Spring Break Abroad
For the first week of spring break, I was on the road for Wesleyan, which gave me the opportunity to meet with far-flung members of the University. Our first stop was Paris, a city that I’ve lived in for long stretches of time and really adore. We had a few days to catch up with old friends and colleagues—in my case, philosophers I’ve known for forty years and an anthropologist I’ve known since the 1990s. I was struck by the similarity of some of the issues they, like American academics, are facing. Artificial Intelligence is on the minds of many, with one of my friends, Jean-Michel Besnier, just publishing N’ětre plus qu’un objet: La tentation d’oublier la vie. How can we be more than objects, and how do we understand the desire to become an object among other objects. My anthropologist buddy Carlo Severi has been working on images, community, and memory for as long as we’ve known one another, while my old friend Marc deLaunay is a Nietzsche specialist, most recently publishing on Nietzsche and race. What a pleasure to reconnect!
We had more than 50 Wesleyans attend a reception hosted by the Lieber family, and it was so much fun to catch up with old friends, meet new folks, and chat with our undergraduates in our study abroad program. The pride in alma mater was as strong as I’ve ever seen it.
After Paris, I went on to Vienna to be part of a panel discussion at the Freud Museum about ways that democratic practices can resist tendencies to authoritarianism. The event sold out, and it will soon be available to watch on YouTube. I’ve worked with the Freud Museum over many years, and one of the highlights of my professional life was curating an exhibition, Freud: Conflict and Culture, that traveled from Washington and New York to the State Library in Vienna. That was in the 90s, and so it was like a homecoming of sorts to be back in Vienna and talk about memory, history, and politics.
I even found a little time for some chamber music in Peterskirche, an extraordinary Baroque church. And now onward toward the last part of the semester!
