A Wellek Lectures Person Muses on Their Recent Torture

I wonder how Fred Moten's Wellek Lectures have been going? I have been hearing great things. I loved doing those. 

I'm reading Zizek's The Puppet and the Dwarf, finally. He's right: it's his best book. 

Zizek on Kinder Surprise Eggs is taking me right back to my chapter on sugar in The Poetics of Spice. I did give it to him, he was visiting CU Boulder that year...all that stuff about voids and sugar and the subject...It was a very Zizek-inspired book in the first place... 

Some time in the middle of my inquisition on the BBC, I heard one of my arguments from 2010 being fed back to me: it is very interesting to think about the "turn" towards "nonhuman" beings, "objects" and so on as part of a nascent ecological and planetary awareness. 

It was uncanny, disturbing and irritating to hear something I had said 13 years ago, and used as part of my own transition from someone who talks about food and eating to someone who talks about ecological systems more generally, about metabolism in short...about things I was taught about in Marxist Sunday school (theory class with Terry Eagleton), that I am now reading again about in The Puppet and the Dwarf...

To hear all that used to pathologize me as a symptom of something that the Knights of St. Hegel were themselves doing. That they had been empowered to do by years of people like me struggling to even get a job, when talking about commodities such as food and social practices such as eating was totally unheard of or taboo, even in sociology, let alone in literature. 

One of them does fridges. "Fridge scholar feeds old professor their own thoughts" -- strange poem. To hear all that fed back to me a part of my torture...that was disturbing, laughable, weird. It reminded me of my colleague at UC Davis who was all about saccharine and saccharine dispensers, back in 2003. It's 2023 now. If what they think about theory and philosophy is woven into their work, I won't enjoy reading it very much if and when I do. 

Beginning his essay on the eggs, Zizek remarks, “Repulsive anti-intellectual relatives, whom one cannot always avoid during holidays, often attack me with common provocations like “What can you, as a philosopher, tell me about the cup of coffee I’m drinking?”  Once, however, when a thrifty relative of mine gave my son a Kinder Surprise egg and then asked me, with an ironic, patronizing smile: “So what would be your philosophical comment on this egg?,”  he got the surprise of his life—a long, detailed answer.”