A confession

I am utterly terrified of both banality and sincerity, and pretentious academic prose is my go-to defense against both. I like theory, I’m relatively good at theory, and when it’s couched in theoretical terms, there is very little about one’s life that doesn’t seem waaaaaay more interesting. To me, at least. At the same time, of course, theory has a tendency to distend, to distance—to dissolve the emotional particularity of experience and render it inert, an object of contemplation that one might appreciate as one appreciates a work of art. I’m not sure that this is a terrible thing, and not just because the unexamined life isn’t worth living. Our present culture encourages an almost entirely passive relationship to consumption; it’s very easy to get hooked into the circuits of what David Foster Wallace called The Entertainment and become pathologically deadened to any pursuit but that of pleasure. Theory can, of course, become its own trap, with its own vicarious entertainment value, but, at the very least, it provides something of a platform against which to push. If you’re gonna rub history against the grain, after all, you’re gonna need a fixed point.

That said, I do tend to be a bit over the top when it comes to these sort of things. For instance: I’ve written approximately 210 words about theory, experience, and alienation when what I really want to be writing about, what I had been planning to write about all day, is the Algerian revolution and what it means to me—or, rather, what it means to me in relation to the various intellectual traditions that have contributed to the making of this particular, theoretically-deadened, individual. For a while, now, I have been trying to find a way to write about how the Algerian revolution sits in relation to the sometimes distinct, sometimes overlapping, always shifting terrain occupied by the black radical tradition, post-colonialism, post-structuralism, and contemporary Islam. It has been very difficult. When I have attempted to explore these terms in the most highly intellectualized terms, almost all my efforts have failed, and not because it’s an impossible challenge. Ironically, perhaps, what I keep coming back to is what these different strains of thought and politics mean to me, what they make me feel, and what I feel about the Algerian revolution when I try going to figure out the meaning of these things for myself. My heart, in other words, keeps getting in the way of my head. Maybe this is the appropriately dialectical response to my typical aesthetic anesthetic: somebody who alienates his feelings through theory momentarily alienating his theory through feelings. But, of course, there I go again...

I suspect that I find it so difficult to write about these things because, on some level, my interest seems so fundamentally infantile, so unserious—as if the entire point of going to Algeria will be realized if I can get my picture taken on the Rue de Frantz Fanon. And, perhaps, my interest is just that childish, easily traced back to the first time I saw The Battle of Algiers, or the first time I read The Autobiography of Malcolm X. All I know is that Algeria has been hovering on the edges of my intellectual life for some time now and, on some level, I believe that going there will help bring everything into focus. Algeria is, somehow, the nexus of it all, the place where fifty years of distinct world histories converge. It is, perhaps, the navel of the dream we are all dreaming.