"My name is a Confederate monument, so I cross it out when I write it."

Writes Baynard Woods (in The Washington Post).

[I]n 1860, to take a single year, various Baynards believed that they owned 781 people, while the Woodses — from whom I’m directly descended — claimed possession of 23 more....

Since before Reconstruction, Black Americans have thrown off “slave names,” but I had never read or heard about White people addressing our enslaver names....

"Before hospitality was a business, it was more of a virtue — a barometer of civilization."

"And in light of the past year, and the extreme hospitality expected from workers during a global pandemic, it might be helpful to think of it that way again. Ancient ideas of hospitality were in place to protect pilgrims, travelers, immigrants and others who looked to strangers for food and shelter on the road. At the root of hospitality is the Latin word 'hostis,' wrote the philosopher Anne Dufourmantelle, which means guest, but also enemy.... Writing about the ethics and politics of hospitality, another philosopher, Jacques Derrida, claimed that 'unconditional hospitality is impossible.' It’s never been reasonable to expect infinite generosity, but that idea has still shaped the industry in countless ways.... The art critic John Berger often talked about hospitality as necessary to his understanding of art and culture, to the act of storytelling, to being human. Hospitality, to him, was a continuous and conscious choice — to listen, to be kind, to be open. If an exchange relied on someone’s exploitation? That wasn’t hospitality at all."

From "What Is Hospitality? The Current Answer Doesn’t Work/The host-guest relationship puts all the onus on the server, particularly during the pandemic, and points to the dysfunction at the heart of the business" (NYT).

FROM THE EMAIL: SGT Ted writes: 

"Surprising words from the country that gave us Derrida and Foucault :)"

Tweets Jordan Peterson, looking at "'Out-of-control woke leftism and cancel culture' from the U.S is a threat to FRANCE because it 'attacks' the nation's heritage and identity, French politicians and intellectuals say" (Daily Mail). 

This is a good nudge to think deeply about how the "woke leftism and cancel culture" has used and distorted the grand French philosophers beyond recognition. The French don't recognize what we've done to the philosophy we appropriated. Our lefties are doing Frenchface... badly.

From the Daily Mail article:

The collection of intellectuals arguing that France is being contaminated by the leftism of America was buoyed on last year after French President Emmanuel Macron appeared to side with them. In a speech in October on the 'Fight against Separatism', Macron warned against leaving 'the intellectual debate to others' as he cautioned of the 'certain social science theories entirely imported from the United States'....

Entirely!  

This month also saw the publication of a book by social scientists Stéphane Beaud and Gérard Noiriel in which they claimed that race is a 'bulldozer' that destroys other subjects....  Historian Pierre-André Taguieff argued... that the 'American-style black question' was a 'totally artificial importation' to France. He said that it was all driven by 'hatred of the West, as a white civilization'.... 

James Lindsay — author of "Cynical Theories: How Activist Scholarship Made Everything about Race, Gender, and Identity―and Why This Harms Everybody" — has a response at Peterson's tweet: "They have a complicated relationship with those thinkers, who were wrong, yes, but who were also bastardized by American Critical Theory frauds the French would certainly not respect in the least." 

writing : speech :: masturbation : copulation.

That last post, about Bridgegate, ends with some musing about how email and texting are preserving in writing far more of the kind of remarks that used to appear mostly only in speech. Researching a different topic, I stumbled upon a strangely relevant passage in a book (called, of all things, "When Men Are Women: Manhood Among The Gabra Nomads Of East Africa"):

[Jean-Jacques] Rousseau wrote about the difference between speech and writing, and following Plato, he regarded speech as more authentic, present, or real than writing. Writing, in his view, imitated speech but never quite accomplished the interpersonal communication possible with direct speech. Rousseau noticed, however, that he communicated his thoughts more clearly and accurately in writing than in speech: "If I were present" in a conversation, Rousseau wrote, "one would never know what I was worth," since shyness would inhibit his speech (quoted in Derrida 1974:141). It is Derrida who points out the paradox: writing, though a false imitation of speech, is nevertheless truer than speech. Rousseau, Derrida explains, "valorizes and disqualifies writing at the same time" (1974:141). For Rousseau, the relation between writing and speech is much the same as that between masturbation and copulation. Masturbation, like writing, is an imitation motivated by a lack — in this case the lack of a sexual partner. Masturbation is a faint imitation of copulation, but because it represents a "perfect" union between sexual partners, who are in fact one in the same person, masturbation trumps copulation as writing trumps speech. 

