Sunday 1 October 2017

Fail Again, Fail Better with Costica Braditan


Costica Bradatan, those tripping dactyls,has written another hymn to failure in the Los Angeles Review of Books. It’s a special subject of his to which one as a person of no importance is liable to retort ‘Bah humbug’. Read it:
failing
In the course of it he hands out what in Carmelite monasteries were called disciplines, short whips of knotted cords, to keep down brother ass. You are too comfortable, too cosy with your precious confraternities and conferences at which the latest daft ‘ism’ is listened to with respectful nods.

As long as we are part of the group, and play by its rules, we can expect to survive. In exchange, we surrender some of our freedom, our individualism and autonomy, but that is more often than not a good deal. Atavistic as it may be — we can survive alone, now — we still find nothing worse than to be left out, all alone, the one in the corner no one talks to. 

And who is in a corner:

If she now surrenders to the power of the group, the philosopher fails twice. First, she fails because in the eyes of the others she is already a failure — a weakling, an outcast. Then she fails because she doesn’t know how to be a failure: how to use the outsider’s privileged position for philosophical purposes. For, philosophically, to be a failure is a very important thing to be — almost a blessing. Far from being crushed by her social failure, the philosopher could put it to excellent use: to gain insight into the workings of the mind, into the affairs of the human society, the abyss of the human soul. Provided that she knows how to exploit it, the philosopher’s social failure could make her a richer, more penetrating and original thinker.

Is this Jacqueline Horner in the corner? Not at all. It is just any philosopher whatever, one of that anonymous multitude. ‘She’ has replaced ‘he’ as the unmarked pronoun. I have written about this in the past:
golden cobra
and:
no intuitions

Bradatan as an editor of LARB has chosen this otiose hieratic usage. Women who read philosophical papers and essays are in the park already and do not need patronising encouragement. It’s like Huddon of Huddon & Duddon coming downstairs and then going upstairs again to bring down his boots.

He deplores networking but a peek at his C.V. shows that he puts himself about with an international reach. Five editorial appointments, lecturing in Texas and Brisbane, a grant evaluator in the Czech Republic, Cyprus and in Italy. ‘Ah yes’, he might reply, ‘the more I succeed the more I fail, I am rising without a trace’


2 comments:

john doyle said...

"The American Philosophical Association, for example, has more than 9,000 active members, roughly the same size as the entire Army of Ireland."

I'm hoping they'll stage this battle on Game of Thrones.

ombhurbhuva said...

The Irish Army has a Categorical Imperative to protect this country from the ravages of undistributed middles.