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The Baphomet

September 8, 2015 / posted in dialectics, images of being-human, manifesto, reviews, Theory, universal nothing / No Comments

The BaphometThe Baphomet by Pierre Klossowski
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

Klossowski writes beyond our sense of realism, to bring about meditations on life, death, morality and so on, from the depths of gnostic heresy. The mix of breaths reveals the hallucinatory experience wherein hermeneutic literalness exceeds our sense of self. This is the gap inherent within language and the gap inherent within ourselves brought to page.

It’s difficult to write about this book, since it defies any sense of genre. Obviously people would say this is experimental. But it succeeds in convincing us that this view — of the intermix of personal, interpersonal, political, social, and so on — that reality is interconnected with knowledge and morality. How we live and exist among others is not an actual reality the way most of us believe, but an intermix within the gap inherent between us and others, within us and within others. We navigate this interstice often with blind faith. When we start to question the fundamentals of an ideology, or when we expect that within a view the truth will be apparent, that is where we become more lost than ever.

Although this book is a fiction it shows us something of how we are by showing us how we illicitly exist within the gaps of our knowledge by extending everything at once and contradicting itself in the point of the other.

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Interrogating the Real

June 26, 2015 / posted in dialectics, reviews, Theory, Universal non-all, universal nothing / No Comments

Interrogating the RealInterrogating the Real by Slavoj Žižek
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

Many of Zizek’s books that are less well known are kind of transistional periods for him. He writes books the way I write on tumblr, to digest information and to posture so as to try it out. If the pose doesn’t work, he discards it later on to try something else.

With this tight but small book, it becomes apparent that Zizek is after the non-changing invariance that is found in all thought, reason and experience. Through the figures of his most favorite philosophers, Zizek does two things. To show us the applicability of these concepts. And to explicate these ideas. The explication part is easy, because it’s right in our face 24/7. The applicability is more difficult. What are we to do with the organization these ideas create for us? Perhaps this is unanswerable, as Zizek himself doesn’t seem to know what to do with his own ideas. So many of these articles are poses, self-wrapping thoughts that reiterate themselves. Sometimes self titled like “beyond discourse analysis” or “hair of the dog that bit you” we get his explication of that theme through a particular theoretical angle. In his most theoretical however, we see the bare parts of the theory eventually spread out, that this maximal difference within this concept is signified, and so these two positions remain, unsynthesizable.

Later on, I believe, Zizek will realize that the Real of Lacan is breakable into two parts, the first being the Real that is unswallowable by the symbolic (so as to be expressed through pathological difference that is the characteristic of a symbolic that is always applied). The second being the pure code that is pure symbolic self-reference but lacking any way for anyone from the outside to gain access to its inner sanctum of difference. In a very real sense, this book, as I suppose all if not most of Zizek’s books, goes ahead to indulge in their philosophical rhetoric as a literal application of the first (because what else would you apply, but this philosophy?) to lead us into the heart of the second, where we have Lacanian mathemes that are left in their solemn ratios without alteration.

We are introduced to a concept, and then left holding it without any direction as to how to use it, what to do with it. Zizek is leaving us his reading glasses.

Perhaps that is the fun of Zizek. That he leads us on these journeys that act like light comedies, taking us to various different areas the way Family Guy or South Park might. Defamiliarizing familiar cultural references enough to reconfigure them in an amusing and strangely upside down deployment that shows us how their logic works backwards to resemble what they always were: purely logical organizations that take in nonsense to create nonsense. In the end these (re)organizations changing nothing about our world yet giving us insight into the way arguments by extension continually intrude in our lifeworld. This parrots the the way market brands, as material orderings, will some day arise to only quietly disappear into the void of capitalist intention, the way we visit one philosophy to briefly see who we are through them.

I would say this is an above average book of Zizek’s. It could work as an introduction as well, if you are interested.

