How Not to Write in Law School
I've often commented that the writing style I used in grad school is somewhat different from what legal writing calls for. I sent an email to two of my friends, Gabriel and Melissa, with examples of the sorts of sentences I used to use, but switched computers since then. So I'm going to go through my Master's Thesis again, and put the list of sentences up here for the amusement of all.
1. [Sexuality] shows us to be those beings for whom being is a question – animals are not erotic, since eroticism is based fundmentally on anxiety. Finally, in designating us as such a limit, sex is tied inexorably to death, the limit of limits. And by invoking death, Foucault means to invoke both our death and the death of God.
2. It is as if, in trying to escape from the circle drawn about us by our finite lives, sexuality merely draws us back into this life more tightly, highlighting the emptiness within it. Sex might be a transcendant experience, but in this way, its transcendence is tied tightly to the immanence of the everyday. It is this emptiness, the vacuity of space, as it were, that gives rise to the “reign of the Limit.” A life in which a transcendence of the limit is meaningless is itself a life dominated by the limit, but in this case, the limit is not something external to it. This life constitutes itself as its own limit.
3. Foucault suggests that we can see in transgression a surpassing of God. If the death of God has made us all gods, transgression is the act that makes us worthy to become so. And this death of God is simultaneous with the death of Man. “The death of God restores us not to a limited and positivistic world but to a world exposed by the experience of its limits, made and unmade by that excess which transgresses it.” So man after the death of God finds that the world by which he was constituted is now empty, and so he himself is an empty construct.
4. This image of sight is simultaneously an image of the moment of sexual climax, and an image of our being, insofar as that being is inevitably hurtling towards death. Thus is sex an image of death, and at the same time one of the most primordial ways in which we seek to cheat death. Sex is not only an experience of death, but also natality.
5. This, then, is the role of transgressive language. It points to something, but the something to which it points is nothing.
6. As [this affirmation] crosses the limit, it constitutes it, and so affirms it, even as at the same time it denies it.
7. This thought is spoken by the subject who is not there; either in a language without an absolute subject, or in a language which breaks down at its center, revealing only a blind idiot god, spinning in the middle of chaos.
8. The philosopher learns, in trying to speak a language stripped of dialectics, that he is not the master of his language, but is shadowed by another, who speaks from the silence within the philosopher’s own works, another who strives to say that which cannot be spoken. From out of the void in the center of philosophy, a legion of voices cry out, the voices of one crying out in the desert, or, rather, the voices of the desert itself.
9. Against the philosopher, Foucault puts the artist, particularly those who transgress the language they speak. You know who they are.
10. Perhaps the best analogy we could envision of transgression would be that of an unsustainable orbit. The transgressor launches himself beyond the limit of society, as a satellite launches itself into orbit. But the position of the transgressor beyond this limit is unsustainable. No one can live in the empty space beyond the limit for long; at some point, the transgressor has to come back and eat a ham and cheese sandwich.
11. There is no point to transgression; or, rather, the point to transgression is that there is no point to transgression. The point of transgression is precisely the nothing to which it points.
12. So if Foucault’s work in his so-called genealogical period is concerned with the creation of man as opposed to the concern with man’s conceptual activity that marks his earlier work, this essay as celebratory of the power of transgressive literature to transcend the modern episteme is repudiated in his later work.
13. Anxiety, even as it is anxiety before the possibilities of being, is also anxiety about death, which is the ultimate possibility precisely insofar as it is the end of all possibilities.
14. As such a profanation against an empty sacredness, it affirms being as limited, and so transcends the emptiness of limited being even as it affirms it. Even as we transgress the limit, we are already falling back into the everyday.
15. Our life is defined by what is within the limit, what we do with the void of our being. We start out with nothing but chaos as our spirit moves across the waters of our being. What defines our being is what possibilities we bring out of this chaos, what sort of world we create for ourselves and in ourselves.
16. To turn to transgression as a means of artistic self-creation is merely to invert the mystical order. Rather than coming empty before the Eternal, in order to be filled, we fill ourselves with transgression in order to be empty.
17. The novella picks up in detail on a sunny spring day, and spring is, of course, the most gruesome time of the year.
18. It says the unsayable within the modern episteme by speaking the truths of a being that lies outside of modernity. But in doing so, this manner of speech is easily appropriated by the bourgeois itself. As the Other to the bourgeois’s quintessential I, it help the bourgeois define itself against the transgressive artist.
