The weekend

I've just returned from a weekend away with the philosophy department. We stayed in a nice place in the countryside, and listened to papers in between eating and going for walks. On the first evening, I gave a short talk (students are encouraged to introduce and discuss a topic that they are interested in) about Bataille's economics. I presented Derrida's challenge - 'the gift is impossible' - and then tried to bring everything back together through the distinction between general and restricted economy. I attempted to explore the possibility of transposing aspects of one type of restricted economy (say, one based on potlatch) onto another type of economy - in our case, capitalist economy based on acquisition and accumulation. My conclusion? That the gift event and the theft event have the same potential for disrupting contempary modes of exchange. It was good fun, especially since I made sure to give an analysis of Bataille's apothegm: "the sexual act is in time what the tiger is in space."

As you can imagine, the primarily analytic audience just loved it.

Matches, in his talk, wondered why we don't all want to be short-sighted, two-dimensional egoists, if that means we get to be liked and have lots of money and possessions. Hmmm, that's something for all of us to think about. While waiting to transfer onto that MBA course.
On the final day, Mon introduced Tarkovsky's Mirror, which we subsequently watched. I thought it marvellous, but I definitely need to see it another two or three times. True to form, Matches was puzzled: "what was that all about?" Sigh.