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Critique of Pure Reason

May 19, 2015 / posted in dialectics, images of being-human, life as we know it, manifesto, rational choice theory and homo economicus, reviews, Theory, Universal non-all, universal nothing / No Comments

Critique of Pure ReasonCritique of Pure Reason by Immanuel Kant
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

So much has been written about Kant. Yes, he’s hard. He’s rammbly. He’s overbearing. But this is due in part to the fact that written in 1781, Kant did not have anyone to talk with. He lacked the ability to find other minds and interface. So in those ten years of silence he talked to himself. And he’s a bit disorganized.

So lets not quibble with the details. Instead let me cut to the heart of what he is saying, in a way that goes beyond any reading of him that I’ve come across yet.

The one aesthetic Kant is after, that allows him to hit a home run, is simply this: All concepts are regulatory.

What Kant is after is to understand the limits of what our regulatory reason can do. This can’t be a function to decide truth. This can’t be a function to decide reality. This isn’t an effort at wisdom. We can use reason to figure out the contours of contingency, of what is given to us. But we cannot use it alone to do anything.

Kant attempts to show us the value of reason in melding together different functions (be it imaginary or understanding or reason) and in this way seeks to highlight the vehicle by which we can come to grips with phenomenon. So weaknesses?

Yes, Alan Badiou is partially correct: Kant’s system requires that he created a negated structure, the noumenal upon which to hang his phenomenon. But Badiou is also partially incorrect. Kant was the first to recognize, through the figure of the transcendental, the necessity of having an apparatus of measurement upon which to solidify a phenomenal field. That is to say, phenomenon cannot interface at a consistent level unless there was a larger field to unify them as equivalent. Hence, this transcendental. Kant laid out the form for us, to quantize, to organize whatever we apperceptive. Historically, this is how Heidigger is able to note that Kant is Modernism Part II. Descartes introduces the need the for a transcendental field (in the form of the mental realm) but Kant completes his thought. Hegel is the application for this field to surject unto Absolute Knowledge.

So we miss the point when we quibble with his mathematics or his bad physics, or how he didn’t understand quantum mechanics. None of his examples matter in their detail. What matters is the principle behind this critique, one which reveals that concepts are regulatory.

And while it’s true, as Kristeva points out, Kant did not “discover” negation (leave this to Hegel as a way for him to bind according to the dialectical-synthesis process) Kant does reach negativity. Negativity is necessary as the limits for a given concept. And if you look at towards the end of this masterful work, and ignore his annoying repetition, you come to understand the antinomies are but examples of the limits of conceptualization itself.

Yes, Dedekind’s cut of real numbers or Badiou’s theory of points belie the same “cut” as Kant’s antinomies. By injecting reason in at various arbitrary positions, we can cut a dichotomy into a mass to differentiate positions. Such positions then become expressive of the cut, which we use as an absolute reference. This reference allows us to orient ourselves. So yes, when only we do not “extend reason beyond the bounds of experience” can we avoid these antinomies, Kant highlights these antinomies as way of showing how reason provides the extension of any given cut, which are always contingent by arbitrary parameters, be they a sensuous apperception or some inherited folly of the imagination. This section following The Ideal of Pure Reason all the way to the end of the work, gives us the apex of Kant’s reach. He was articulated much, but never brought it back around to exploding the limits of concepts themselves. He could only fumble and say, well, they are regulatory.

Not only are they regulatory but they are necessary for the organization, the quantization into phenomenon, inasmuch as the sensuous, as he calls it, is necessary for logic to take a stance. We need contingency to make a mark somewhere, otherwise we get nothing but pure logical presentation without any place for differentiation into a real context. It is this dual refractory nature that presents us with agential cuts to determine the nature of what is real, a mixture of contingent sensuousness and transcendental formalism. This mixture however, isn’t stable, it belies on the context of previous cuts, usually derived from our human need to have agency in limited domains.

This is the start of post-modern fragmentation of knowledge, as each domain acquires its own organizing cut.

But this is also well beyond the context of where Kant was going.

