Agora April 2017

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AGORA vol. 3

TABLE OF CONTENTS THE JUSTICE OF PROTEST AGAINST HATE Jack Schreuer

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DEMAGOGUERY AND THE PURSUIT OF MODERATION Matthew Marani

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CRIPPLED ANALYSIS The Collision of Truths Walker Gawande

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KASPAR The Violence of Words Jack Schreuer

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ON TRANSLATION A Preface to Listenning to Our Defeats by Laurent Gaudé John David Crosby

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WHY PHILOSOPHY? A View From the Absurd Max Lowe

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SPECIAL THANKS TO Skidmore Print Services Publius Barbarah McDonough

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THE JUSTICE OF PROTEST AGAINST HATE

by Jack Schreuer The rise of Donald Trump has created an atmosphere in which people feel liberated to hate. What was once unacceptable because it didn’t treat all people as equals, has now been legitimized by the election of a fellow bigot. The mantel of discrimination has been taken up by the Alt-right, a clique of neo-fascists, fueled by internet rage and the fear of racial and gender equality. As all developing ideologies do, these trolls have found a base to support their ideas and incubate hate: Breitbart News.

The intellectual anchor of the Trump’s propaganda machine is the White House’s resident Jabba the Hut, Steve Bannon. This slug-like being has already coated an already despicable White House with a slimy layer of racism, sexism, and just about every other discriminatory -ism, further emboldening the spread of the Alt-Right.

This cultural release of hate has raised a question I never imagined would need to be asked: “Do we let racists spread hate on campus and demean our fellow students?” This question has a practical incarnation, as a debate rages on whether students have the right to protest when such a discriminatory speaker arrives on campus. These apostles of the Alt-Right are commonly Bannon protégées coming directly from Breitbart. The flashpoint for the debate over the right to protest hate speech has centered around an incident that occurred at UC Berkeley when a protest led to the cancelling of Milo Yiannopoulos, a former senior editor at Brietbart News’, speech.

In his presentation, Yiannopoulos had planned to reveal sensitive information about undocumented immigrants on campus.

UC Berkley’s Office of Students Affairs released this statement, “We are deeply concerned for all students’ safety and ability to pursue their education here at Cal beyond Milo’s speech…

Milo’s event may be used to target individuals, either in the audience or by using their personal information in a way that causes them to become human targets to serve a political agenda.”1 This was further coroborated by George Ciccariello-Maher, a professor at Drexel University.

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1 http://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/americas/uc-berkely-protests-milo-yiannopoulos-publicly-name-undocumented-students-cancelled-talk-illegals-a7561321.html

In an era dominated by ICE raids and forced deportations, the revealing of this information would have legitimately endangered the safely and wellbeing of these individuals. When speech hurts others, it stops being free and becomes violence.

Clearly, this speech would have threatened the very fabric of someone’s life: They could have been forcefully ripped away from all that they know. What we are saying when we defend Yiannopoulos is that he, someone from the highest echelon of privilege, has the right to endanger the lives of those with less privilege; it is to say that a white person’s right speech outweighs an immigrant’s right to life; it is to argue in favor of the perpetuation of the right of the oppressor to oppress over the right to be free from oppression.

To protest is to reject this recreation of the systems of persecution, to say that we stand in solidarity with those most vulnerable, who not only face violence from the state but also from others who have been inspired by this hate. We cannot discuss free speech in a vacuum. We must consider the effects it will have on people in the real world.

In the early 20th century, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled that it is illegal to yell “fire” in a crowded theater, because that is dangerous speech. But Yiannopoulos’ speech is different: It is not a generally reckless act, but a targeted one, an attack of verbal terror. It only endangers those least empowered to fight back. It is an insidious form of dangerous speech, because it slips under the radar for most of us who will never experience or even notice the violence it creates. This is a system of targeted violence and anyone that claims otherwise must have plugged their ears with the wax of ignorance and passed over every video of an innocent person of color being shot by the cops. This system is not violent towards Yiannopoulos or me for that matter, or many white Americans who wonder why Black Lives Matter is making such a big deal out of nothing, for we are safeguard by privilege. We do not live under daily oppression, so when someone claims their community is being violently persecuted, we must listen to them and not ask whether it is worth it to fight but ask how to help in their struggle.

Some have denounced the protests because they are violent, but what does a broken window mean in regards to well-being of a person. They cite $100,000 of damage against things2, but this 2 http://www.cnn.com/2017/02/01/us/milo-yiannopoulos-berkeley/

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is incomparable to violence against people. I integrally reject a society that claims any amount of money, especially such a relatively small sum for fixing a few windows, is more important than a person’s life. Only in a culture rooted in white supremacy could the life of an immigrant, people who are now commonly referred to as illegal or sub-human, be sacrificed for the sake of material goods. Yes, there was violence and yes, I wish it was unnecessary; but we must always be willing to sacrifice things for people. Even more so, we must be willing to trade things for the rejection of the systems of oppression that not only allows for but enact the persecution of minorities. Every ICE raid is proof that love has not trumped hate. So we must ask ourselves whether will we sit back like our ancestors and allow the perpetuation of centuries of oppression or do everything in our power, even if that means sacrificing our personal morality, to end this violent system of inequality that so many have benefited from.

