How much money does a writer need? In New York, a young writer can get by on $25,000, give or take $5,000, depending on thriftiness. A slightly older younger writer—a 30-year-old—will need another $10,000 to keep up appearances. But that's New York. There are parts of this country where a person can live on twelve or thirteen thousand a year—figures so small they can be written out. Of course it depends. Read More

Among children born in America in the late 1980s, my classmates at the San Francisco Day School must have been the happiest, healthiest, most unthinkingest cluster of them all. Our parents raised us to give thoughtful Bar Mitzvah gifts, walk or jog daily, recognize Kwanzaa. If the community was not quite anti-intellectual, it was certainly not a culture of quiet indoor pursuits. The weather was too nice, for one thing. And our parents, who hadn't attended Ivy League schools and didn't read literature, had yet done well enough to afford beach houses up the coast and a rainbow flock of Polar Fleeces. Among us, their offspring, there was no such thing as academic rivalry. We worked together if we worked at all.

I like to tell my students that I wouldn't have moved to Turkey if Orhan Pamuk hadn't made me admire it from afar. I say this partly because it's true, but mostly because it shocks them, and that seems useful for my purposes. Their mouths drop open in disbelief, and they sit slackjawed while I tell them how The Black Book sold me on their city. With misty pictures of decaying opulence and narrow alleyways dotted with minarets, it made the word Bosporus name a strait that I needed to see. The scruffy, Diesel-clad Turks that I teach throw up their hands. Their ongoing perplexity at my decision to leave a good job in the US to teach at their Turkish university grows into something more. How could a novel by Orhan Pamuk make me think this was a good idea? Read More

December 13, 2006

Bruce Robbins replies to Walter Benn Michaels [see Michaels's letter below]:

The legacy of racism, Walter Benn Michaels concedes, has produced disproportionate poverty among blacks in America. But doing something to compensate for that legacy would do nothing whatsoever to aid the struggle for economic equality. "We'd just have more poor whites and Asians."

In early March, French philosopher Alain Badiou came to New York to promote the first English translation of his 1988 pillar work, l'Être et l'Événement, or Being and Event. I caught him at Labyrinth Books in Morningside Heights, where he was to be interviewed by the New School's Simon Critchley—a man as hip as philosophers come, whom I once saw sporting leather pants.

In school I'd never read Badiou, but I'd had a vague idea that he was the rarest of his kind: an optimist. A believer, even, in a future for philosophy. This was important, because when I left college there seemed little to look forward to. The analytic-continental divide, once an ideological schism, had turned into a passive-aggressive gang war. Before graduation one of my favorite professors rounded up the senior philosophy majors to talk about grad school. There's funding, she said—lots of funding, and not enough women! Summers off! France! It sounded like a timeshare pitch. None of us, to my knowledge, ended up in a philosophy department. Read More

Franco Moretti's Graphs, Maps, Trees:
Abstract Models for a Literary History

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A specter is haunting the academy—the specter of close reading. But don't worry: as the New York Public Library had the Ghostbusters, the academy has Franco Moretti.

Of course, Moretti is not the first or the only critic to object to close reading. For a good fifteen years, close reading has had a place in the ever-expanding group of things that might be bad for you; experts have shown that close reading will cause you to ignore history, reinforce cultural hegemonies, and "avoid commitment."

But Moretti's objections are different. Moretti is a man of the world, and men of the world do not reproach you for trying to avoid commitment. Instead, he finds close reading to be close-minded, superstitious, a fundamentally "theological exercise—very solemn treatment of very few texts taken very seriously." The problem with the canon, by extension, is not that it is sexist, racist, or classist, but that it is so-provincial. Read More

While on my way to Rome, I stopped off in Oxford for several weeks at my mother-in-law's. If you set out to imagine a don's house, it would look a lot like hers. Three stories packed with books, from the orderly shelves of the study where she keeps those closest to her heart and work to the half-sorted heaps and two-deep shelves of the landings where several lifetimes of reading are stored: hers, her ex-husband's, her children's. As I went up and down the stairs I'd often stop for a browse, wondering whether to take the Life of Johnson down to breakfast or an undiscovered author up to bed (Rose Macaulay, Barbara Pym, a whole canon of British fiction from every phase of postwar life). It was in this way, on an earlier visit, that I first began to love Iris Murdoch. This time I was caught by a name more familiar to Americans: Edmund Wilson. His Europe without Baedeker was propped next to some other old Hogarth Press editions, a fine Henry Green with curious art deco cover, some Virginia Woolf. Wilson, Edmund is a strange name to find in a house more accustomed to Wilson, Angus and Wilson, A.N., but there he was. Read More

Was theory a gigantic hoax? On the contrary. It was the only salvation, for a twenty year period, from two colossal abdications by American thinkers and writers. From about 1975 to 1995, through a historical accident, a lot of American thinking and mental living got done by people who were French, and by young Americans who followed the French.

The two grand abdications: one occurred in academic philosophy departments, the other in American fiction. In philosophy, from the 1930s on, a revolutionary group had been fighting inside universities to overcome the "tradition." This insurgency, at first called "logical positivism" or "logical empiricism," then simply "analytic philosophy," was the best thing going. The original idea was that logical analysis of language would show which philosophical problems might be solved, and which eradicated because they were not phraseable in clear, logical language. That meant wiping out most of what Hegel had left us, and Europe still understood, as philosophy—including history, being, death, recognition, love. Still brand new in the 1930s (Carnap, Russell, Ayer) when trying to develop its ideal logical language, it had only just become institutional in the analytic pragmatism of the 1950s and 1960s (Quine), in time to be cranked up again in the 1970 (Kripke), saved from termination by the reintroduction of naive assumptions rejected at the start. Read More

Jacques Derrida died last weekend. Polite French journalese will refer to "sa disparition," his disappearance. Now, if I were a "deconstructionist," this would be the moment to reflect on the words disappearance and appearance. We only say someone has disappeared, we do not speak of his life as an appearance, but yet this is what is implied by someone's disappearance. He was, at one point, present, here, appearing, now he has disappeared. But everyday French language only has the negative without the positive. There is not first, in the order of things, something called appearance and then something called disappearance which happens later. There is always the trace of disappearance inside of every appearance, absence within presence.