Actually the last one isn’t so bad, sometimes.

It being summer and thus the educational institution where I teach these days[1] having closed its doors for the time being, in anticipation of this traditional enquiry I tend to find myself contemplating to write another tome the world hasn’t really been waiting for; maybe a few hundred pages about neotextual convergence in the Rigveda (or ऋग्वेदः, as we sanskritologists[2] say) would exercise the old brain for the next weeks, but upon spending a few minutes browsing the local library in the small village I am staying in, I found out that my good friend Bernard Vegnaud has just written “Neotextual Convergence in Vedic Hymns” and is currently selling tens of copies of it.

So, naturally, I turned my sights to reinventing the study of social realism with a treatise on Ken Loach and Mike Leigh and, buoyed by this most excellent of ideas, set out home to assign research to my PhD students immediately, only to find a draft of H. H. Hallerstrøm’s new book “Not so realistic after all, Mr. Loach?” in my mailbox with a nice letter asking for a blurb quote, which I sent him by dictating it over the phone to Sophie-Anne (which is how these “blog posts” end up on the internet; the whole process still being a bit of a mystery to me[3]): “Hallerstrøm’s new book is the most concise and hilariously fantastic critique of Ken Loach I’ve read in years!”

Still, that left me without a project. Rien ne sert de courir, il faut partir à point, as we Frenchmen say, or the early bird catches the worm; with me — presumably being a “late” bird, though not in the sense of decomposing, one hopes — getting no worm at all, as if that were a bad thing, which, of course, it just might be for birds. In any case, wasn’t it René Descartes who has said Dubium sapientiae initium, or in plain English that doubt is the origin of wisdom? So what kind of philosopher, wise men one and all, would I be if I did not doubt the generality and universality, one might go so far as to say the wisdom of this ignoble saying, this Pinocchio of idiomatic phrases?

No philosopher at all.

Indeed it has been argued that not only does the second mouse get the cheese, but also that the early worm gets eaten, which goes a long way to explain the arrival times of my students, though not, I assure you, dear reader, my dietary habits.

Ah, the blazing sloveness of summer, with sudden and ample free time, often whole hours between conferences and ministerial lunches, between speaking commitments and dinner invitations, when the relay of dusk to dawn to dusk to dawn is but irregulary noted by the the attempted act of feeding oneself… After some more Absinthe and some shelving of other ideas — for example, a paper called “On Reading Reading Lolita in Teheran in Teheran” which I could have composed during the 74th Iranian Philosopy Summit ’10 in that very city — as too juvenile even for the book on precultural deappropriation it would have appeared in, I hit upon the grandest idea of them all.

This, finally, has not been done before! I shall read the seven volumes of Rowling, J.K.’s dystopian schelmenroman “Harry Potter” over the next few months and I shall delve into their meaning and context, into the subtext, the neotextual convergences, the übertext (not to be confused with hypertext) and the pretext[4].

We shall begin next week, as Therasmokritus kept saying for years.

[1] Having taught at some of the most prestigious of universities in my career, I do have to say that the American campus life does not lack a certain charm that one cannot help but associate with the Oscar Wilde quote “Morality is simply the attitude we adopt towards people whom we personally dislike.”

[2] Abbout, C. Mohr: “There’s no need for that kind of language: Sanskrit.”, Willmington University Press, Willmington, 2005.

[3] Thusly explaining the riddle about the Gauloise, the glass of Absinthe and the non-existant third hand alluded to here. See, philosophy isn’t that hard after all.

[4] Resmussen, Raul: “Pretextual Studies of The Lorbeerbaum Effect”, Harvard University Press, Cambridge, 1992.

So I would like to use this web publication to formulate an exemplary answer, and I sincerely hope that this young man will study this and the following minimalist essays and maybe use the comment feature to pose arguments and counter-arguments, since this is what our science thrives on.

I have written many words about the narrative structure, ontological composition and semiotic landmarks that make up the drama “True Blood”. For those readers, if indeed there are any, who do not subscribe to Le Monde, I will use the brief break in the airing of this drama posed by nationalistic celebrations to summarize my views so far. “True Blood” cunningly mixes archetypes with stereotypes, ironically over-iconifies extrapolations of myths as old as the mind itself and superimposes these myths on a society equally post-modern and pre-enlightened. It is very a la mode in its deconstruction of Jungian psychoanalytics that popular culture is involved in, ironically sub-consciously, exemplified in the cyclical emergence of Vampires in narratives of all media. The reflection of what terrified our caveman ancestors on our modern existence, which is supposed to be enlighented, in the sense of transcending superstition as well as the literal defeat of the night as primary source of fear with electrical power, all but validates the school of thought founded by Derrida, Sklotenbørg and, most notably, Jerome Barthelm. Abyssmical existential dilemmata are the root of dread, the source of irrationality and the reason for non-reason.

