I found a really cool audio clip of David Foster Wallace speaking about Kafka. I think it answers this question I asked in the first class in some weird, round-about way. I would also like to take a second to apologize for that question, which I felt like a complete dofus about immediately after asking it. Anyways, I also feel like DFW sums up why, as a North American undergrad student interested in studying/analyzing literature, I may have asked it.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SzEO0qFFzwI

As much as Michel-Rolph Trouillot, Silencing the Past advances ideas concerning history and historiography, I could not be more stirred by Trouillot’s meditations on present-day Haiti. One idea I find especially provocative in this work is taken up only briefly:

“With time, the silencing of the revolution was strengthened by the fate of Haiti itself. Ostracized for the better part of the nineteenth century, the country deteriorated both economically and politically – in part as a result of this ostracism. As Haiti declined, the reality of the revolution seemed increasingly distant, an improbability which took place in an awkward past and for which no one had a rational explanation.” (98)

Trouillot adds a short end-note after the second sentence, in which he simply references another one of his works Haiti: State Against Nation. The dynamics between past and present that Trouillot mentions makes what he is discussing more relevant and more tangible. Elsewhere, Trouillot discusses the way revolutions and dissent in the Caribbean during the 18th and 19th Century was viewed as a replication or result of European revolutions/revolutionary ideas. I found this intriguing on a personal level; I had done quite a bit of research on revolts in French colonies around the time of the French Revolution for a research paper last year, and always treated them as a subsidiary of the Revolution in Europe. Haiti is a state that the “developed world” has more or less left behind. I can’t help but think that if we were taught more about the revolution in Haiti (and as a Haitian revolution, not a European-influenced one) we would pay more attention to a country that is much closer to us then Europe. Of course, the idea of a white, middle class male “paying attention” to Haiti has its own bundles of problems, but I suppose those are things to be worked out in time.

All this to say, it is incredibly refreshing to read an author who is outside of the “Western” (I use that term reluctantly as a simple reference point, as Trouillot does spend some time discussing it) tradition. Silencing the Past has sparked a curiosity in me when it comes to Haitian and Caribbean history.

Oh I so rue the day I saw this text (oh the puns). I found this text extremely frustrating, not because it was hard to read, but because goddamn it everything Rousseau said felt so wrong. While reading the text the only thing I wanted to do was learn French, grab a time machine, visit Rousseau and tell him off.

What this text reminds me a lot of is Fight Club, with it’s espousing of anarcho-primitivism as the best stage of human life. I enjoyed both Rousseau and Fight Club when I was 14, but visiting it now a lot of the revolutionary, dissident charm has worn off. But like Tyler Durden, Rousseau is extremely charming and well-spoken, but also gratingly condescending.

For one, he’s so Euro-centric and surprisingly colonial. The way he refers to ‘savages’ and how they’re closer to the state of nature than we are, which completely undermines the civilizations of these people that have developed completely differently from our own. Inevitably, for Rousseau, civilization means ‘European civilization’, and he even says at one point that Europe has been “continuously and better civilized than the rest of the world” (p. 116). Even when he discusses the evolution of language, he paints its developmental trajectory as basically following that of English, of discovering all the clauses and tenses and cases which are not necessarily endemic to language.

Also, his ‘scientific reasoning’ in the text now seems hilariously backward and completely unfounded on any biological, anthropological, or historical research. The book is ridiculously conjectural and some of the claims it makes about human nature seem very logically underdeveloped and not as sound as Rousseau would have us believe (the number of times he uses ‘obviously’, ‘clearly’, and etc. is ridiculously smug). Also, why does he spend half the discourse establishing the state of humans in nature?

I just find that Roussea picked the least interesting section of the question ‘What is the origin of inequality among men and is it authorized by natural law?’ He focuses on the first half but all that he establishes is that, yes, people are unequal. Well, Rousseau what (I’m so sorry, my puns are getting worse)? Maybe it’s because of this text, but I feel like that is already established. But even of the state of nature Rousseau describes, a state he himself said that we may never have been in, it’s clearly one we can’t return to. So where is the constructive criticism? A Discourse on Inequality feels to me almost childish; it’s blatantly reactionary, but instead of providing anything useful, it just nostalgically pines for a lost ‘golden age’ that probably isn’t as great as Rousseau thinks it was, and completely ignores the benefits society has given us.

Oh I so rue the day I saw this text (oh the puns). I found this text extremely frustrating, not because it was hard to read, but because goddamn it everything Rousseau said felt so wrong. While reading the text the only thing I wanted to do was learn French, grab a time machine, visit Rousseau and tell him off.

What this text reminds me a lot of is Fight Club, with it’s espousing of anarcho-primitivism as the best stage of human life. I enjoyed both Rousseau and Fight Club when I was 14, but visiting it now a lot of the revolutionary, dissident charm has worn off. But like Tyler Durden, Rousseau is extremely charming and well-spoken, but also gratingly condescending.

For one, he’s so Euro-centric and surprisingly colonial. The way he refers to ‘savages’ and how they’re closer to the state of nature than we are, which completely undermines the civilizations of these people that have developed completely differently from our own. Inevitably, for Rousseau, civilization means ‘European civilization’, and he even says at one point that Europe has been “continuously and better civilized than the rest of the world” (p. 116). Even when he discusses the evolution of language, he paints its developmental trajectory as basically following that of English, of discovering all the clauses and tenses and cases which are not necessarily endemic to language.

Also, his ‘scientific reasoning’ in the text now seems hilariously backward and completely unfounded on any biological, anthropological, or historical research. The book is ridiculously conjectural and some of the claims it makes about human nature seem very logically underdeveloped and not as sound as Rousseau would have us believe (the number of times he uses ‘obviously’, ‘clearly’, and etc. is ridiculously smug). Also, why does he spend half the discourse establishing the state of humans in nature?

I just find that Roussea picked the least interesting section of the question ‘What is the origin of inequality among men and is it authorized by natural law?’ He focuses on the first half but all that he establishes is that, yes, people are unequal. Well, Rousseau what (I’m so sorry, my puns are getting worse)? Maybe it’s because of this text, but I feel like that is already established. But even of the state of nature Rousseau describes, a state he himself said that we may never have been in, it’s clearly one we can’t return to. So where is the constructive criticism? A Discourse on Inequality feels to me almost childish; it’s blatantly reactionary, but instead of providing anything useful, it just nostalgically pines for a lost ‘golden age’ that probably isn’t as great as Rousseau thinks it was, and completely ignores the benefits society has given us.