Please forgive the dust, the cobwebs, the sepulchral silence that has befallen this site as of late… unless you’re into that thing, and given the topic, it’s likely you might. But it’s no excuse for the appalling boredom and lack of new material. My only excuse is that I’ve been hammered, er, I mean, hammering away at the prospectus for my doctoral dissertation. And yesterday morning, Boxing Day, I boxed it up and sent it off. There will be pain – oh, yes, overflowing tumblers of sweet, delicious pain and hours, dreadful hours stretched to ennui before I can rightfully assume the title of “Doktor Leech” but this first hurdle has been, well, hurdled.
The topic of the dissertation might also amuse readers of this blog because it is about fear. Specifically it’s a philosophical examination of fear from the perspective of epistemology (how we know the things we know) and aesthetics (the meaning of our sensations.) I eschew both enlightenment rationality and postmodern irony for an approach I’m calling encouragement. Blah-blah, blah and blah. My favorite section is the one where I get to talk about horror movies. I picked the Saw franchise because it’s a franchise which allowed me to discuss it as an economic object, it got sucked up in the whole “torture porn” discussion which allowed me to discuss it as a social object. And then of course it’s relatively novel with respect to the serial killer as social critic sub genre. Yawn. I know you’re falling out of your chairs. But there’s also dollops of Hegel and Adorno and Nietzsche and maybe a spatter of Freud and Sun Tzu and Seneca, Aristotle, Horace… yup, it’s a regular Kellog Variety Pack of philosophers.
It’s not done — in fact, I’ve just *started* throwing my heart to the dogs — but it’s noticeably closer than it was a week ago. Someone give me a shout out, will ya?
