Journal 29.05.10

This month will end in the lightheaded happiness of having closed the first chapter in life, at last. I wrote a research proposal that I´m totally happy with, even if no one is going to take it. It seems as if life could start yesterday but yet as if often happens I was way too tired to enjoy it. My sleep was amusing and unmolested and I rose early, long before the sunrise, as if thinking that life has just too much to offer for the day, I might be as well deluded into this. What is most important of the completion of the proposal is the understanding of my task as a philosopher; that is, at long last I know what Agnes Heller means: What matters about philosophy is the choice of philosophy alone. Somehow I feel relieved but also a little sad, there´s just so much put into those meager 19 pages, so much of everything. A journey of 7 years of my life into the world, it is almost a decade! All the pain and the joy, the glory and the defeat, all the houses and the hours and the lives and the deaths, own and of others, how can you fit everything into 19 pages? I´ve taken also a little taste for writing stories that reflect my understanding of time but I think the motif of the one I am writing now is just too weak and lifeless to become a good story. I must go into the world and search for more.

On Husserl: Husserl´s key point was that an object is not present to itself; it is only present as a subject

Derrida: The other is infinitely other because we never have access to the other as such

Robyn Barnacle: Consequently, for Heidegger understanding is always a relation already established between knower and the world, as a relation that manifests historically and culturally through language. This idea, that thought could be understood as relational, was a breakthrough for me – although I did not realize fully why until later. It was not until I started to find parallels to this idea in Plato´s work on Eros that my project really began to come together. If a similar conception of thought as relational could also be found in the ancients, I reasoned, then an alternative, non-Cartesian, history of thought existed.