About

But the moment, maybe, is coming for us to ask, do we need, really, this hermeneutics of the self? Maybe the problem of the self is not to discover what it is in its positivity, maybe the problem is not to discover a positive self or the positive foundation of the self. Maybe our problem is now to discover that the self is nothing else than the historical correlation of the technology built in our history.

-Foucault, “About the Beginnings of the Hermeneutics of the Self”

Many years have passed since that night. The wall of the staircase, up which I had watched the light of his candle gradually climb, was long ago demolished. And in myself, too, may things have perished which, I imagined, would last for ever, and new structures have arisen, giving birth to new sorrows and new joys which in those days I could not have foreseen, just as now the old are difficult of comprehension.

Proust, A.L.R.T.P. Swann’s Way.

Updating this about page in light of the now almost two years that I’ve had this blog, I have a little bit more perspective with which to describe the goings on detailed here.

These posts are mostly personal and mostly artifacts of specific points in my intellectual and literary development. They reflect, to a greater or lesser extent, my attempts to wrestle with questions of truth, morality, politics and responsibility – sometimes whimsically, sometimes more seriously. I don’t maintain that all or even necessarily any of them represent persistent qualities or beliefs in my life, although I appreciate their ability to act as a bulkhead against my own attempts to interpret my intellectual development linearly – although not on this blog, I was shocked to find something I had written from 2005 arguing against affirmative action, because at the time I found it, I was convinced that I had always felt the way I do now. If anything, they perhaps hamper later attempts to recast these years in either the halcyon tones of the past or as pre-figuring antecedents of my intellectual present. In short, this blog should remind me that I was not always happy, that I did not always believe what I do now, and that only rarely did I ever think that it would “all work itself out.”

If these writings betray a certain angst, then they’re doing something right.  I accept and recognize the criticism that these entries are mostly narcissistic; this is both an expression of my personality and the sort of investigations I feel most qualified to carry out.