“I think, therefore I am”, Descartes said, but would he state this as categorically, would he be able to watch, with a weeping heart, the trials and tribulations that Soukie (existing) and Vampire Bill (existing-and-yet-not) have to face? Would Simone de Beauvoir be glad to see decades of post-feminism deconstructed by this red-haired waitress whose name I keep forgetting? And Lafayette, who is not only about transcending traditional notions of gender and sexuality, but also limitations posed on humans by their physical shell? And what about the almost sub-conscious, if not sub-human, drifting of Soukie’s brother and this abominable detective, a symbol for the state’s ignorance and inability? Is their role as literal rubber ducks in the metaphorical sea of existence not exemplary for Humbert’s post-moral Ethnosophy?

The only narration I struggle with is Tara’s foray into sexual enlightenment in last season, which ended in the evocation of the Dionysian ideals as the incorporation of all that is pure instinct and should be beheaded, butchered, burned and buried. But it can also serve as a warning sign that post-morality has not yet been achieved, that the struggle is ever ongoing, and thereby also validating me in my humble attempts to convey thought and to spread philosophy beyond its self-imposed boundaries of academia.

Dear reader, if you indeed are there, “True Blood” is, if properly deconstructed, a beacon indicating past, present and future of post-modern thought and I will continue to watch and learn and impose on you to watch and learn with me via this web publication!

And while in Aesop’s case an argument can and has been made that certain moral or ethical points become more succinct with the help of the confines of animal protagonists[1], no such claim would hold up for Roald Dahl’s “The Fantastic Mr. Fox“, a rather pedestrian little book about the adventures of the titular character. It might be a children’s book which “is great for reading aloud to three- to seven-year-olds”[2] — does it not strike anybody else that, with proper guidance and explanations, Satre might be a better choice to read to a seven-year-old? But I digress.

It makes one wonder if this book offers anything else but short-lived entertainment, however, if it teaches us anything besides the belief that stealing is heroic and actually working on a farm (as my own grand-père did), for example, is somehow mean?

The book does not even attempt to adhere to a coherent moral world-view; the only difference between the fox and the farmers sems to be that the former steals chickens before killing them, whereas the latter provide them with shelter, food and a long life before slaughter. And while one could understand it if Mr. Dahl had made the hero of his little exercise in Seussianism a vegetarian, one cannot help but wonder why any parents would want to subject their children to such illogical nonesense.

Do the striped pyjamas signify the protagonist's ultimate fate: jail?

Anyone familiar with Humphrey’s Law of Attraction will not be surprised to learn that Hollywood has chosen to transform this, for lack of a better term I shall call it work, although I hestitate to use such a noble word here — chosen to transfrom this work, if indeed we want to call it that, into a moving picture. It falls right into the anything-goes-as-long-as-it’s-cool-or-at-least-done-by-someone-cool mentality that has swept up an entire generation of young people who, while peacefully watching an animated moving picture like this one day might very well trash shops and cars, even their own cities and neighbourhoods in what they call a protest for peace, a few years later. It saddens one’s soul, but is hardly unexpected that the two should go hand-in-hand, that an ideology that prefers cunning and criminal behaviour over honest work should consider the democratic process as sinister, and violence a justifiable form of protest. By which I do not wish to imply that there exists any causal link between the two, that is that by watching The Fantastic Mr. Fox one becomes a criminal — what a ridiculous notion! — but rather that the two are symptoms of the same illness.

Which is why I did not allow my two youngest grandkids to see the moving picture yesterday.

[1] Ciccone, Louise: “A mythopoetical Interpretation of Aesop’s Fables in the conext of Hegel’s dialectics”, Special Rider Publishing, Duluth, 1992

[2] Amazon.com review of the book.

