soon, folks, soon--and some thoughts on collaboration

Have I been not posting for a month? Sure.

Things have been frighteningly busy, with academic and extra-academic deadlines. But, out of this, I can promise you my paper from the Glossator conference on which I posted previously, comments in anticipation of Kalamazoo (as soon as I get a particular paper written about Julian of Norwich and her relation to the concept of the literary by way of comparing Margery Kempe and Denise Levertov, for one Carolyn Dinshaw).

I have been working on an update for the Romance I sometimes write on put up here.

Also, I am happy to say that as of today there exists a rough document that my co-conspirator Anna Klosowska and I are at least currently willing to call something that we wrote together for an upcoming BABEL volume (I've posted on this as well, below, about Chrétien and Samuel Beckett). Actually, collaborating with Anna is fantastic. Its actually festive, like, as in, entirely rigorous and intellectual, engaged and repsonsible, and yet somehow wild and even hallucinogenic at times. In the interests of full disclosure, I should say that I've been under the sway of Amy Hollywood's writing on Bataille in her Sensible Ecstasy lately--so perhaps I'm just inclined to interpret my own scholarly endeavors with more radical and subject-shattering jouissance than one should (?). And I certainly do not mean to claim collaboration as a kind of mystic practice in a rank and file reading of Hollywood (though, if I was going to assent to a reading of theorizing as secular mysticism, she'd be the one to go to...). Nonetheless, it is possible in collaborating that every little bit you write on, each sentence or thought sent back and forth, might suddenly pop up as at once seemingly out of one's own mind as well as entirely out of that which is not the mind--making you satisfied that you are not in fact everything--and on the condition of that satisfaction, also demanding one partake of that sneaking suspicioun that there is just (in Leo Bersani's words) this All-ness. And yet, all you are doing at that point is doing a reading, sending it to a friend, and expecting a reading in return and vis-versa: for literary critics, just doing our jobs. I really like what we have written, and will perhaps put up a sneak preview of a bit of it soon.