morning wrap-up

Went over to the Bastille area for Vietnamese lunch and then a big espresso with former DePaul classmate Bob Vallier. Bob recently moved from Chicago to Paris, and is hard at work on another translation, this one for Indiana University Press. Bob is a handy person to know, since he always seems to master every city in which he lives. If I wanted to know something about Chicago, he was usually the first person to ask, and the same is true of Paris.

As for Meillassoux, I worked this morning on his rather stirring treatment of the difference between the concepts of not/nothingness in Hegel and Heidegger. Here you also get a bit of Meillassoux’s take on Derrida, a figure he otherwise rarely discusses.

I was thinking of going to work in Chartres tomorrow, but it may be too crowded on a Saturday. We’ll see. It’s a note-taking week for me rather than a writing week, and note-taking has the advantage that it can be done away from the computer, and can be done quite easily in the Great Outdoors. After the side-trip to Poland I will mostly be confined indoors with electrical outlets.