Intellectual Posers Unite!

This is just a guess…but the astounding amount of naiveté I have concerning the probability of a pleasant outcome of my life activities HAS to be what keeps me from turning belly up and twitching like the monster cockroach I just caught trying to squeeze his way under the weather stripping in my door.

Whatever, the reason, I came home from the library yesterday with a two foot high stack of books on critical theory, critical ethnography, Foucault, Bourdieu, cultural studies, and visual ethnography. This is largely because, during my first year at this new job, I learned that there are certain areas of the Deep South that are intellectually magnetized to attract French and/or feminist Post-Structural theorists. You know, like Taos and Sedona attract New Age hippy types and aliens?

Trust me, there’s nothing like a French intellectual to make you feel like you are trés stoopeeed. Other than, of course, intellectual-er than thou colleagues who keep referencing French philosophers and using words like post-Neitzschean, transversalist, and ethicophilosophical. Please slap me if I ever start to talk like this in public.

In any case, I’m doing academic cross-training now. I ordered the comic book-style “For Beginners” books on Foucault, Derrida, Heidegger, Marx, Saussure. I’ll have to save up for the ones on Barthes, semiotics, and Deconstruction. I’ll work my way through these at home and use websites and more library books to begin to develop a passable level of understanding... I’m thinking of this sort of like night school for the custodian who dreams of becoming an architect. There’s an interesting symmetry in that analogy, since I actually used to be a toilet-cleaning custodian. If only I had been reading Nietsche in my spare time back then, instead of running to the mall with my check to buy clothes for the club. Question to self: How young is too young to begin introducing one’s daughter to existentialism?

I have to admit, there is something inherently sexy about being able to use “post-Heideggerian” in a sentence. I’m just aspiring not to make people shoot beverages out their nose when I do it.