I use this opportunity then to broach a subject that is very much on my mind at this moment, in which I sit on my chaise longue, with a Gauloise in my left and a glass of fine Absinthe (a subject which a loyal reader might very likely encounter again in this web publication) in the other hand (the same astute reader might deduce that I now have no hand left with which to type, which should serve as a stern reminder that the concurrency of the thing as it is in a universe where each moment mutually excludes its successors and predecessors, therefore seemingly validates our intrinsic trait that predetermines the affirmation of the essence of the thing as an it in the purely existential sense), after spending the day pondering imponderables (which is not, as it might appear, just a cliché, but should rather be understood as a gentle reminder for the topic of the special lécture that is scheduled at the Lycee Notre Dame du Bugainville, dealing with the enormous question of whether there is, as posed by Nestor Willem Van Jhutenbørg in the original essay “On the Consequential Subtext in Hegels 7th Theorem”, such a division of the world, both in the post hoc determined sense as well as in the sense Renoir (Jean-Batiste, not Jean Julie) first defined in 1934, into two domaines of thinkable and unthinkable, and whether, if we can think about unthinkables, can there be such a thing as an unthinkable? and how it relates to the concept of Klaxtroproteamos of Therasmokritus, which was re-interpreted almost 20 centuries later in an essay by Locke with the view that unthinkables can be made thinkable by thinking machines, which, in turn, are unthinkable, because thinking machines thinking about unthinkables will have have to be thought of, and in which he also criticizes the previously assumed binary nature, proposing instead grades of unthinkability, which opens the thought of thinking machines being able to think about a little more thinkable things, which from another point of view would be unthinkable things, and thinkables are indeed unthinkables at the same time, and thus the ability of the brain of thinking of brains thinking about unthinkables (from the point of view of the current brain), where yours, if you’ve got that far, must hurt by now, so I finish this bracket), and watching football on my television set, because it is World Cup time (which, I must say, has much improved since the disappearance of our equipe, which has gone under without so much as a whimper, as I already discussed with the Ministre des Sports at the reception at the award of the médaille d’honneur of the Academie Francaise to my esteemed colleague Jean Fourlain Aramiste), beholding with sheer fascination of the synchronized joy and suffering of billions of people around this globe, like the world itself holding its breath from its struggle the spectacle of the battle between object-gewordene manifestations of a country’s hope and the abstract notions of what signifies the nation, I have but one thing to say about Vuvuzelas:

Shut up, already!

Normally, we would add: Sacre bleu!, but as I long since dispensed with the mental crutches posed by organized religion, indeed, cast away with great force all those preconceived notions that have molded our world view for millenia, all those sociopathological myths borne out of a desperation to explain a cruel universe perpetuated by crusty elites, I leave it at the first.

What, indeed, might the reader ask, could spark such an emotional outburst? It is nothing less than the world’s greatest sporting event, if not humankind’s greatest endeavor per se, the manifestation of kinetic existentialism, the ennoblement of the muscle in the battle of man against the majestic alps, the pure setting of willpower against heat, rain, wind and exhaustion, a journey through this big country that reflects the  existential dilemmœ we face in today’s society to their very core. Of course I am talking about the Tour de France.

But why would I care about such a staged event to satisfy the masses, such a gladiatorial marketing campaign engrossing a whole country? Because it is not! It is rather a campaign to prove Guattari’s theories of Ecosophy — the bicycle as the metaphor of the material substratum is the equalizer, but also an enabler for man to leave his plane of immanence. The perpetual circling of the crank arms, the endless return to itself, hours upon hours – does it not seem futile? But yet, it drives us forward, onward and to unimaginable heights, through orchards, forests, villages, past factories, farms and banks and over the highest mountains, towards the target, the final, the ultimate destination. And yet, the small circling motion is encountered again in the big circle that is closed after three weeks of crisis. Having arrived, we are ready for the next departure. What is achieved, has been achieved, but it does not stop.

Sophie-Anne, my oldest granddaughter, who has started her first year of university last September — at the same honorable alma mater as yours truly oh so many years ago, no less — has convinced me to position myself squarely into the center of current philsophical discourse where it intersects with popular culture, i.e. on the internet. This intersection, nay, fusion is not only a subject and passion that has kept me good company over the last decades, but also something that, like so much else, seems to have migrated to the electronic voids of the web. Where else then to go for me and what else to do but start my own weblog (or, blog, as I am told, they are called) like Sophie-Anne suggested?

Now that I find myself standing before the court like the ancient Greek philosopher Therasmokritus, dragged out from behind the laurel bush where he hid for over thirty years, teaching his disciples, I fear that this court is much larger, much more critical and vociferous in its opinions than the jury he had to face, because I now face the vastness of the whole internet.

And when I say internet, I do mean an entity immensly greater in scope than what would be encompassed by “the whole world”, a paltry little phrase of an ancient era that is used merely to denote a multitude, an euphemism of the most abominable sort that renders any serious discourse obsolete by its sheer audacity in not only bending, but strangling the truth until it lies gasping among the ruins of its platonic ideal… where was I?

Ah, yes, the court of the blogosphere, a protosemantic concept if ever there was one. Does it humble me that much greater men than me have been shredded by public opinion, does it terrify me to walk outside the well-known confines of academic and scientific life among the masses, the trolls and pranksters, out into a world where philosophy is seen as something that old men do, with no bearing on “real life” (whatever that might mean in the context of ethereal electronic information dispersed among millions of machines world-wide)? Of course, it does frighten me a bit, but as I have been telling my students for a long time now in my introductory classes, I strongly believe that there is nothing that is as current, as necessary, as useful and as satisfying as philosophy when we look at the world we live in and our role in it.

So I believe, passionately, that even in the dregs of human culture, in the lowest of forms of entertainment, we can find the same principles at work that we find in our highest philosophies, and if I can find some gold among them to show the world, to shed a little light, then this all his been worthwile. We shall see; and Sophie-Anne has told me she too will have the odd comment to make or opinion to contribute.