On political euphemism, it is very important to note that the PATRIOT ACT (which was not patriotic) and then, rising to a new level of irony, became the FREEDOM ACT.
I read about the lives of Elena Garro and Helena Paz Garro and it was sad. Both died ill, poor and alone; Paz’ death coincided with the pomp and circumstance of her father’s centenary celebration. Garro’s self-imposed exile had to do with the tangled politics around the events of Tlatelolco, and Paz Garro was a talented person who struggled with her parents’ shadows.
About writing, I read this:
Why couldn’t the boy just have refused to sign the letter? Why the paralysis? For Freud, the unconscious was inherently conflictual, and in this example, the boy may have felt both the wish to sign and not to sign the letter. This would have stirred up his oedipal conflict with his father and the guilt that went with it. The symptom allowed him not to sign and, through the physical pain of the paralysis, punished him for his guilty wish.
This applies to many things. (I am convinced Freud is right about many things, and that he is discredited because he is too intellectually demanding and not enough of a profit center.)
Fraught is the word my friend used to characterize the situation at my university. Fraught is the feeling I have and fraughtness is the opposite of peace. It is the affective challenges, not the intellectual ones, that are hard.
I am involved too much, some would say, in service, administration, politics, advocacy; politics and advocacy are me and service and administration are extracted from me in a situation fraught with double binds. One should ignore everything and tend to one’s work, except that those who do this, can do because they have more people to share service and administration with. And the university wants you overworked, so you cannot do advocacy and politics–and it wants you to internalize that view.
And the reason I do not like academic advice is that it ignores context. “Work in the office,” it says to people who have no office (to give a simple example). Context matters. More profoundly, academic advice supposes that everything can be remedied with self-discipline and self-help; you are a neoliberal subject who, if deserving, will excel without context.
People think one should awaken in the morning thinking of discipline, schedules and getting things done, but I think one should awaken thinking of love.
Axé.
coldhearted scientist وداد 