Others condemn not just the violence but the events of “mob justice” ––the extra-legal attempt of the people to combat injustice. But, we now live in a time when the state is vehicle of injustice. What is supposed to defend people from hate has becomes hate’s strongest advocate. If the state has shirked the mantel of justice, then we must pick it up. I will take a fickle form of justice over a society that lets violent persecution go unchecked. In this era, the “mob”, also known as the people, should come together and act as the safe guard of the oppressed.

This may lead to a few broken windows, but that is better than broken lives. I do not want justice by the mob, of course; I dream of a state that does not violently evict native peoples who just want something as basic as water, and doesn’t funnel minority youth into a complex of for-profit prisons with a discriminatory “justice system.” But we cannot stand by and let injustice run rampant. We must fight not only to prevent violence against the most oppressed but for an America that for the first time might be just.

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DEMAGOGUERY AND THE PURSUIT OF MODERATION

by Matthew Marani Contemporary American politics has taken the form of a zero-sum game, with two opposing factions clashing over the interpretation of the past and competing visions of the future.

Absent from the rhetoric of both the right and left is a willingness to compromise. Dogmatism reigns supreme as a divided nation toils under the incompetent yoke of partisanship. Although elected officials bear a significant burden of blame for this political stratification of American society, the constituents themselves also played a significant role in the dismantling of a national consensus. Subsequently, the apparent inability of politicians to deliver our inflexible wants and needs has fueled the rise of such demagogues as Donald Trump and Bernie Sanders. In a clear affront to reality, both candidates continue to regurgitate their populist appeals. As opposed to constructive dialogue, it appears these two firebrands will maintain their fanning of the ever-menacing embers of racial and class antagonism, deepening the ideological chasm between the metropolis and hinterland.

In a world replete with suffering and injustice, perhaps it is our nature to seek to overcome such perceived wrongdoings through immediate and despotic action. As a species possessing self-consciousness, and varying interpretations of the world we collectively inhabit, it is essential not to view one’s own ideology as an absolute truth or that of others as inherently inferior.

During his travels to foreign lands, René Descartes suggests in his Discourse on Methods that his encounters with those “with feelings quite contrary to my own are not for that reason barbarians or savages,” but instead “use their reason as much or more” than himself.1 Perhaps characterizing those of a different background as “white trash” or as possessing “New York values” hampers any serious discussion or analysis of a social group’s legitimate grievances.

Government is not a struggle in which one faction, be it the people or the elite (I loathe such simplistic descriptions of societal division, but alas it appears to be the prevailing theme of this election cycle) seizes power, but a process of compromise. It is 1 René Descartes. Discourse on Method; Meditations; Rules for the Direction of the Mind. Indianapolis: Bobbs-Merrill, 1964. 9

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the mentality of a petulant child to demand wholesale acceptance of one’s political or cultural platform. Indeed, it is entirely counter-productive to seek societal progress through the employment of vitriolic utterances that build a political order on a fractured social foundation. Rather than step on untrodden ground, perhaps we should examine the paths taken by political predecessors. Faced with an entrenched aristocracy, an impoverished peasantry and an ambitious (but minimal) bourgeoisie, the Kingdom of Piedmont-Sardinia’s Prime Minister, Camillo Cavour, overcame significant obstacles to industrializing this minor Padanian kingdom that ultimately unified the Italian peninsula. As a young man, his friends and acquaintances described Cavour as being “ultra-liberal” and a “Jacobin,” a youthful rebellion against his noble ancestry and economic privilege.2 What was achieved by Cavour’s radical politics? Nothing. The young aristocrat remained an outlier, a stranger within his own country unable to reform political or civic society. However, in the wake of the failures of the French Revolution of 1830 and the European Spring it dawned on the maturing Cavour that meaningful reform could only be achieved through moderate progress that emphasized the sacred right of private property.3 Adding to Cavour’s effectiveness as a political figure was his willingness to steer clear of ideology, navigating the competing interests present in Piedmontese society to advance the common good. Guiding the stability of Piedmont-Sardinia was Cavour’s adherence to traditional procedures that were known to work adequately rather than risking the future of his homeland on political experimentation.4 Similar to Cavour, the Founding Fathers were well aware of the necessity for a system of checks and balances. Heavily influenced by the writings of Montesquieu, our ancestors sought to establish a political order, as written in The Spirit of Laws, where “the life of the meanest subject is deemed precious,” where “no man is stripped of his honor or property until after a long inquiry.”5 To this end, our republic was to be based on order, justice and freedom, not economic equality. Indeed, in the late Russell Kirk’s What is Convervatism? He describes

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2 Denis Mack Smith. Cavour. New York: Knopf, 1985. 5 3 Smith 35 4 Smith 33 5 Charles de Secondat. The Spirit of Laws. Kitchener, Ontario, CAN: Batoche Books, 2001. 93

“radical systems” as forces of “narrowing uniformity,” driving society into a “deadening egalitarianism.”6 It is the very diversity of condition and the subsequent diversity of opinion, which provides the very lifeblood of government, constructive dialogue and debate.