So if you keep in mind the “regulatory” nature of conceptualization, you’ll come to a fruitation that is far more radical than any reading of Kant that I’ve ever come across. I think you’ll find as well, that this radical negativity, necessary to cut concepts out of the larger folds, is why Deleuze found himself returning to Kant towards the end of his career. In this way Kant is still more radical than most anyone gives him credit for… and in this sense, his admiration for David Hume speaks volumes about where he’s going with this critique. In fact, he exceeds Hume in this way, by abstracting Hume’s explanation of human behavior as conventional habit into the modality of regulatory concepts. Kant finds the limit of reason but in doing so he is able to demonstrate how reason is utilized to supplement understanding beyond the bounds of experience. His four antinomies are but possibilities for unfounded regulations, many of which Hume would simply call “conventions”.

To wrap. I for one, am glad to have Kant as a guide. As staunch and “joyless” as he is, there is a core of clear direction within his thought that allows him to calibrate his awareness to a finely tuned point regardless of content. Kant turns rationality in on itself and is able to note the different vectors within rationality as a manifold, a field of its own connectivity. Kant adds these various example, these vectors together, rotates rationality as a vehicle of deployment and is able to find a navel limit within rationality, negativity on the one hand, sensuous apperception on the other, and the chimera of the transcendental dialectic on the third. This groundwork of pure formalism is the striking aesthetic consistency that belies German philosophy post-Kant, while marking the groundwork for the very abstract structural formalism that is to follow in mathematics and science in the 19th century and beyond. Without having the ability to negate all that does not logically follow, or being able to create limited phenomenon within a transcendental domain, we would not have any technological or mathematical achievements today.

This isn’t to say that Kant should be given credit for this because he “invented” this. Rather, he was simply the first to stake out the parameters for the nature of these kinds of endeavors, endeavors which continue to structure human experience and behavior today. No doubt, if Kant did not do this, then someone else would have formalized this exercise, eventually. Still, to one lonely man in Königsberg, thank you.

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The Seminar of Jacques Lacan: The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis

May 19, 2015 / posted in reviews, Theory, universal nothing / No Comments

The Seminar of Jacques Lacan: The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis (Seminar of Jacques Lacan)The Seminar of Jacques Lacan: The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis by Jacques Lacan
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

This is my second time reading this book.

In his attempt to correct Freud, bring him up to date, Lacan approaches the same metaphysical abstraction as so many post-structuralists. A big part of psychoanalysis’s problem stems from methodology. In order to help his patients, Freud had to determine what normalcy was. And he did this through the cultural signs that were available around him. Lacan’s abstraction of these terms is an attempt to get away from the original limits of Freud and get at the principles of what Freud was talking about. The ordering that Lacan utilizes in order to center the subject is actually pretty deft. He approaches sort of sideways, from the abstraction of human desire as drive — in doing so, he places us in relation to the subject, but only from the angles at which we can see it. The distortion apparent in the subject’s view of itself, the only part where we can come to understand itself as as being — in essence, torsion in a field of the symbolic. Whether this happens through the other, or through itself, or through drive or any other conception is not as important.

What’s interesting about this difficult structure is that Lacan’s highlight follows a very familiar path. We need to have two things to measure itself against. This could be a phallic and a drive. It could be the other and its gaze. It could be the analyst and the subject. Really, there are so many available! Each of these different metrics presents for us different normalcys, different ways of sparking what may be normal. Ultimately though, Lacan is able to get us back to normalcy only when we approach the imaginary and symbolic regimes in conjunction with their phallic suture. This master signifier becomes the unit that marks the weave of meaning, in the same way that money is used as a filter in our current civilization to codify relative values.

While this is terribly interesting and a good gauge of what Lacan is talking about, what is missing in all of this psychoanalytic structure is the need for agency. We can retroactively stamp the structure onto any story or person or event we like. But we have a hard time trying to figure out how to get us back to where we need to go. The point of all this is to find out what normal is, so that we can help patients recover their sense of person, or their direction, or whatever is wrong. And that becomes a huge issue as to why psychoanalysis starts to lose its prestige today.

