joculum

One of the side effects of posting from a wi-fi coffeehouse-+-bookshop (and I just realized that substituting the currently fashionable plus sign for the ampersand, or as here for the unintended double-entendre of "cum," results in a plus sign flanked by minus signs. Hm.)...

...anyway, I have just now looked into Alain Badiou's Handbook of Inaesthetics on the shelf a few feet away because Badiou is one of those guys whom we gotta know or else not be with-it and au courant and all that good stuff. And this book was translated in 2005 though some of the essays are a few years older. And...

And Badiou is quarreling snidely with the right guy, viz. Czeslaw Milosz, and deploying Pessoa (excellent choice) and later on explicating Mallarmé in terms of the contrast with Baudelaire and explaining the conceptual confusions of calling poems hermetic or self-enclosed, and obviously Badiou is going off in directions that I have to pursue because they are opinions that overlap with topics with which I deal and even writers with which I deal. He too is trying to reshape topics for the twenty-first century.

And yet, as with David Edwards' Artscience discussed in an earlier post, I have the feeling to which I refer in another context in the previous post, that Badiou has got hold of the right object and is looking at it the wrong way. And his disciples can be relied on to remodel the whole damn apparatus to make the part fit and the machine work.

But this sort of observation is just meaningless gassing until one has actually read the book closely, and as utopyr reminds me, I am more usually referring to books I "must get around to reading" than to books I have actually read.

So I hope to return to why I find those three travel narratives so singularly illuminating when they are read closely in the right context. (I keep discovering new strategies and new piece of useful theory, embedded explicitly by the author in a story that is seemingly about something else.)

But to do that means that I put the Badiou back on the bookshelf and go do my own thing, just as Walter Benjamin kept on explicating the conceptual implications of cast-off capitalist detritus, instead of the unattempted project of reading and creatively refuting Carl Jung, in those last years before the catastrophe of World War II.

Benjamin gave us his theses on the philosophy of history as a result, and the great unfinished edifice (I first typed "artifice"....) of The Arcades Project. I doubt that the joculum blog will leave anything nearly as consequential. Eh bien, alors, c'est la vie, c'est la guerre. La vie en rose. Le après-midi d'un philosophe, peut-etre. (Newbies may need to know I often make fun of my complete monolingual failure to master any of the dozen languages I have tried to learn over the course of a lifetime. As my failure to remember the third declension neuter in Latin will serve as shorthand. I engaged in this adolescent tomfoolery because to end at "nearly as consequential" gave this post a sense of literary finality that is against the spirit of joculum. "Don't be deceived. What is this?")

I don't know how to put the accent mark over the "e" in "etre."