The greatest threat to a democratic republic is the demagogue.

Pandering to a faction’s resentments or aspirations, the agitator promises retribution against a supposed enemy, be it a religious group or an economic class. Through the force of their personalities, they attest their capacity to “Make America Great Again” and squander any possibility of crucial self-criticism by shouldering all of societal ills on “greedy billionaires.” The issues that the United States of America faces are vast and complex, without a singular solution nor the plausibility of being resolved in one presidential term. However, the road towards reform must be cautious, conducted through historical procedures and built with the consideration of all citizens in mind. `

6 Russell Kirk, and George A. Panichas. The Essential Russell Kirk: Selected Essays. Wilmington, DE: ISI Books, 2007. 8

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CRIPPLED ANALYSIS The Collision of Truths

by Walker Gawande In the wake of the presidential election, many of us are experiencing a collision of worlds; the merging of two coexistent realities like oil into water. No one, least of all myself, expected Donald Trump to attain the presidency. All odds pointed against him from within my isolated bubble of leftist and liberal constituents. As I write the introduction to this piece, I still feel the schizophrenic displacement of my daily life and the reality of the conservative world––a world I once considered the ausland––out there––but has revealed itself to me as the authoritative hegemony in the United States, with control over the House, the Senate, and the Presidency. What I misunderstood was that the ausland does not define something outside of my world, but something that exists within and even parallel to my own life. By ignoring and villainizing it, we, the center-left and the left, have failed to properly reform ourselves to the real world and its myriad powerful constituencies, which go far beyond contemporary members of the American recognition movement (on which the Democratic presidential platform was predicated).

All of this begs the question: How did we get here? This phenomenon was no unfortunate fluke or a random mutation in the gene of American politics—there were definite markers that could have predicted Trump’s rise. More than that, history has proven that a man like Trump, on a longer timescale, is near-inevitable in the mechanics of political history. There is already a plethora of scholarly articles that detail this, including one that beat me to the punch1 on several segments of the conclusions I’ve drawn over the course of writing this piece.

However, there is still a lot to uncover in the politico-archaeological excavation of the 2016 election, some of which I hope to bring to light in the following: I would like to investigate, first and foremost, the conditions that precipitated Trump’s rise. In the second half, I hope to synthesize a more complete understanding of the psychology of his supporters, with the aid of Wieland Hoban’s translation of Peter Sloterdijk's major cri

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1 http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2016/10/10/in-the-heart-oftrump-country

tique: You Must Change Your Life (2013, US).2 Here, I will focus on Sloterdijk’s theory of crippledom: an analysis of humans as non-autonomous beings striving upwards towards self-agency.3 The goal of this article is not to vilify Trump or his supporters: It is important to remember that this approach has only fueled the (somewhat just) indignation of the conservative base and pushed Trump to his current height. Given this, I believe that it is our duty to understand and give recognition to the conservative experience as a bridge towards mitigating Trump’s effects on the American psyche. Admittedly, my writing is not directed towards a conservative audience: I am not trying to make conservatives understand themselves (that would be overly presumptuous), but to push liberals––and leftists like myself––to understand them and their communities.

To begin, we need to consider the socio-philosophical nature of the modern conservative community in the U.S., whose members make up the backbone of Donald Trump’s support. Many of us, I would dearly hope, have noticed Trump’s and many of his supporters’ complete ignorance of indisputable facts.4 This is because of a subversive skepticism of experts that is foundational to the conservative ethos. Specifically, conservatives are skeptical of facts determined by experts––experts meaning persons who hold authoritative knowledge over specialized domains. This skepticism is rooted in the anti-intellectual movement governing much of America’s sociopolitical field even from the country’s birth.5 Given their mistrust in experts, conservatives turn their gaze inwards, towards themselves and their close constituents, as a ground plane from which to assess the world. Hence, they are primarily concerned with relationships,6 which for them hold a greater reality than facts. Put another way, they feel the direct effect of their relationships with those around them, whereas facts appear as indirect assessments of the world that may or may not bare any real impact on their daily lives. Conservatives—and Trump’s supporters in particular—are concerned with whose side of the game you are 2 Sloterdijk, Peter. You Must Change Your Life. Translated by Wieland Hoban, Polity: Cambridge. 2013.

