on the anthology

Levi tells the story of the forthcoming anthology The Speculative Turn, including some details previously unknown to me. Such as this:

“Prior to that, I only knew of Graham as the guy from DePaul (Loyola’s Continental rival) who had published a book fresh out of grad school and who was wearing a fidora in his books cover picture, i.e., I encountered him as an object of my envy and ressentiment.”

I’ll admit that the authorial hat is a bit of a back cover cliché. It happened mostly by accident. My friend Veronica decided we’d shoot a bunch of photos on the roof of the Zamalek Hostel, where I lived at the time. Most of the photos were straight-up photos of me with no “accessories”; just for fun I added a few with the hat and a few others with sunglasses. When we got the photos back from Kodak (digital cameras were not *quite* the norm yet in early 2001), we realized it had been a bit windy, and my hair was all messy in the non-hat photos. So it had to be with a hat, and even though I still cringe a bit at the clichéness of it, it’s sort of a nice photo– certainly better than the mean-looking one for Guerrilla Metaphysics where it even sort of looks (incorrectly) like I have a weird earring.

Unfortunately I never heard of Levi while in Chicago, even though we overlapped for a couple of years there. I went to a few events at Loyola in the early ’90s (I think Dennis Keenan’s Ph.D. defense was the first I ever attended; I’m pretty sure Sheehan and Sallis were on that committee, though my memories of the day are a bit hazy after 18 years).

By the time Levi was in Chicago, I was initially in final-stage dissertation Angst and later, after getting the one-year faculty post at DePaul, having a really enjoyable time during 1999-2000, even though Paul Schafer (greatest grad school roommate in the history of the world) had already left for New Orleans by then. I’m not the party-throwing type, but it’s the one year in my life when I regularly threw parties, all of them successful and memorable, so I guess I must have been very happy to be finished. The Cairo gig sort of materialized midway through that year. (It’s just gravy that DePaul wrote me this spring to announce that they decided they owed me $3,000 more for that year– a full decade ago! Unbelievably gracious of them.)

As for the anthology itself, Levi exaggerates my contribution… He and Nick did all the real work.

Now, an interesting question with broader philosophical ramifications… Would Levi and I have hit it off personally if we had met in Chicago in 1998 or 1999? Would there have been a good mutual influence, or would we not have been ready to have a useful philosophical conversation? Heck, we’ve never met even now, so there’s still a chance we’ll hate each other in person when we meet.

But the interesting question is– to what extent do you need to be sufficiently “ripe” to profit from a specific person? Certainly it is true that I have read some authors prematurely, not yet at the stage to get what they are talking about. The same is most likely true of people. There are surely plenty of missed meetings out there that would profit all of us greatly, but in this particular case maybe it was better to meet Levi through this anthology and as a blogging neighbor; otherwise, maybe we would have been sick of each other by now.

But it’s an interesting question, how big the “window” is during which a person can be meaningful for us. For example, I read Latour very late, through a chance recommendation– 1998. What sort of intellectual encounter could I have had with Latour 20 years earlier, in 1978? Not much of an encounter, clearly. I was a 10-year-old kid interested mostly in baseball at the time. And Latour was in San Diego just pulling out of his “social constructionist” phase. We wouldn’t have meant much to each other in 1978, no.

What about 1988? In other words, imagine I had read The Pasteurization of France when it first appeared in English. I was a college sophomore just getting seriously involved with Heidegger. Maybe the Irreductions appendix is just quirky enough to have interested me as a sophomore, but I probably couldn’t have made much of it.

In fact, Latour interested me largely as a Heidegger Counter-Environment. His focus on individual entities, and his wit as opposed to Heidegger’s pomposity… If I hadn’t been half-demoralized by Heidegger’s limitations (the other half, of course, was completely excited and energized) then it’s unlikely that I would have reacted as strongly as I did to We Have Never Been Modern, which didn’t even exist until the early 1990’s, unless I had been through a long and rewarding but somewhat tediously intense Heidegger apprenticeship.

The somewhat “realist” flavor to Latour was what captivated me, and that may not have been possible before about 1995. So let’s say that’s the first opening of the window– I might have strongly responded to Latour that early, but not too much earlier.

How late could the window have gone? Probably not too much later, simply because it’s harder to feel enthusiastically inspired by an author as you get older. Naturally, you never lose the ability to appreciate and incorporate good work. But the ability to be electrified by a new intellectual influence and to throw all of your eggs into the new basket is primarily a youthful ability. You need energy and resilience to do that, and you also need to be at an age where you don’t quite have your own fully developed agenda yet. Once you have that agenda, you tend to be working it out step-by-step with many complications, and new influences take a lot of energy to absorb, so sometimes you open yourself to those influences only somewhat hesitantly as you advance in years.

Let’s arbitrarily set the publication of Tool-Being (2002) as the closing of the window. I could still have read Latour after that date, and would surely have enjoyed his books very much. But they wouldn’t have sunk so deeply into my bones after that date.

That’s roughly a 7-year window for the Latour impact to be as big on me as it was. Could I possibly have missed the window? Most definitely. Even now, he is almost never mentioned in continental philosophy circles.

Take this example and shift it to other areas of life, and it becomes a fascinating theme… What was the “window” for various people who meant a lot to you in different ways? Or various books, or places, that were transformative for you? Things and people need to come to us at the right time.