Of course, this is just a seminar about the conceptual framework. But shouldn’t this approach also be considered? We take this thought for granted because, I assume, we enter the seminar already believing.

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Welcome to the Desert of the Real: Five Essays on September 11 and Related Dates

December 31, 2014 / posted in dialectics, reviews, Theory, universal nothing / No Comments

Welcome to the Desert of the Real: Five Essays on September 11 and Related DatesWelcome to the Desert of the Real: Five Essays on September 11 and Related Dates by Slavoj Žižek
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

Of course, here is Zizek again. Second time reading this book. This is a light book for him, as the chapters are short and the theory isn’t thick. Nonetheless, as always, with his dialectical switching, Zizek is interesting and insightful. One of the primary problems with those equating philosophy with truth is that it needs to be true all the way through.

Yes, okay so much of what Zizek says is sometimes conjecture. But the point is taken, and if it’s not then it doesn’t stick and it’s not useful.

What Zizek is doing here is presented 9/11 as an event in which we have a choice about the kind of world we want to live in. Nonetheless, 9/11 allowed for a further refinement in division as separate entities, like the American government, went ahead to define the field for itself (we are the victims), rather than melding the field. That conservative move to hole up created a differential in logic which of course, creates the antagonisms that we face today. This is perhaps the underlying motif that Zizek wishes to highlight through the figure of homo sacer, that much of our laws and understandings of class are determined through the difference of who is left out and how that leaving out is expressed beyond whatever political justifications may be given.

All in all entertaining to read, but simple in his point. The complexity involved is how he builds his simple point through the mediation of abstract universal figures. After all, only through mediated complexity can one arrive at a more abstract point of reference. Without that mediation, a given simple object is only itself, without extension.

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On the New

December 14, 2014 / posted in dialectics, images of being-human, reviews, Theory, universal nothing / No Comments

On the NewOn the New by Boris Groys
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

Groys is a formalist. He recasts the dialectic of subject and object in terms of valorized-profane in order to talk about the production of culture. Through the figure of art (and then conceptual theory), Groys notes the production of new as necessary to stablize the meta-position of culture. He makes these positions independent of specific content and that makes him not only a formalist but also an idealist.

One of the issues with this, is that this ideation remain ungrounded in material practices, that valorization and the profane are “indistinguishable”. Perhaps this makes him a lazy philosopher, but it’s unwelcome since the very ability for one to distinguish the two is the entire point of valorization. A stronger critique of this thought would be to say that all that we can recognize is already included in culture, and that what isn’t in culture is only recognizable through the filter of culture, so it is “not yet itself”, which begs the question of schema.

At first glance I thought he was going to outline a scheme of becoming. Umberto Eco did so in order to talk about how new information can create new categories for the new, but Groys avoided doing this difficult task. Instead he retreated into the familiar dialectical play of cultural difference to pull the new from the auspices of the void… this puts him strictly within the history of formalization as outlined in Foucault’s The Order of Things, wherein the question today becomes how can one pull content from form alone? The appeal to the void (or the Other of thought) or the attempt to think the unthinkable isn’t a new attempt. Groys puts forth a well researched and tightly knit but conservative book. In this sense, he is pretty easy to read, and serves more as a text for a sophomore for an aesthetic reading of familiar forms instead of as an earth shaking opus.

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The Gargoyle

November 12, 2014 / posted in images of being-human, love, reviews, universal nothing / No Comments

The GargoyleThe Gargoyle by Andrew Davidson
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

This story has two different themes which are inextricably tied together: love and redemption. That in itself is not so new or different, but the way in which Davidson goes about it is intensely interesting.

While the neutral background characters provide the context for understanding this story as a love story (their background romance is sneaky in the sense that it works well to do this), Davidson also intersplices many other background stories and inherent side chapters to do the same thing. None of these stories by itself is compelling. And while they provide the skeptical narrator interest at first, he soon drops this rhetoric in favor of oh, you get the point. In fact much of the narrator acts as a skeptic for us, so that we can further suspend our belief.