3 Ibid. section 1, chapter 3: Only Cripples Will Survive 4 http://www.politifact.com/personalities/donald-trump/ 5 http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2008/02/15/AR2008021502901.html 6 Sloterdijk; §1, Transition: Religions Do Not Exist

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on. It is not so much a matter of what you stand for as much as who you stand for––hence the vilification of Trump’s opponent, Hillary Clinton. It should be noted, however, that this friendor-foe disposition is not immediately problematic, as it does not necessitate an absolute enemy, which would be central to any nationalist authoritarian movement––a movement that Trump has played party to, although I would refrain from calling him a fascist in the purest sense.7 At its core, conservative fact-skepticism comes from the political nature of facts versus relationships: Relationships are naturally democratic: No singular person pulls the purse strings on political relationships. People can easily decide which channel to watch or Twitter pundit to follow (or ignore); politicians to vote for or people to engage with. On the other hand, facts are authoritarian: They are derived from a concentrated or singular source––namely experts––and are naturally predisposed towards further concentration as the facts themselves become more specialized (the sciences are a particularly good example of this phenomenon). Considering that conservatives, and especially neoliberal conservatives, have a profound sense of justice revolving around a particular conception of democracy as individual freedom, it makes perfect sense that they would abhor experts and their supposed facts.

The next issue in need of addressing is the problem of national identity. As I have already explained, conservatives are more deeply concerned with their immediate family and community.

They see the United States as a failed community, as its national citizenry is not based on common experience and ideology, but mere geographic occupancy. Geography is not necessarily the closest common denominator by any means, but it is the one most commonly referenced in politics,8 the defenders of whom modern conservatives see as a common enemy. To put it lightly, the concept of federal involvement baffles conservatives, as its legal power extends across these familial boundaries to an identity that they do not understand nor feel a part of. This often leads them to lay claim to a definition of the American

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7 Trump is not interested in transforming the American political system, which fascism would require; he is simply interested in exploiting it––hence, I think he would be best described as a neopatrimonialist, which I consider to be the extreme end of populism, just as communism is the extreme end of socialism.

8 Consider border security, illegal immigrants, green cards, etc.

identity through an exclusivist pseudo-nationalism, commonly based around race, birthright, religion, and/or other core beliefs. For conservatives, this is an unmistakably necessary concept: It gives a community-based order to a state that is largely nebulous in their eyes––and whatever they do not concretely see, they do not believe.

Of course, there is serious counterevidence to this analysis: the many unsubstantiated and absurd conspiracies alleged by Trump and his supporters. This phenomenon largely stems from the conservative subversion of the scientifico-factual-hegemony, but to reach a fuller understanding, we have to consider a second tenet of conservatism: the absolute value of personal experience.

As relationships define the political game in conservative logic,9 both a person’s own experience, and the experience of those within his or her community, come first. This is why statistics matter little to conservatives—most other forms of facts don’t either. It’s too abstract and it often fails to reflect their personal experiences. For this same reason, it is difficult to imagine any experience of hardship as being detached from a physical person or community, hence their apathy towards the black experience which to them is part of the ausland.

This is how they comprehend race, sexuality, and especially the government: Trump supporters identify themselves according to whom is within and against who is without their community.

Of course, this presents a serious problem––absolute trust in the immediately perceived community has dire consequences for the integrity of the ideas they apply to their understanding of the political landscape, which often verge on the conspiratorial. More importantly, the psychological infallibility of their own community leads conservatives to negatively seek the ausland to explain their hardship, and the prevailing establishment becomes a natural target. This is largely because they feel abandoned by it, which they are right to: The “establishment” has gutted welfare, education, state healthcare, and never replaced it. Naturally, the establishment and any of its associates are bad for their community, and so Trump’s supporters opt for smaller 9 This political game in conservative logic could be likened to a Wittgensteinian language game. This is not meant as a derogatory statement (e.g. dumb liberal logic) but a recognition of the basis of a legitimate ideology.

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government, despite the fact that smaller government is what brought them their tragedies. This is a false inference within scientific logic, but a true one within conservative logic.

In sum, all of these points-of-contact that conservatives have within the political arena become enflamed, providing the conditions for Donald Trump’s rise: It began with the dot com boom, which expanded the amount of information available while weakening the leverage of traditionally trusted fact-sources in politics and science. This resulted in the implosion of the field of common political facts almost altogether by this point in political history. Second comes the reduction of public investment in cultural amenities, such as state and municipal divestment from the arts, music, and humanities, which has led to a dearth of community-based culture. This cultural-fracturing reduces the sense of connectedness that one feels with the greater community, alienating conservatives further from the concept of a U.S. citizenry. Most troubling is the stagnation and reduction of education spending,10 which mangles multiculturalist programs that might both mend the disconnection conservatives feel to the whole of America and reduce the institutionalized scapegoating of minorities.

