It is never a good idea to trust the person who insists they are being totally honest with you. For one, they can only be trusted to the extent that they intend to be honest; their confessional honesty will not save anyone from their unrealized errors and self-deceptions. In this sense, honesty and other presumptions of innocence are vulnerable to a unique kind of self-deception. At the very same time, when a person who is accused of a crime they did not commit protests and maintains their innocence, they are not lying, even if they are guilty of other wrongdoings. They are being honest about their specific innocence, and any condemnation or assignment of guilt in that matter would be a form of wrongdoing, making the accusing party guilty in turn. We can distinguish, I hope, between the specific matter in which one might be lying or telling the truth and the general condition of honesty or any other generic appeal to virtue. Doubt of the latter need not eliminate any faith in the former. I begin in this curious way because I want to try to convince you, the reader, of a particular kind of honesty or good faith that, I insist, is contained in the pages to follow. In other words, against my better judgment, I want to make clear the immense degree to which I wish to not deceive you.
The pages to follow have been composed and edited without pretense. What I mean by this is perhaps better expressed in a negative way: I have carefully avoided certain kinds of compositional and editorial pretenses by accepting a series of enabling constraints. Most of these constraints were simply the material and temporal conditions of the seminars for which they were written. After the seminars were completed, the editorial process has been, so far, extremely light-handed. This light-handedness is due in part to an aspiration to let the fragility of the words and ideas remain intact and alive. I am not sure that I have succeeded, nor am I sure what success will mean for this work. It may be pretentious to assert the absence of pretense and, of course, it is only true in a severely limited way. I do not pretend to know my full intentions or inner life and I cannot claim total ownership in light of the members of the seminar who, along with a few others, contributed enormously to my thinking as I wrote and read what I wrote and then lightly amended certain things afterwards.
To be more concrete, with the exception of this Prologue and the Epilogue, this book was written en vivo in a period of seven weeks during the summer of 2019, at
The lectures were all aimed at interpreting those assigned readings, but they also took the liberty of pushing and pulling against the readings or adding context and analysis around them, obliquely. I did not do this alone. Along with my students, I made heavy use of other writings that I read as I struggled to distill the readings for myself and struggled even more to find what I ought to write about. These feverish writing sessions began as long nights, after which I slept in and then made some last-minute edits before class began at 4:30 PM each Tuesday and Thursday. As fatigue began to set in and as my readings took longer, delaying my writing, I would awake around 8 AM and write from 9 AM to sometimes as late as 4:15 PM, when I would jump on my bicycle and rush to print out my manuscript for the day in time for class. This writing ritual was repeated twelve times, ending in a live reading in each seminar, where I would often make additional comments off the page, and where questions and criticisms were often presented by the students. I made audio recordings of those sessions, but I have not gone back to them and I am not sure that I ever will. It was exhausting and, at this writing, I am quite certain that it had mixed results in every direction, pedagogical and more. I am not writing this prologue as an official preface, but, more humbly, for a review by a press. Should this manuscript be accepted, I may return to the seminar audio recording for later edits. If I do that, I expect that I will need to write another preface to account for it.
Seeking to preserve the fragility of these lectures and seminars may be sentimental and romantic or, even worse, it might be that literal sort of exercise that
I have no delusions of grandeur here, but a steady diet of these texts did eventually lead me to want to imitate them in a childish and personal way. When I was a young boy, I wondered if I could compose music, imitating the religious music I heard all around me. I would record demos on a cassette. At first, I only shared them with my sister, Gracie, who told me that I sounded like I was howling. I was discouraged by her feedback but it was an important step in what has now become a lifetime of composing, recording, performing, and playing music. I wish I had kept that tape, but it is lost now. What I like about that tape and some of the other earlier recordings I made was that it lacked pretense in a way I am trying to explain to you here and now about this book, my latest howling imitation.
I am not sure that the lack of pretense is, all things considered, a good thing. Nor am I sure that it is a good reason to publish or read a book, much less an academic work such as this. But it is important for me all the same. I also know that this raw and basic importance has been important for a few other people who are interested and invested in these kinds of studies and ideas too. I pray that it is not too much to hope, however modestly, that others may find it similarly important or at least worthwhile in some way. In this spirit, I would like to share it with you, dear reader. I have sought to compose it with a concern for preserving something about it that, if I can finally be completely honest with you, I am not sure exists at all.