Post-aggressive

A tired, sleepy weekend on the heels of an exhausting week. Friday night, I had dinner with Jeehyun, followed by a terrible movie at my place. Saturday: the gym with Mike, Cafe Sud with Fran, and the Huong Vuong supermarket and then Chapterhouse with Sara. By 7:30, I had fallen asleep on the couch and was out for the next 11 hours.



Today should finally be a day of much reading - and much reading that seems to be merging. This morning, I find this in Marwick: "In April 1966 the publisher Gallimard simply printed 3,500 copies of Les Mots et les choses. Within a week they sold out. Regular reprintings followed. 'Foucault commes des petits pains' was the heading to a Nouvel Observateur article devoted to the best-sellers of the summer of 1966. It was, naturally, the apocalyptic view of the individual human being about to disappear as a focal point of knowledge which seized the attention of the press . . ." Of course it was - and I'm reminded of the chapter I just finished on Thomas Muntzer in Cohn's In Pursuit of the Millennium. In something like the German peasant revolt recounted there, however, the eschatological impulse to destruction is not wedded to a post-apocalyptic social rebirth. The end is simply the end. In Foucault, however, and all the French, Marxisant theorists of the '60s (as Marwick notes - though I believe he's wrong regarding Derrida), the end is always the beginning.

As to that bit in my last blog about my "aggressive" academic tone, I've decided - with the help of Sara and Jeehyun - that, though that is a somewhat unconscious tendency of mine, it can also - as in the case of the class in question - serve as a defensive posture against excessive infantilization. The class involves: 10 or so undergraduates, a sign-in sheet, weekly postings to the Blackboard server, a midterm examination, and - beginning with the last class - the practice of splitting us into groups of four (complete with group spokespersons) so as to secure maximum participation. All of these are unheard of (and for good reason!) in graduate classes. Given the options of either a friendly, invested performance of engagement or a critical and predominantly written antagonism, the latter at least appears more honest. Of course, there might be other options too, but with the exception of silence they've yet to occur to me.