Metaphysics Aren't Gentlemen

The brief presentation I gave in Tunis this week for the Fulbright conference left the audience, I am afraid to say, rather traumatized. It was not an unhopeful sign.

I very briefly outlined my reading of social distance in Bataille—which naturally required a discussion of feces and Freud and difference's desiring-production—and the structuring role it plays in my present 'empirical' consideration. By the time I mentioned 'hierarchy of filth' in a question-and-answer exchange, gasps and giggles were elicited.

I was later approached by a number of graduate students—who are themselves in the throes of navigating Theory's use-value in both their own research and in social science on the whole— interested in the audacity of (1) presenting a theory of subjection and diachronic humanization purportedly 'over-the-heads' of audience-members and (2) a methodology hostile to verifiability pretensions. The response I gave to the first concern is that no one deserves to be subjected to a writing or talking down. The discussion addressing the second concern ultimately arrived at a point where the conversation stressed the importance of surpassing Theory's overwrittenness.

'Bad Theory' abounds, especially in the banal and tired overtures to Foucault and Said (both of whom are, in multiple senses, overwritten at this point) passing for engagement with post-structuralism so often. The conclusion drawn from the post-presentation conversations was that blank stares in an audience of would-be social scientists is indeed a necessary sign.