All of this brings me to Peter Sloterdijk’s theory of crippledom.

To give an almost pitifully condensed but entirely necessary explanation of his theory: Sloterdijk argues that humans are natural “cripples” in that we cannot survive without a complex of amenities that extend far beyond whatever we can naturally produce ourselves. Whether we like it or not, we are fully dependent on crutches––be they physical or emotional––throughout our lives. Hence, Trump supporters (especially members of the white working- and middle-class) are in a sense cripples who want to break the crutches.11 The federal and state governments that originally supported them have divested from welfare and other basic amenities in an attempt to take away support from the undeserving other of the ausland. However, this program backfired, stripping support from those people who need it most––and those same people are the backbone of Trump’s support. They feel helpless be-

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10 https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/education/wp/2016/10/20/ these-states-are-spending-less-on-education-now-than-before-thegreat-recession/ 11 Sloterdijk; §1, Chapter 3

cause the crutches have been revealed to them––that is to say, they notice the lack of crutches and this triggers their sense of vulnerability, breeding an intense desire to break whatever crutches they have left. They are faced with the paralyzing realization that humans are natural cripples, who are born needing deep and complex support structures which they cannot possibly transcend, even upon becoming a complete agent.

Their self-perceived imperfection causes them to strive for something transcendent to prove to themselves that this perfection is not only possible, but natural. This same force is what causes human beings to seek religion, a transcendent force that places them within reach of perfect existence––such as the Abrahamic tradition of reaching oneness with God: the manifestation of transcendent perfection. In this election cycle, Trump represents the Strongman. He is the one who, in their eyes, is the ideal human being, rising from the ashes of existence by his own will to power. This is a false image, but in the conservatives’ direst moment, they will impose any story onto a person who actively renounces the of support from the government. These are not bad or dumb people: They are simply the byproduct of a combination of conservative austerity measures and a neglectful Democratic Party. Inevitably, these conservatives want to go back to time that does not exist––a time when they did not need the crutches to stand, a time when America was great.

The reality is that these crutches were always here. It is easy to blame conservative members of government for this tragic mindset, but we must face the harsher reality––the reality that the Democratic Party abandoned the middle- and working-class for the sake of a distribution-blind recognition politics. While many of us have consistently advocated for the reinstatement of proper welfare measures, we have also vilified those cripples who have fallen, and laughed at their frustration and embarrassment in not being able to get back up. I am not just referring to neoliberals here. I am also referring to moderate democrats and even some leftists who supported Bill Clinton’s welfare reform in the 90s. If you have even so much as ignored the cry of our fellow Americans, I am speaking to you. How can we blame the working class voters for being attracted to the strongman ideology? We have let Trump feed off this longing and create an entire world that survives on its own fascistic ideology, perpetuated by the media and our own morbid curiosity.

If you feel that I have given even the smallest insight into the

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conservative individual or his community, you now have both the power and the responsibility to help our fellow cripples back onto their feet. The first ethical mantra of such a movement should be help, but not infantilize. As members of the left, we are not the benefactors of the economically disenfranchised, but their partners. Thus, this does not simply mean enacting good policy, but it means being a good neighbor: The allochrony of American politics has finally broken, and the neighborhood has doubled in size. Trump won because Democrats abandoned its largest constituents. It is time for the Democratic party to reformulate itself as a proper labor party of the middle-, working-, and lower classes.

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KASPAR The Violence of Words

by Jack Schreuer On the surface, Peter Handke’s Kaspar seems to be a play about teaching someone to speak. But it is far more than that, because language is not just a communicative technique: Language constructs how we view the world, how we perceive it, the relationship between things, and our relationship to things. Language determines how the outside world perceives us and how we perceive it. With language’s powerful role in life, to learn it is to learn a new way of viewing the world.

Kaspar’s socialization, through the learning of language, is imparted by the prompters’ voices. These prompters perpetually command Kaspar. Their teachings are not just innocuous table manners or sweeping techniques; the prompters also engrain cultural values in Kaspar by saying that everyone must work hard, that war is good, and that you can use torture to get the information you need. They say these things like they are as obvious as table settings, not differentiating between that which is a matter of political ideology and social norms.

As he learns language and culture simultaneously, Kaspar cannot resist these ideological points; his only choice is to learn them as if they were facts because he has never been shown the difference. He will learn that war is good and what is proper when setting a table all the same.

Paramount in both Kaspar and America’s neoliberal ideology, which this play heavily critiques, is the idea of choice. Kaspar is on multiple occasions told not that he can choose but that he must choose. But what choice is left to him? He was forced into assimilating to the prompters’ language, their worldview: he is told how he must think, act at a table, and view political issues.

