Fahrenheit 451 meme

John has pledged to do my Badiou meme if I will do the Fahrenheit 451 meme that was circulating a month ago. Indeed, it was a month ago that John dared me to do it: "why have a blog if you can't do these charmingly vulgar things?"

1. You're stuck inside Fahrenheit 451, which book do you want to be?

(John’s clarification: "this refers to the end of the book where people have to constantly speak their favorite books in order to preserve the texts since they are gone or endangered.")

Since I’m not bringing the Critique of Pure Reason with me to the desert island, I guess that’s what I’d choose to be. It’s always seemed to me that one could rewrite it simply by reflecting carefully on one’s experience in the world.

In my old age I would hope to become the Critique of Judgment.

Mark at Charlotte Street has written well about two ways of growing old as a thinker: riding comfortably along the intellectual tracks one laid in one’s better days vs. continuing to struggle to wrest from the phenomena forms of expression adequate to them.

In the Critique of Judgment, Kant shows us (ahem) a third way to get old: develop a theoretical vocabulary so architectonically hyperdeveloped that its voice overpowers your own, so overly expressive that everything you had previously attempted to exclude—the human, the local, the communal, the imaginative—returns as the true and beautifully incoherent meaning of your project. What seemed like a system ends up a poem of everything there is.

2. Have you ever had a crush on a fictional character?

No. But I have fled the embrace of Walt Whitman, a fictional character who seemed to have a crush on me.

3. The last book you bought is:

I guess I should have waited to do this meme until I bought a cooler book, but it was Philosophy in a Time of Terror, in which Giovanna Borradori, the famous interviewer of philosophers, interviews Habermas and Derrida in the months after 9/11.

I intend to write a little summary of the Habermas interview, which I found illuminating.

I’m not usually one to put Derrida down—I love "Ulysses Gramophone" like I love Ulysses—but the only insight I took away from the interview is that his response to 9/11—that we must take up again the "language of English empiricism"—is somehow parallel to Hitchens'.

4. The last book you read:

The last book I read that I hadn’t already read was A Study in Scarlet.

Sadly, the best line in the book is one you already know:

There’s the scarlet thread of murder running through the colourless skein of life, and our duty is to unravel it, and isolate it, and expose every inch of it.

(Could this have come from Derrida? Doesn’t he somewhere speak of basting—a sort of guiding stitch that one uses to hold together provisionally the cloth one wishes to sew—as another supposed non-concept that does the same sort of thing as gram or supplement or trace? No, it’s from Kant: the logical forms of judgment are the "guiding thread" that leads us to the pure concepts of the understanding.)

5. What are you currently reading?

The Europeans, by Henry James. My curiosity was piqued by Leo Bersani’s suggestion that "Eugenia’s lack of a self may be the most morally interesting thing about her."

6. Five books you would take to a deserted island.

Plato was popular with many bloggers, but I must go instead with Aristotle. I trust Aristotle more than I do Plato to reward careful and imaginative reading, and he might help to identify some of the local life. (I don’t know if you’ve ever looked at The History of Animals or Parts of Animals, but their catalogs of animal life are pretty exhaustive.)

Besides, Plato’s doctrine of recollection is more plausibly and enjoyably articulated by Proust. If I ever despair of being a political animal cut loose from the polis, I will visit with my old friends Saint-Loup, Bloch, Bergotte, Oriane, Marie & Céleste, Charlus, and—most of all—Swann.

I greatly enjoyed Jonathan Franzen’s collection of essays How to Be Alone, but it is Wallace Stevens who can truly claim to be the author of such a manual:

If there must be a god in the house, let him be one/That will not hear us when we speak: a coolness,/A vermillioned nothingness, any stick of the mass/Of which we are too distantly a part.

I’ve never made time to read The Magic Mountain, which I’ve probably started a dozen times, but for my yet-unread gamble I select instead Bleak House.

I had intended to bring an OED, but I’m down to my last pick, and it must be Moby-Dick, the text which, more than any other I’ve read, allows reading to be what it is. I joked about Kant above, but it’s Melville I’d really want to be.

7. Who are you going to pass this stick to (3 persons) and why?

I pass it to three of my non-blogging readers: Chris, Hilary, and Luke.