In that sense, it’s quite a good structure.

I did find much of the passionate pleas for love, for unconditional acceptance to be moving, probably because it’s so fantastic. But that is how faith is supposed to work, as Pascal’s Pensees work, Christianity is so inexplicable and unexplanable, we have no choice but to believe! And Davidson’s craft works in much the same way. If you are able to go with it, including the highly contingent and very fantastic characters that provide the fodder for disbelief–that each of these very different characters from very different worlds can connect with one another on such a common basis such as pure presence–in the form of love.

In that way, this book works like a multicultural manifesto, in which people from all walks of life must seek a connection to the unnamed anchor that acts as an absolute reference beyond both life and death. At this point both hero and heroine make their way through all their reincarnated lives in an effort to be redeemed. Not just through their heart, but to give up their heart through each other into the hands of a loving God.

It’s definitely a nice tale that strikes at a complete world view appropriate to the readership of probably mostly northern European/American audiences with a small smattering of Other in the form of polite Japanese discourse. And that’s cool, I guess.

One could always just read Pascal and get the same point. But then you wouldn’t get some of Davidson’s lovely lines.

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Neuter

October 28, 2014 / posted in images of being-human, life as we know it, lyrical-narratives, manifesto, reviews, Theory, Universal non-all, universal nothing / No Comments

NeuterNeuter by Hélène Cixous
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

Neuter is a difficult book to read, because Cixous starts where she starts, slightly outside the context of your storied-expectations. Through a series of opening ephigraphs, and outlines of meditations on readings and texts, Cixous draws you deeper into the cramp inner space of story, subjectivity and analyst. Both psychoanalytical and philosophical, Cixous draws the thin null space, the non-existent middle, by which we see the internal dynamic structures that sustain the situation of subjectivity.

This is another way of saying that Cixous desexualizes subjectivity, by further castrating the subject. Rather than posing the master discourse of the universal All-Father, Cixous chooses instead the mother-son relationship, in order to show how a desexualized subject, one that is reversed in their “phallic-essence” is in fact one that is null. From there, she highlights the stakes of the story itself, and the relative positions of analyst and subject.

It all seems pretty mystical though (or musical, if you like), because Cixous walks the line using metaphors and literal meanings of words. Of course words are both literal and figurative at the same time, so she plays heavily with that ambiguity. As part of the writing, the text approaches self awareness, describing its own audience as it creates its own bridges and metaphors. It questions its own page turning, layering for us an introduction that takes us out of the context and turns us back around so that we can leave behind what we are supposed to experience and begin to experience what is there, outside the context of familiarity. This heavy introduction is the chanting part of the text: dive deeper-deeper! as she drops into the very inner void, and places us in the place for a master-text within the master-text, showing us bare subjectivity and bare story as the elements of the narrative are actors in the narrative itself.

Neuter then, is Cixous’s way of castrating the story, taking out the contingencies of names, place and time, by which we read universal “common” experience through each sideline of particularity. Cixous allows us to experience the arbitrary relationships of a story, and she does this masterfully, by turning all its elements inside-out, defamiliarizing the story itself by castrating it of its essential contingencies. In a sense, she makes the story a pataphysical experience of what was previously universal. Neuter is the smallest null space one can get. Neuter is the barest outline of the essential arc. Neuter is the null subjectivity, the zero degree point of view. Truly a difficult and masterful piece of writing, controlled, deliberate and evocative.

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Being and Event

October 18, 2014 / posted in dialectics, reviews, Theory, Universal non-all, universal nothing / No Comments

Being and EventBeing and Event by Alain Badiou
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

Alain Badiou does something particularly difficult. He provides a nexus of interplay between formal mathematics (in set theory) and ontology as presented in the philosophical tradition. It’s often an understood but unacknowledged fact that explanations don’t really “explain” in so far as they translate between discourses. For this book, that is most definitely true. The intrusion of formalism into philosophy and the intrusion of nominalism into what was before a formalism that cannot name anything because it cannot decide anything on its own. The axiom of choice is “illegal” because it cannot discern nor can it choose anything at all.