He is being primed for a society that bases itself on the idea that we are individuals, and have the right to choose who we will be, but this is exactly what is denied to Kaspar.

Kaspar is forced into a language and a self built by the prompters and their culture. Kaspar is not just learning a language; he is being recreated, molded, shaped by the language he is learning––a language he did not choose. To build a new Kaspar, the old one must be destroyed. This is what the prompters attempt to hide: they want their audience to believe that their actions

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are constructive, educational. But inherent in the creation of something new is the destruction of what was there before–– the being Kaspar once was. Even if one perceives this being as language-less, primitive, not deserving of the same dignity that we would grant to those who know and speak as we do, they must admit that Kaspar was a person. Throughout the self that Kaspar was is splintered and destroyed, ripped apart into various pieces. The forced assimilation that Kaspar undergoes is violence at its most wretched: It is not an attack on the body, but an attack on the mind; the self. It destroys Kaspar, but not his physical form. The shell that is left, Kaspar’s physical form, is filled with something new. He is no longer Kaspar but instead a golem––an edifice to be stuffed with the ideology of the voices.

Kaspar is not just the story of the socialization of a boy from the wilderness, but it is also representative of the development of human societies. This is not the first time this story has been told––it echoes the theories of 18th century philosopher Jean Jacques Rousseau: Rousseau believed that one could not understand human nature by looking at people as they currently exist because they are so shaped by their culture. He critiqued his contemporaries for failing to consider humans outside of European social constructs, claiming that such analysis says far more about European culture than universal human nature.

To express his theories, Rousseau writes a narrative account of humans’ pre-societal, natural existence and their creation of society.

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Kaspar’s being at the beginning of the play is akin to a Rousseauian conception of pre-social humans. They are solitary, wild, and language-less. Rousseau would add that Kaspar and these people were content in the natural world, their desires in line with their means to achieve them, without the ever-driving wants that keep modern people from happiness. Just as Kaspar’s interactions with other humans led to his capture and removal from nature, basic interactions lead people out of their natural state of contentment. This is the crux of Rousseau’s theory, and it is expressed perfectly in Kaspar’s line, “but falling is twice as bad ever since I know that one can speak about my falling.” Rousseau himself writes, “whoever sang or danced best, whoever was the handsomest came to be of most consideration; and this was the first step towards inequality, and at the same time towards vice.” Here both Kaspar and Rousseau are saying that once in society, people are subject to the opinions of others; they are told it is wrong to break social custom––in Kas-

par’s case not looking foolish by losing balance––taught to feel bad if they do. In the reverse, people are revered for excelling in that which society values and therefore people desire to fulfill their social expectations. Rousseau believes that the drive for others to think well of us corrupts humanity, for it engenders jealously, hatred, and conflict over opinion and resources. This is the root of our unequal society, in which those with more resources fight to grow ever more powerful, while those society deems less valuable suffer (It seems that with money’s control over our society, the traits valued most are being born rich and one’s ability to screw over others in business). Competitive striving for social acknowledgement breaks the cycle of human contentment found in the state of nature. This is exactly what Kaspar is subjected to. He unwillingly internalizes the pain and pleasure related to how society views his actions, and he is forced to act not as he desires but as society desires.

The play Kaspar is a social commentary on the subtle ways that society teaches its members to conform and constructs the meaning in the world around them. Kaspar is never given the freedom to think for himself; nothing he does is his decision; everything he learns he is told he must do. He is instructed to choose but everything he is told by the prompter is a must.

The most important but unspoken “must” of all is that he must listen to the voices. This is the most absolute “must” in society: One must acquiesce to social rules or be scorned and considered to belong in the very wild from which Kaspar emerged.

Kaspar’s brutal education does not make him a person, just as a society does not have the right to define what is human. It instead destroys him; he becomes a vessel that can only repeat “musts”– a vessel that wishes he was a person “like somebody else was once, like he was once”. At the conclusion of the play, every part of the fractured Kaspar makes this wish, while the most constant aspect of Kaspar spews an accumulation of “musts” being broadcasted into his ear by a prompter. This lays bare the conflict that exists within all of us, the struggle between the “musts” taught to us by society and our desire to realize the person we believe ourselves to be or to have been.

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ON TRANSLATION A preface to Listen to Our Defeats by Laurent Gaudé

by John David Crosby Whenever I visit France, one of my favorite activities is asking my friends there what their favorite English words are. The usual plethora of euphonious words arrive: I’ve heard “zoo”, “cherish”, “thimble”, “ubiquitous”, “music”: each with their Anglophone syllables – the soft tongue of a “th” the hard crunch of a “ch” or the silky “s” that does not sound like a “z” – pronounced proudly and passionately in that romantic French attitude which oozes confidence, even when uttering an unnatural noise.

