an Eagleton anecdote, told by Eagleton

The death of Colin Wilson is leading to the reprinting of a number of newspaper articles about him, including one by Terry Eagleton, HERE. But what really interested me in Eagleton’s piece was the following mortifying (though amusing) anecdote:

“I was once browsing in an Oxford bookshop when I came across a display of books offering simplified accounts of various subjects: Physics Made Simple, Astronomy Made Simple and so on. I caught a glimpse of a friend of mine standing before the display, a distinguished Oxford philosopher, who was leafing idly through the Philosophy Made Simple volume. Seizing the chance of a jest, I crept up behind him and murmured in his ear ‘That’s a bit difficult for you, isn’t it?’ He swung round in alarm, and my first thought was that he had had cosmetic surgery. But it was not my friend at all. It was a complete stranger. Muttering a few words of apology, I scampered out of the store.”

It may have been minor karmic payback for a minor moment of snobbery on Eagleton’s part, though I appreciate his candor in telling the story (as well as his candor in discussing his 16-year-old “existentialist” phase). I do recall Eagleton being less than polite to one of our Cairo undergraduates who naively asked him the digressive question, unrelated to Eagleton’s lecture, about whether he preferred Obama or McCain in the shortly forthcoming U.S. election.

In any case, I don’t share the widespread contempt among intellectuals for such books. If you look over the list of available volumes in any such series, you’re bound to find a few from which you could benefit. (The one I keep meaning to buy, assuming it exists –as it must– is “Cricket for Dummies.” Thus, I could hardly blame a cricket player for reading “Philosophy for Dummies.”)

What makes Žižek’s remarks on the “Shakespeare Made Easy” series in The Parallax View so funny is not that he briefly scores points at the expense of the series, but that he uses the series to make a clever philosophical remark about the non-literalizability of literary content.

In fact, this is one of the things I love most about Žižek as a human character. He’s not really a snob (I know some people find him to be a snob about some forms of pop culture, but I wouldn’t put it that way.) He’s not always nice about the things he dislikes, but this almost never takes the form of a sneering dismissal. The sneer is not a Žižekian weapon. Instead, he invests himself passionately in actually occupying a position other than the one he critiques. This is connected with his distaste for “beautiful soul” positions in politics, and that, I think, is Žižek’s most lasting contribution to political discourse, beyond any of his flagrantly unpopular positions.

Here’s an anecdote from my own experience, concerning a lecture by Žižek that I attended at Birkbeck in 2006. In it, Žižek made one of his frequent passing digs at Buddhism. The first question from the audience was an angry riposte from a Buddhist monk, who if memory serves was actually wearing a saffron robe (I doubt Žižek knew he was there, even unconsciously– the room was simply too full). Some intellectuals in Žižek’s position may have made disdainful gestures and moved on to the next question. Instead, Žižek enthusiastically doubled down and continued his assault on Buddhism in a briefly heated one-on-one argument that was surrounded by the inevitable cloud of laughter.

In a certain sense, it may always be rude to make public insults against people’s religions like that. But what I admired in the situation was that Žižek didn’t try to place himself in a position transcendentally superior to that of the Buddhist monk. Instead, he placed himself on the exact same level, and expended actual energy in fighting the arguments of the monk.

This is the sort of thing that gives Žižek his endearing comical streak, but also the thing that makes him so refreshing as an intellectual. We are all much better off for his decade-long run (and still running) as the most prominent public figure in continental philosophy– a term I continue to use without the least trace of irony.

it actually snowed in Cairo

The news stories say it was for the first time since 1901, which I’m willing to believe, though my colleague Shahinaz (a native Cairene) says it snowed once in the 1960s and another time in the 1980s.

Cairo isn’t hot all the time. I tried to make it through my first year in Egypt without owning a jacket, but had to cave in around Christmastime and buy one. It can get pretty chilly, especially at night. They don’t bother investing many resources in heated buildings, since most of the time it would be a waste, but that means that when it does get cold, you can be miserable even indoors. And it’s a deep, wet, bone-chilling cold when it comes.

Nonetheless, snow is almost unheard of. Cold is rare, and precipitation even more so, and the conjunction of the two is worse than rare.