In writing this review, I am a little torn between two implicit choices in how to proceed. On the one hand, I want to point out that Badiou allows us to get to the root of discursive meaning itself — in this case the axiom of foundation. In having the ability to choose what stage we enter, even if the choice is “made for us” by us, anonymously, we can extend a generic knowledge about a situation through the act of forcing a choice in which one empty term matches another, thereby in extension, naming a situation. This is a pretty delightful bit of connection here, because it allows us to then, if we want to, absent cardinals left and right. We can take this choice and begin to dissolve various limit cardinals into successor operations, in a sense, assaulting the legitimacy of ontology. On the other hand, we could as Badiou suggested, utilize the formalism of these various mathesis and recapitulate philosophy as we knew it, trace back various events and allow formalism to become a bulwark upon which we encapsulate various points of tension, defraction and inflection within the tradition. The first thought outlined above is akin to being a kind of philosophical assassin, as Deleuze called Wittgenstein. The second thought is akin to being the boring kind of conservative academic who doesn’t at all create but only hangs his hat on work by others. As Badiou said

I have to say that philosophy does not generate any truths either, however painful this admission may be. At best, philosophy is conditioned by the faithful procedures of its times (340).

I don’t find this to be damning but Badiou resolves to make the best of it:

A philosophy worthy of the name–the name which began with Paramenides–is in any case antinomical to the serivce of goods, inasmuch as it endeavors to be at the service of truths; one can always endeavor to be at the service of art, science and of politics. That it is capable of being at the service of love is more doubtful (on the other hand, art, a mixed procedure, supports truths of love). In any case, there is no commercial philosophy (341).

And that, I very much doubt, although this short quote really only betrays Badiou’s own allegiance to a very tradition topography!

I suspect some readers who are desirous to quickly get to the point may feel that this book is unnecessarily lengthy, obtuse and just plain long winded. I found with each turn, such amazement with Badiou’s terse language, his tightly compacted sentences and the immediate grasp with which he had with so many familiar thinkers, but aligned in new ways. One may find his application of set theory to be illegal, or at least not enlightening, but it is a mistake to read this book in solely in terms of set theory or solely in terms of ontology. Badiou wishes to say something about both, as One, and thus it’s difficult to separate the two from each other within imposing the traditional academic borders from which they came. Nonetheless people do so, even though people may insist that this particular set Badiou creates is non-constructible. The only way this can be done is to regulate the set to a position of being undecidable, which is another way of saying that it’s nonsense or at the very weakest, inapplicable because its terms do not align with anything that can be summarily named.

I find, counter to Badiou, I think, in this book a much deeper, darker implication. This implication mainly being that there is no real legitimacy within thought, that our ability to make sense relies solely on our ability to apply categories, to tease out, to decide what the indiscernable is by naming tentatively and then engendering a generic situation fully by extension. What about shows us however isn’t simply that discourse itself is an arbitrary set of conditions that have been formed by the inclusion of itself as an empty signifier–but that understanding itself is the acknowledgement of its own absurd axiom but through the act of repetition… that the only real tool we have for determining the truth of any discourse is the weak form of testing its consistency. Only that which remains most consistent (and applicable) remain what is to be best determined as truth, though to be sure, a truth which mostly depends on what a subject can recognize in the void.

Now, perhaps counter to some postmodernists (I hesitate to suggest that Badiou is a post-structuralist as this is the only book of his that I have read, but being a constructivist does align him with post-structuralism), Badiou does admit to there being some truth, sometimes. To be sure much of various other writers have hit upon this form of truth as contingency too, many characters whose names are probably well known to you, Zizek and Meillasoux to name two. I won’t go over their differences here, but it is suffice to say that we have come around upon a zeitgeist of sorts, wherein we cannot find any outside legitimacy so we start to assume that it comes from thin air. But this is another way of highlighting that we do have a choice in the matter. This decision is understood and made by so many already, that their version of the truth is what ought to be best for us all, if not said in words, than in action. This feels very weak to me, and it’s not where I would like to end. Badiou ends on a note of utopic joy for philosophy. Good for him. He’s started a school, perhaps. But in service of truth, he’s hammered in a procedure that suspends us in a being-in-situation that separates us from the void. If you take Badiou to his supreme conclusion, I think we end up floating in a null space, one in which we end up simply doing what we do because there’s no reason not to.