The different topic I was researching came up over in the comments to that "growing brain cells through sex" post. Would masturbation work on the brain cells or was it something about sex with a partner? I realized that my assumption that masturbation wouldn't work resonated with really old notions, like the idea that masturbation could make you insane. Researching that, I easily found the Wikipedia article "History of masturbation," and I was fascinated by the line:

The 18th-century philosopher Jean-Jacques Rousseau saw masturbation as equal to 'mental rape,' and discussed it in both Émile and Confessions. He argued that it was the corrupting influence of society that led to such unnatural acts as masturbation and that humans living a simple life amidst nature would never do such things.

So many strange ideas. So many potential connections. Think about them, write about them, talk about them here in writing. We might grow some brain cells.

"Heh, great stuff, Althouse. Cf. Derrida on Nietzsche's umbrella."

Says Yashu, in the comments on "The word 'umbrella' appears exactly once in Obama's 'Dreams From My Father.'" And that was after I'd read rhhardin, commenting on "Sigmund Freud on the meaning of the umbrella": "Derrida in Spurs on the umbrella that Nietzsche wrote he had forgotten."

I'm spurred to read "Spurs," but "Spurs" is not an ebook, so I'm off the hook. Still, here's some text visible in Google books. Derrida is playing with the the possible meaning(s) of "I have forgotten my umbrella," found (in quotation marks) in Nietzche's unpublished manuscripts. Excerpt:

The umbrella's symbolic figure is well-known, or supposedly so. Take, for example, the hermaphroditic spur of a phallus which is modestly enfolded in its veils, an organ which is at once aggressive and apotropaic, threatening and/or threatened. One doesn't just happen onto an unwonted object of this sort in a sewing-machine on a castration table. 

"Unwonted" is not a typo. Unlike "unwanted," it's not commonly heard/seen. It means: "not commonly heard, seen, practised." So says the OED, which tells us that Charlotte Brontë used "unwonted" in "Jane Eyre": "Difficulties in habituating myself to new rules and unwonted tasks." Are there umbrellas in "Jane Eyre"?

I jumped up, took my muff and umbrella, and hastened into the inn-passage: a man was standing by the open door, and in the lamp-lit street I dimly saw a one-horse conveyance....

The Freudian symbolism is too blatant to need pointing out. The umbrella, the man, and the horse. And the muff, the inn-passage, and the open door. That's more than dimly seen.

"Apotropaic" is also unusual. The OED says it's "Having or reputed to have the power of averting evil influence or ill luck" and gives this earliest example from the 1883 Encyclopedia Brittanica:

The sacrifice of the ‘October horse’ in the Campus Martius..had also a naturalistic and apotropaic character.

Wikipedia says the "October horse was an animal sacrifice to Mars carried out on October 15, coinciding with the end of the agricultural and military campaigning season." There were chariot races and "the right-hand horse of the winning team was transfixed by a spear, then sacrificed." So did the ancient Romans have umbrellas? Yes. They were used by women and "effeminate men." Used against the sun, of course. How much Latin do you need to see the "umbra" in "umbrella" and to know we're talking about shade.

We law folk know "umbra" from the "penumbras" in "specific guarantees in the Bill of Rights [that] have penumbras, formed by emanations from those guarantees that help give them life and substance," a very glaring phrase written by Justice William O. Douglas, trying to explain how in the lamp-lit street he dimly saw the right of privacy.

But it was really Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr. who got that word started in its U.S. law usage, the OED tells us: "The use of the penumbra metaphor in American jurisprudence appears to date from the late 19th cent. and is associated with Oliver Wendell Holmes (1841–1935), legal scholar and Associate Justice of the U.S. Supreme Court."

1873   O. W. Holmes in Amer. Law. Rev. 7 654   It is better to have a line drawn somewhere in the penumbra between darkness and light, than to remain in uncertainty.

I suspect no one will ever Heh-great-stuff-Althouse-Cf. me again. Here I am, writing expectantly, hoping for the circle to finally close, as it did for young Obama, crying over his father's grave, when he realized that the masculine needed to be leavened with femininity and that who he was, what he cared about, was no longer just a matter of intellect or obligation, no longer a construct of words, and then it started to rain and suddenly his brother Bernard was squatting beside him, sheltering him with a bent-up old umbrella. 

"Are you ready for me to read it?" Meade asks, and I say, "It needs one more thing, and I don't know what it is."

At the Magnolia Café...

... we're getting someplace.

That line makes me remember something from the comments on today's "golden age of blogging" post. I'd said:

"Moments trip gently along" for Obama, whose "feet hum over the dry walks," in his letter to his NY girlfriend Alex McNear.

