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I will lay down a marker right away—for me, the main criterion for supporting a Presidential candidate is that he or she knows what the left is; anyone who thinks that a Republican president will be able to settle into the White House in 2013, put on the green eyeshades, and start balancing the [...] Continue reading Sarah Palin, Anyown, and the Constitutional Reformation Anyone familiar with TV crime shows knows how pervasive the figure of the serial killer has become in American popular culture, and how stereotyped—there is the imputed traumatic foundation of the killer’s addiction to violence, there are the idiosyncratic and extremely regular habits, the fixed idea of grievance, the ideal victim, and so on. [...] Continue reading The Rights of the Anyown 2: The Idioms of the Anyown “Redeem” is word with intertwined economic, political and religious meanings: it means to buy back or to pay off; it means to make up for; it means to buy or recover a slave or hostage; and it means to be delivered from one’s state of sin. It’s easy to see that it’s essentially the [...] Continue reading The Rights of the Anyown 1: A Politics of Redemption When we speak about the “arbitrariness” of the sign, someone usually hastens to add that what is meant by that is, of course, its conventionality. “Arbitrary” is the right word, though, for what is assumed: that the sounds we make in speaking the languages we speak could just as easily be any other sounds, [...] Continue reading Self-Evidency We all know about the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis (and if you don’t, you can google it)—it’s really Whorf, who was a student of Sapir’s and greatly expanded a couple of much more tentative suggestions from Sapir regarding the relations between language, thought and culture, who is responsible for the notion that grammatical structures influence thought [...] Continue reading A Sapir-Katz Hypothesis I’ve opened this post to discussion of Chronicles 399 & 400. http://www.anthropoetics.ucla.edu/views/vw399.htm A few months ago I saw a student wearing a t-shirt with the words “Us vs. Them” on solid background (I don’t remember the color of the shirt or the lettering). It seems to me an example of minimalist brilliance. It first of all must be read ironically, as criticizing all the ultimately “arbitrary” [...] Continue reading The Right of the Idiom, Yet Again Below is the paper I read today at the Yale Initiative for the Interdisciplinary Study of Anti-Semitism’s conference on Modernity.” It was a rather interesting conference, which I will perhaps feel moved to comment on at some point. For, now, though, I’d like to state the central conclusion I arrived at from the proceedings. [...] Continue reading Anti-Semitism Disciplinary spaces are both open and closed: when you just enter a disciplinary space, a space with a real focus, an evolved vocabulary, and means—both explicit and tacit—for rerouting the attentions of the others within the space; when you just enter such a a space you don’t really know what’s going on. Even more, [...] Continue reading The Right of the Idiom, 3 The elemental form of freedom is that of the discipline: a shared, inviolate and inexhaustible locus of attention. Sciences are disciplines, developing vocabularies and histories, and framing their objects so that another “layer” of understanding can always be sought. But so are congregations around some object of faith or communities of criticism around some [...] Continue reading The Right of the Idiom, 2 |
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