In that sense, he is right, he has not created any truth at all. He has only shown his the emptiness of nominalism as philosophy, in a way, highlighting how all is axiom of choice, made all the more jarring as it is layered upon the formalism that is set theory.

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Disgrace

September 9, 2014 / posted in reviews, universal nothing / No Comments

DisgraceDisgrace by J.M. Coetzee
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

This is a well written and enchanting book. Coetzee tells a tale of the falling of the old guard. A professor in an ivory tower, one who has all he needs in his old age, materially, status-wise, and so on… Thrown out of routine when he gets too close to his familiar prostitute, he pursues a student too young, too innocent for him, and this opens an opportunity for him to take a stance, to be someone meaningful again.

Given that he has everything to lose, he does so, even though the university, going through the motions to save face, implicitly offers an unofficial protection of him, so he could keep what he has. But instead of doing what his peers expect him to he throws everything away rather than merely saying the politically correct lines.

This seems like it should be enough for him, but it isn’t. In the middle third of the story, he stays with his daughter who is robbed, raped but refuses to go to the police. Instead she stubbornly stays on her farm. He thinks this is a lesson to him, “what men do to women” but she refuses no. It’s not. She, like him, takes a stance to risk everything, including her life and public dignity, eventually agreeing to be another man’s third wife, a man who only wants her farm, a man who she does not love… just so she could keep living in her house. He thinks this too is a lesson; he wants to rush in and save his daughter but she refuses him, refuses to recognize his authority, refuses to let him meddle in her life…

The last third of the book revisits the first two parts, as if the first time we went there was not enough. He apologizes to the dad of the student he molested. He revisists his home to see it vandalized. He revists his daughter to see her stubbornly refuse to leave, now pregnant with the child of the rapist… he throws away the last of his money to settle in a town he doesn’t care about and take a job he does not like.

He gives his daughter up to her deed, convinced that she is a fool, but also convinced that he cannot save her, he is not her father anymore.

What he does not see is that he is just like her. And as it turns out, he is just like his students. He thought his teaching wasted on them…he thought his wasted teaching taught him humility but it does not. “The irony does not escape him: that the one who comes to teach the keenest of lessons, while those who come to learn learn nothing.”

This line in context refers to how teaching humiliates him, how his lofty ideas are wasted on those who just want a passing grade. In fact, this is quite the opposite; it teaches him that he can say anything, and get away with it. But then he doesn’t get away with anything in the book, even though he thinks everything is fine.

In the end, he ends with a dead end job, euthanizing dogs that no one wants… he feels their pain, can’t stand the horror. But does so, in the end even euthanizing the dog he likes best. This is the rarest irony here, that life wastes its lofty ideas on him, giving him a “graceful” way out of each situation — yet he continually chooses the wrong situation — he chooses to be himself, to stand not for values but simply for his own will and desire, whatever that may be. This is how he could not fathom his daughter’s will, as she gave away her image, she chose not to live as a proper white woman (in holland or anywhere else) but instead, chose living among angry South Africans, in a hostile rural area. Likewise, he too gave away his image of being a dignified college professor, and then being a powerful father, impotent in the rage of the post-colonized.

All tragedies only work as tragedies because the singular one stands before the universal, to take in all of its fury… and falls short of mastering it… and are conquered by it, and eventually learn to embrace it, giving everything up to chaos and loss. In essence, this professor chooses to learn the keenest of lessons himself, he chooses to learn nothing… the very nothing that he is.

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