Look out! It's David Maraniss's new book "Obama: The Story," which tapped as sources 2 girlfriends, Alex McNear and Genevieve Cook (who were presented in his memoir as a composite character). Vanity Fair has a big excerpt from the book, and I'm just going to home in on one thing, Obama's letter — you can't call it a love letter — to McNear, who was a co-editor of a literary magazine ("Feast") who was "interested in postmodern literary criticism, and her arguments brimmed with the deconstructionist ideas of Jacques Derrida, the French philosopher." After some talk about Ezra Pound and T.S. Eliot, he moved on to the subject of himself:

Moments trip gently along over here. Snow caps the bushes in unexpected ways, birds shoot and spin like balls of sound. My feet hum over the dry walks. A storm smoothes the sky, impounding the city lights, returning to us a dull yellow glow. 

I am now willing to believe Obama wrote his own memoir. This is that jejune "creative writing" style that I was talking about back in 2009, right here:



Let's continue with the epistle to McNear:

I run every other day at the small indoor track [at Columbia] which slants slightly upward like a plate; I stretch long and slow, twist and shake, the fatigue, the inertia finding home in different parts of the body. I check the time and growl—aargh!—and tumble onto the wheel. And bodies crowd and give off heat, some people are in front and you can hear the patter or plod of the steps behind. You look down to watch your feet, neat unified steps, and you throw back your arms and run after people, and run from them and with them, and sometimes someone will shadow your pace, step for step, and you can hear the person puffing, a different puff than yours, and on a good day they’ll come up alongside and thank you for a good run, for keeping a good pace, and you nod and keep going on your way, but you’re pretty pleased, and your stride gets lighter, the slumber slipping off behind you, into the wake of the past.

Oh, how I hope Obama the President is keeping a journal, describing the experience of being President with exactly this style and perspective. So internal and yet so superficial in the recording of sights and sounds.

You nod and keep going on your way, but you’re pretty pleased, and your stride gets lighter, the slumber slipping off behind you, into the wake of the past.

So we beat on, boats against the current, borne back ceaselessly into the past.

"What is government if words have no meaning?" — Jared Loughner's question to Gabrielle Giffords is " the stuff, not just of right-wing suspicion of government, or of radical left-wing suspicion of same, but of scores of Hollywood movies."

Writes Lee Siegel:

... from Taxi Driver and Three Days of the Condor, to Guilty by Suspicion and Mercury Rising, to The Sentinel and Syriana, and, well, I can't keep up. For at least half a century, our movies, from simple to complex, have been driven by the idea that official words have no meaning and that government is either criminal or a sham.

If you haven't seen the movies:

...you have probably read the standard texts of advanced American attitudes. Thus you have absorbed throughout college, like any number of Hollywood screenwriters and American tastemakers, the idea — from Nietzsche to Wittgenstein to Foucault to Derrida to Chomsky to Stanley Fish — that the words used by any type of official, political entity, like a government, are nonsense. "What is government if words have no meaning?" That could be the motto of The Daily Show.

If we're soaking in a culture of nihilism, why are most of us holding up so well?

"French society, and especially Parisian, is gluttonous. Every five years or so, it needs to stuff something new in its mouth."

"And so five years ago it was structuralism, and now it is something else. I practically don't dare use the word 'structuralist' anymore, since it has been so badly deformed. I am certainly not the father of structuralism."

Said Claude Lévi-Strauss, asked, in the 1980s, about post-structuralists like Foucault, Derrida, and Barthes.

But Mr. Lévi-Strauss’s version of structuralism may end up surviving post-structuralism... "Mythologiques" ... ends by suggesting that the logic of mythology is so powerful that myths almost have a life independent from the peoples who tell them. In his view, they speak through the medium of humanity and become, in turn, the tools with which humanity comes to terms with the world’s greatest mystery: the possibility of not being, the burden of mortality.

"Mortality" is the last word of the obituary written by Edward Rothstein for Claude Lévi-Strauss, who died last Friday, at the age of 100.

Derrida dead.

Jack Balkin has a tribute: "Although accused of undermining liberal and Enlightenment values he was actually deeply devoted to them."

UPDATE: I liked this quote, from the BBC report, taken from a film (could they name the film?) about Derrida:

At one point, wandering through Derrida's library, one of the filmmakers asks him: "Have you read all the books in here?"

"No," he replies impishly, "only four of them. But I read those very, very carefully."

That's a nice lesson about reading, comprehensible to anyone.

ANOTHER UPDATE: The NYT gives Derrida a long and very negative obituary, with plenty of attention to the Paul de Man scandal.