The shock of a blinking white cursor renews itself when one steps away form daily writing practice. Thinking of it as a practice, as a draft and open space for exploration rather than the academic drive to “produce” alleviates some of the pressure; yet, there still remains the internal overachiever neurosis to form gorgeous sentences, posts and ideas. Interestingly, although unsurprisingly, writing practice has a material spatial dimension that I am, as I write this, trying to take in new directions.
    My practice of late, whether it be for this blog or other work, is to write after my evening mediation, while sitting on a soft couch, my laptop’s screen illuminating the otherwise dimly lit room. The relaxed surroundings are meant to offset the intensity of formulating and articulating the thin strand of clarity dangling between the abstractions of a critical apparatus and specific object it is reading and being read by. However, these cozy conditions aren’t quite conducive to paper writing; my couch will not easily accommodate all the books that simultaneously need to be available, nor will the dim lighting aid in the already troublesome process of decoding. That is to say, the material conditions will not allow for thought beyond the vignettes produced in this virtual space. So, in an effort to transition to conditions more in line with actual academic production, I have placed myself in my ‘study’ (which is also my tv/ movie space, my dinning room and my library) and am writing this on my desktop. However, because this is a process rather than a leap, I have kept the dim lighting. What does your writing space look like?


    A few weeks ago, I was out to lunch with Kristine and began to tell her a joke from Family Guy. As usual, I was laughing and squirming even before I finished the story; despite her distaste for the show, she always laughs only because, I think, my own enthusiasm/ delivery is comical.

“You become a 12 year old when you talk about that show” she says.

Ah-hah. Yes, I do! I become giddy, enjoying (and trying to transmit) a space of raw joy that is self-perpetuating like nothing else I’ve experienced, save depression.  However, what struck me as amazing a few days later when we met for our Kant reading group, was that Kant took me to that same space, albeit via an entirely different route. Reading a few Foucault articles today took me there again and prompted this post. Although I don’t have the energy to use Kant to critique my own experience of joy in two drastically different objects, let me offer a strange example and some commentary.

“Even from a distance, one experiences Foucault’s death at fifty-seven as an event whose untimeliness affirms the violence and mercilessness of time –– the power of facticity, which, without sense and without triumph, prevails over the painstakingly constructed meaning of each human life.” –Habermas on Foucault

    Despite the rather morbid content of the quote, the beauty of its formal construction, the language and the abstract awareness it evokes all strike me as gorgeous. The abstraction of time, death and the ultimate negation of self-creation strike me as an amazing sequence that inverts its very content. That is, despite its seeming moroseness and, at the level of content, the reduction of all endeavors to ephemeral absurdities, the craftsmanship of the sentence itself affirms human projects, of lives devoted to the perfection of self-creation. Indeed, it is this latter space that functions as a performative affirmation, a torch of violence against the inevitable and a defiance of the cognizable abstractions we know will overwhelm us. In sum, fuck off death! Foucault lives!