Hope you enjoyed!
1. [Sexuality] shows us to be those beings for whom being is a question – animals are not erotic, since eroticism is based fundmentally on anxiety. Finally, in designating us as such a limit, sex is tied inexorably to death, the limit of limits. And by invoking death, Foucault means to invoke both our death and the death of God.
2. It is as if, in trying to escape from the circle drawn about us by our finite lives, sexuality merely draws us back into this life more tightly, highlighting the emptiness within it. Sex might be a transcendant experience, but in this way, its transcendence is tied tightly to the immanence of the everyday. It is this emptiness, the vacuity of space, as it were, that gives rise to the “reign of the Limit.” A life in which a transcendence of the limit is meaningless is itself a life dominated by the limit, but in this case, the limit is not something external to it. This life constitutes itself as its own limit.
3. Foucault suggests that we can see in transgression a surpassing of God. If the death of God has made us all gods, transgression is the act that makes us worthy to become so. And this death of God is simultaneous with the death of Man. “The death of God restores us not to a limited and positivistic world but to a world exposed by the experience of its limits, made and unmade by that excess which transgresses it.” So man after the death of God finds that the world by which he was constituted is now empty, and so he himself is an empty construct.
4. This image of sight is simultaneously an image of the moment of sexual climax, and an image of our being, insofar as that being is inevitably hurtling towards death. Thus is sex an image of death, and at the same time one of the most primordial ways in which we seek to cheat death. Sex is not only an experience of death, but also natality.
5. This, then, is the role of transgressive language. It points to something, but the something to which it points is nothing.
6. As [this affirmation] crosses the limit, it constitutes it, and so affirms it, even as at the same time it denies it.
7. This thought is spoken by the subject who is not there; either in a language without an absolute subject, or in a language which breaks down at its center, revealing only a blind idiot god, spinning in the middle of chaos.
8. The philosopher learns, in trying to speak a language stripped of dialectics, that he is not the master of his language, but is shadowed by another, who speaks from the silence within the philosopher’s own works, another who strives to say that which cannot be spoken. From out of the void in the center of philosophy, a legion of voices cry out, the voices of one crying out in the desert, or, rather, the voices of the desert itself.
9. Against the philosopher, Foucault puts the artist, particularly those who transgress the language they speak. You know who they are.
10. Perhaps the best analogy we could envision of transgression would be that of an unsustainable orbit. The transgressor launches himself beyond the limit of society, as a satellite launches itself into orbit. But the position of the transgressor beyond this limit is unsustainable. No one can live in the empty space beyond the limit for long; at some point, the transgressor has to come back and eat a ham and cheese sandwich.
11. There is no point to transgression; or, rather, the point to transgression is that there is no point to transgression. The point of transgression is precisely the nothing to which it points.
12. So if Foucault’s work in his so-called genealogical period is concerned with the creation of man as opposed to the concern with man’s conceptual activity that marks his earlier work, this essay as celebratory of the power of transgressive literature to transcend the modern episteme is repudiated in his later work.
13. Anxiety, even as it is anxiety before the possibilities of being, is also anxiety about death, which is the ultimate possibility precisely insofar as it is the end of all possibilities.
14. As such a profanation against an empty sacredness, it affirms being as limited, and so transcends the emptiness of limited being even as it affirms it. Even as we transgress the limit, we are already falling back into the everyday.
15. Our life is defined by what is within the limit, what we do with the void of our being. We start out with nothing but chaos as our spirit moves across the waters of our being. What defines our being is what possibilities we bring out of this chaos, what sort of world we create for ourselves and in ourselves.
16. To turn to transgression as a means of artistic self-creation is merely to invert the mystical order. Rather than coming empty before the Eternal, in order to be filled, we fill ourselves with transgression in order to be empty.
17. The novella picks up in detail on a sunny spring day, and spring is, of course, the most gruesome time of the year.
18. It says the unsayable within the modern episteme by speaking the truths of a being that lies outside of modernity. But in doing so, this manner of speech is easily appropriated by the bourgeois itself. As the Other to the bourgeois’s quintessential I, it help the bourgeois define itself against the transgressive artist.
Hope you enjoyed!
posted by Mad Jurist at 10:12 AM
0 Comments:
Post a Comment
<< Home