File spoon-archives/deleuze-guattari.archive/deleuze-guattari_1998/deleuze-guattari.9806, message 91


Date: Sun, 14 Jun 1998 20:46:09 -0700 (PDT)
From: Alexander Glage <glage-AT-yahoo.com>
Subject: Re: Bashing academia







Yeah, I've got to agree with Matthew.  Richard's remarks seemed a
little too resentful, and certainly uncalled-for.  They seemed to
serve no purpose but to make students feel bad about themselves
(hardly a joyful task).  Still, on almost every list I've participated
in, I've seen this view of academic life expressed at least once--that
is, that the university is for the most part an oppressive
institution, little more than a means for individuals to become
indoctrinated or otherwise to have their spirits crushed, etc.  I
don't see my own experience at all reflected in this view.  I would
guess that many on this list would also have a hard time seeing
themselves or their peers as mere "nutcases" and "frowning thinkers"
(and indeed, the use of the "nutcase" as the figure of the student
must raise some Foucauldian eyebrows...).  At the very least, I think
it would not be implausible to say that, had it not been for the
university, many of us would never have had the joy of stumbling upon
Deleuze, or upon philosophy more generally...

Still, to be fair, I think we all can understand where Richard is
coming from: there is always a danger in committing one's life to
scholarship, to spending so much time reading and writing, to existing
in one's thoughts.  The temptation to withdraw from the world, to
absorb oneself in those "silent regions of thought which has come to
itself and communes only with itself" (Hegel), is one toward which we
must always remain somewhat ambivalent, even suspicious.  Of course,
these are lessons that must be learned again and again, *through*
philosophy as well as literature, through dialogue and memory, through
life.
     George Eliot said it as well as anyone:

"It is an uneasy lot at the best, to be what we call highly taught and
yet not to enjoy: to be present at this great spectacle of life and
never to be liberated from a small, hungry, shivering self--never to
be fully possessed by the glory we behold, never to have our
consciousness rapturously transformed into the vividness of a thought,
the ardor of a passion, the energy of an action, but always to be
scholarly and uninspired, ambitious and timid, scrupulous and
dimsighted....Doubtless some ancient Greek has observed that behind
the big mask and the speaking-trumpet, there must always be our poor
little eyes peeping as usual, and our timorous lips more or less under
anxious control."  (*Middlemarch*)

I confess I like Eliot's warning much better than Richard's.

Alexander Glage
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