One woman I met in Paris put a stop to this pattern of behavior, when she boldly proclaimed that her favorite English word was “Procrastination.” Her reasoning was simple: “there isn’t a French equivalent, and it’s so English!” – or rather “il n’y a pas un mot en français comme ça, et c’est tellement anglais!”

There is of course a way of saying “procrastination” in French, but it’s longer, and it seems to defeat the indolent nature of the act of putting things off. After all, “remettre à plus tard” literally translates to “putting off until later” and doesn’t roll off the tongue so easily.

It was here that I first noticed the inequivalences that languages possess when they are paired together: When I ask what your favorite word is in English, I am asking as a foreigner, as an agent removed from that very language. The answers full of euphony are pleasing because it enforces the idea that I am hearing noises and sounds rather than words with meaning. I am sometimes guilty of this when I am asked my favorite word in French; I often respond with “pamplemousse (grapefruit)” or “coquillage (seashell)” simply for that inexplicably Frenchness one feels when exaggerating the pronunciation, as if one is Alain Delon or Jean-Paul Belmondo. But in looking at translations of languages as utterances from one to another, I search for the words that have nearly impossible word-for-word translation. There, I mature from the romantic curiosity of sound and reception of noise to the logical, sensible world of meaning and understanding. I look for the blended utterance in which the word is so unmistakably born from its mother tongue, and boasts an even more poetic definition and message. I find words constantly when I speak or read French that hold these

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qualities – they are the words I consider my favorites, such as “pénombre” (most often translated as “dimness or twilight”, yet its connotation is “the presence of a shadow that does not entirely darken the room”.), “flâneur” (again, most often translated basically as “to stroll idly” but its meaning is deeper: “to walk the city without aim or a goal, soaking in the stream-of-consciousness that the people, the city, and the natural world presents”.), and “dépaysement” (the translation is usually “homesickness”, but its meaning is “the feeling of disorientation from being in another culture or world”.).

Through the “foreignness” of these words one can find aesthetic beauty, melodic sound, and most importantly meaning that cannot be found in our native tongue. That is the true virtue of the foreign utterance. When the translator has equated his native language (the target language) to the original purity of the text, then the translation will be foregone – the translator will only regard the original text as a rival to the target language, giving the original an identity that does not exist. For what does “French-ness” mean: – beyond the imagery and sensual effect of things like Fois Gras and lamp-lit quays along the Seine – that there is an essential identity within that culture and, therefore, within that language. Americans may very well know those in our country who aimlessly walk through the grid of New York, or feel an estrangement in a new country, or see a darkened room that we struggle to describe in prose. But the French have Flâners, and it is with this that their identity is formed, that the two languages – target and original – cannot be equals or rivals, but identities, different physiognomies and ideologies.

When I translate, this notion always stays with me. I am not reading a text for me as an American with little knowledge of far-away places. The identity of the foreign must remain, must be upheld to great heights, not in a “sense-for-sense” as Saint Jerome would argue, but in Jacques Derrida’s sense in accord with the value of restitution that aims for the sur-vive – the survival – of the seed of that literary creation. The transcendental contract of translation I must produce must also give the original text a seed for its survival. It is with this code I could produce Listen to Our Defeats. I admit, I will try to refrain from writing about Listen to Our Defeats, as Laurent Gaudé’s powerful writing, which I have had the honor of “reproducing” (to use another Derrida-ism), speaks solely for itself.

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What I have attempted in translation is what I attempt whenever I learn a new language: establish a relationship. My relationship with French comes from art, romanticism, books. It is why I hold French so high in regard: my education has been dictated by my growth in French, my aestheticism cloaked in my adolescent exposure to Godard, Camus, Balzac, Renoir – the gods I prostrated my sensitive, shy seventeen-year-old self. Through the power of translation, Balzac and Camus molded my aesthetic understanding of art, so that I could look at a Renoir painting and see the French identity that was formulated by the prose of the great thinkers of that country. I devoured French literature, and through translations I garnered the identity of the country as best I could. It was only through reading in the original-tongue, the French of generations past, that I came upon a true understanding of identity: the identities of a people, a country, language and ideas.

Reading Hemingway in French must be difficult to the unassuming reader. The simplicity and sharpness of his phrases, which many Americans have never considered beautiful, are given a loveliness, a charm that only comes in the form of the foreign aestheticism of words in another language. After all, a “coquillage” is only a “seashell” yet somehow the sheer beauty of the word, sounded out or written down, distorts the foreign reader. But words have meanings and ideas, and it is the task of the translator to look beyond that beauty, and to mature the meanings and ideas into another identity.

For my work with Laurent Gaudé’s Listen to Our Defeats, I initially struggled with the long, philosophical sentences, which are almost Proustian in their detail. The foreignness of the flow and turn of phrase made me feel removed in some way, and I felt, like a bad actor, as though I were just transcribing from one language to another leaving all meaning behind. So I read.

