After finally taking a look at my blog stats and email after a rather demoralizing discussion this weekend, I find that the blog Faith and Theology linked to me today, rewarding me with around 150 hits. The post that they linked to? My remarks about my book last week. As Faith and Theology put it:
A devastatingly severe book review – by the book’s author!
I really cannot discern the intent or sense behind this brief link. Is it malicious? Merely vicarious? Gleeful? I don’t know. However, I will say that one of the dangers of being honest online is that people use it against you. This I will never understand. For every weakness, every insight into my psychology, every idiosyncrasy of my psychology I have revealed, every passion, there has been someone who has taken it up and used it to their own advantage. When I revealed that I had elected to use medication to treat my depression, certain “Lacanians” used this as an opportunity to attack me. When I discussed my hatred of things like homophobia, misogyny, racism, and those who use others as pure implements of their own jouissance or enjoyment like pedophiles destroying the body of young children and then killing them or Dahmer trying to turn others into zombies or Berdie Madoff destroying the lives of countless people in his own blind avarice, I was perversely taken to task for having a hatred of such people (what bizarre mind could find this problematic, I don’t know).
And now, apparently, I am taken to task for finding elements of my book problematic. For the record, it is not the scholarship of Difference and Givenness that I find lacking. On the scholarship end I think it is a terrific contribution to Deleuze studies that approaches his thought in a way that he had not previously been approached… As a philosopher attempting to make genuine arguments and to respond to the tradition from whence his thought had emerged. If I have a problem with the book, it is not with its scholarship or the rigor of its argument, but with the unconscious desire that animates it: A desire to police and regulate. Rousseau is, in part, great for his willingness to reveal himself in a raw and completely public way. So too with Freud, Nietzsche, Henry Miller, and so on. To make oneself public in the most intimate and shameful corners of one’s being, there is something great in that. There is something liberating in that. Not just for the person that does it, but for those who have been in that place as well and who can now see that others have been in that place as well. What is disgusting is the person that takes that uses that public presentation as a weapon for their own ends, poisoning public discourse, creating a sphere in which it must all be hidden behind a veil of affectation, and so on. I suppose those who abuse such presentations reveal more about themselves and the weakness of their own positions and self-regard than they reveal about the other that they abuse in this way.
August 11, 2009 at 3:30 am
I think the Faith and Theology link is entirely innocent. If anything, the implication seems to be that it is refreshing for someone to be so frank about their own work in public.
August 11, 2009 at 3:39 am
For every malicious person, you’re going to find two or three whose respect for you jumped up a notch because of your ability to be self-critical. I haven’t read your book, so I don’t know if Graham is right in saying that you’re too hard on yourself, but you should never regret either self-awareness or honesty.
I’m not so sure about people using your honesty to their “advantage”. Perhaps in Philosophy departments one can create advantage by taking personal whacks at other philosophers. But you certainly can’t build the kind of career on it that you can by coming up with and writing about original philosophical ideas.
August 11, 2009 at 3:43 am
Hi Levi. “Is it malicious? Merely vicarious? Gleeful?”
I’m very sorry if it came across as any of those things. To be honest, I found your self-critique to be absolutely exemplary. For me, it was a terrific example of how writing and thinking ought to be undertaken: not in order to produce some inflexible fixed position, but in order to move and to change. I guess I saw your post as an illustration of Foucault’s famous remarks, which I also posted recently.
One of the theologians whom I work on, Karl Barth, often had a similar attitude towards his own writing: he could also be “devastatingly severe” with his books. So when I called your self-review “devastatingly severe”, it was meant as a compliment.
August 11, 2009 at 11:03 am
Hi Levi,
I’ve been a reader for a while now – I just thought I’d point out a (probably quite obvious) connection to Nietzsche here, whose later preface to the Birth of Tragedy is a brilliant example of authorly self-criticism in philosophy. Not just of the work itself, but also of the underlying forces that led to it. I see your comments on your book as following in this admirable tradition.
(Also glad to see you affirm the book as basically being a ‘terrific contribution’. After all, if Nietzsche was very critical of his younger self, he still thought BoT was head and shoulders in front of most things ever written on the general topic…)
August 11, 2009 at 11:33 am
Ben already spoke on his own behalf, but I was going to say that I’m a bit familiar with the Faith and Theology blog, and it’s always sincere, never snarky. (We already know who the snarky people are in this neighborhood, and Ben isn’t one of them.)
That said, you’re still too hard on the book, Levi! It is much loved in the circles in which I travel.
August 11, 2009 at 1:56 pm
No worries, Ben. Many thanks for the comment and clarification. As I said, I’m feeling rather raw and battle weary after this weekend so I am, no doubt, a bit over sensitive at the moment.
August 11, 2009 at 2:54 pm
Hi Levi, I really like your blog and all that you explore here, where I’ve learned a lot, and I really admired you eloquent disclosure of the regrets you have about your book. I accidentally happened to witness the strife between you and Kvond regarding your post discussing your hate for hate mongerers, and I know that you took the post down after you posted it. Would you mind discussing your thoughts and doubts in doing so?
August 11, 2009 at 4:30 pm
Hi Amarilla,
Thanks. I deleted the post after I wrote it because it made a subtle dig at online trolls at the end. I didn’t think this was productive as it would just generate more conflict, so I thought it best simply to take it down. Turns out I was right but didn’t get it down in time.