized sections between the two. The former, however, is focused on how the question of gender is a vector through which the negotiation of who qualifies as "human" takes place, while the other one looks at the politics of obituary writing after 9/11 as such a site for negotiation mournable humanity. I loved both. Of course, I'm a theory-head.