I read about archeology, about François Auguste Ferdinand Mariette, about Lindenhof in Geneva. I became as close as possible to the realness of the text so that the meaning was within the words I chose. I made myself reproduce Gaudé: I read what he wrote about, and made the story my passion. When Derrida claims that the Original text is calling out for a response, the text is crying out to be loved. The task of translation becomes an act of love not just a responsibility or transcription.

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My goal of this text has not been for my writing to be examined or enjoyed or hated. It is simply to take every word of Gaudé’s

into another language, a new identity in a foreign world. All words have meaning, all words have aesthetic qualities and none are equal, but the translator must carry on, searching for the utterances in their language to salvage the art they have before them. For if we love words that sound foreign to us or words that have identities we don’t share – whether it be “Seashell” or “Procrastination” – then we love language, and our task is set. After all, translation is a task of love.

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WHY PHILOSOPHY? A View From the Absurd

by Max Lowe Why philosophy? Some would say that philosophy is the art of preparing for death (namely Socrates) and as nice as that sounds, it doesn’t really satisfy the question. For me, the act of completely committing myself to philosophy is also an act of surrendering pursuit of more standard “worldly” things. On one level, ideologically speaking, the act of practising philosophy makes perfect sense and shouldn’t need to be defended, but people still regularly ask why I bother with it, and they have a good point. More than a point actually, they are correct. But how can a question be correct? Well beloved reader, I will tell you, also shut up. When someone asks why I want to be a philosophy major what I really hear is, “That major has no real world applications, you’re alienating yourself from regular culture, and doesn’t the practise of philosophy just leave you completely unsatisfied with life, leading to far more questions that you can answer?” Yes, yes and YES! So there are two major ways that people try to refute these claims: They deny the fact that philosophy is useless for everyday life (which it totally is) or they claim that everyday life isn’t what is important (which it also is). I am an absurdist, which means that I think the only thing that matters is finding your own little pocket of joy in the world. The fact that I am an absurdist is actually very important to my overall perspective: I firmly believe in what I like to call, “trickle down philosophy” which means that a person’s stance on any given issue is often a result (or microcosm) of their central school of thought (such as absurdism). Specifically to explain absurdism is sort of hard because I can explain some of the main concepts of it, but part of why it is called absurdism is because it just sounds absolutely absurd to anyone who isn’t one. I think that absurdism impossible to be taught, as it is a conclusion that only you can come to individually, on your own. Despite all this, I will do my best to explain what I consider to be the main tenants of absurdism: Absurdism is largely a response to nihilism, and I did go through a strong nihilistic phase earlier in life. Where a nihilist would say that life has no meaning, an absurdist says saying “life has no meaning” implies that there is even such a thing as meaning. In my mind the very concept of meaning is

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ridiculous; it’s just a consequence of the fact that our brains are pattern machines––there is no evidence to support the innate idea of a pattern. This seems like it would result in basically the same ideas as nihilism, but the key differences come in the manifestation of this belief system. I think absurdists are happier, because if you believe that there is no such thing as meaning it doesn’t feel like you are missing out on the meaning in the world, it just implies that meaning is something that exists in your head, so you should take it upon yourself to go and find meaning in the world because whatever meaning you decide there is, is the most valid meaning possible. In addition to all of this, there is a tone of hypocrisy involved in absurdism, but if you are an absurdist that is totally okay. For example it is against the very idea of absurdism to talk about absurdism (sort of like fight club) because if there is no meaning in the world, why am I trying to explain to you anything about meaning.

Absurdism both directly supports and goes against the idea of practising philosophy.

So once again, why philosophize when I could gain more happiness through the stability of a more “normal” pursuit?

It could be that philosophy is some sort of overly complicated form of therapy for me, and it actually does bring me happiness; or it could be that I am somehow eternally bound to a fruitless search for the knowledge I know I will never attain––and I think these are both true answers for many people. What I personally want to believe is just that all things are equally useless so fuck it, why not philosophy? Philosophy is a spiral staircase that just leads to more philosophy. So if you haven’t tried philosophy, save yourself and don’t start, but also please stop pointing out how ridiculous philosophy is, because it really hurts. As much as we like to pretend we have the answers, I think philosophy students might have the least. And if you find that answer dissatisfying, you might just be taking your first steps towards trying out the cool new drug called “Philosophy”!

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CONTRIBUTORS John David Crosby Walker Gawande Max Lowe Matthew Marani Jack Schreuer

Editor-in-Chief Jack Schreuer Editor-in-Chief Jack Schreuer Print Designer and Editor Gawande PrintWalker Designer and Editor Walker Gawande Web Editor Matthew Marani Web Designer Matthew Marani

For more information contact:

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jschreuer@skidmore.edu or mmarani@skidmore.edu