Second Painting: A Nihang Singh riding his horse

Third Painting: A sikh combing his hair with traditional comb

These paintings are copyrighted material. Therefore any copying, reproduction or redistribution in any form is not allowed. Please contact the artist through his website if you are interested in knowing more about these paintings.

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And just when I start getting down, after a long bus ride when the audience faces start to fade from memory and I start to wonder - did it really make a difference? That's when I watch some of the videos and get inspired all over again.

There are now hundreds of "If I were Prime Minister" videos up on the tour website (www.davidsuzuki.org). Some are silly. Some are inspiring. Some are familiar faces and others complete strangers. But they are all Canadians who have ideas on what our politicians can do to make Canada a world leader in sustainability.

And that's just the point. I don't want to cross the country talking at people. Our goal is to get people talking with each other. Sharing ideas. Pushing our leaders to get serious about the environment. Canada's oncevaunted environmental reputation is falling apart, and no politician has picked up the pieces yet, let alone started putting them back together. I'm hoping my audiences will stand up and exercise their rights to demand real change.

The videos are one way to do that. At each event, young Simon, our videographer, is there ready to record clips of people expressing the kinds of changes they would make if they were prime minister. Sometimes people are shy, but more often than not, Simon is practically mobbed by people wanting to express their opinions. That's especially true of the realityTV generation, who has been raised under the blinking light of a camcorder and has few reservations about talking to one.

All those videos will eventually go up on our website, if they aren't there already. And the beauty of the internet is that you don't have to actually come out to an event to put up a video. YouTube has made video posting accessible to anyone with access to a computer. You can watch, rate and even comment on all the posts. It's an easy and democratic way to get your point across. And at the end of the tour, we're going to send all the videos to the party leaders.

We've been fortunate on the tour to have earned the support of a number of wellknown Canadians. I was recently interviewed on Much Music with hiphop artist kos, for whom I have great respect. And singersongwriter Sarah Harmer even performed at one of our events. Ms. Harmer is an impressive musician and passionate about conservation.

But while I really appreciate support from amazing people like these, the videos that really blow me away are from average Canadians who are clearly so passionate about environmental issues. There seems to be a growing sense that for too long we've tried to separate our environment and our economy into two separate and distinct entities.

That's caused huge problems in our society, because our environment is our home and it is finite. Our economy, on the other hand, is predicated on relentless growth and considers environmental issues "externalities," as though they don't really matter. Yet, they do matter because today with problems like global warming we are seeing what happens when endless growth meets a finite system.

What we need now is to rationalize our economy with ecological reality. This means we need to shift our economy to be cleaner and smarter. We need to stop subsidizing polluting industries. We need to create targets and timelines to reduce pollution to levels that do not jeopardize our natural systems. It means our environment, not our economy must be the real bottom line.

Originally published on Feb 16, 2007

Dr. David Takayoshi Suzuki is distinguished Canadian geneticist who has attained prominence as a science broadcaster and an environmental activist. He is also a co-founder of the David Suzuki Foundation.

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With the rapid expanding and evolving of biotechnology, new terms are entering the nomenclature at a rapid pace (from the preface), though they are not easily understandable except for a small group of experts. It is important for scientists of other branches to keep abreast of the latest terminology and necessary for non-professionals to understand buzzwords such as "Apo A-1 Milano", "CD95 Protein", "FRET", "hedgehog signaling pathway", "lysophosphatidylethanolamine". "Glossary of Biotechnology and Nanobiotechnology Terms, Fourth Edition", is "a handy reference designed for people with little or no training in the biological and chemical sciences" (from the back cover) written for the aforementioned purposes.

The book provides the definitions of biotechnolgy and nanobiotechnology terminology which includes terms from the fields of biology, biochemistry, chemistry, and nanotechnology. The current book is a result of the author's effort of continuing improvement over a decade since the first edition published in 1993. The current edition contains 402 text pages, more than two and half times of the first edition. In this edition, the author has added "nanotech" terms relevant to biotechnology to the glossary (from the preface).

The book is intended for "anyone working directly or indirectly with those pioneering the frontiers of modern biology" (from the back cover). The author has written the book for readers without necessarily holding advanced degrees in biochemistry or molecular biology and made certain compromise between absolute scientific rigor and definitions based on analogy, with the inherent possibility of oversimplification (from the preface). The cross reference after each item is extensive and provides the logical connections with other items for readers to explore relevant topics.

Some comments about the book are in the following. The cross-references would be ideal in a hyperlink form such as an online format or in a companying CDROM. I found by Google that an online format is available for its earlier 2nd edition [1]. However, the content there is not as updated as the current 4th edition. Definitions can be more illustrative with color figures. especially for those items about cell, protein or DNA structures. Moreover, I do not agree with the statement on the back cover that the book "allows one to follow a reference chain that enhances clarity right down to a high school level." Extra efforts and references are required to fully understand the analogies and examples. Finally, let me quote one interesting comment by Eleanor Randall in the review of the same book: "As I began this review, I needed a clearer definition of nanobiotechnology and its relationship with bionanotechnology. Interestingly, the title term nanobiotechnology was not included in The Glossary and, in the preface, one finds the term bionanotechnology used." [2]

The book will help one keep current with the biotechnology and nanotechnology terminology, communicate successfully with those working on the cutting-edge of modern science and enter interdisciplinary collaborations. This book is recommended to scientists, engineers, attorneys, government workers, lobbyists, venture capitalists, and university tech transfer staff, especially for personnel with no advanced training in biological and chemical sciences to understand concepts and buzzwords that are indispensable to their work. Nevertheless, biotechnologist, who is probably only an expert in one of the diverse areas of biotechnology, and advanced students in one of the many biotechnology fields, may find it useful.

References
1. Glossary of Biotechnology Terms, 2nd Edition
[http://biotechterms.org/] Technomic Publishing Company, INC;

2. Randall E: Book Reviews: Glossary of Biotechnology and Nanobiotechnology Terms.
Issues in Science and Technology Librarianship 2006, Spring:http://www.istl.org/06-spring/review1.html.

Glossary of Biotechnology and Nanobiotechnology Terms
American Soybean Association, St. Louis, Missouri, USA Fourth edition.
Edited by: Kimball Nill.
CRC Press, Taylor and Francis Group, Boca Raton, FL; 2006.
416 pages. ISBN 0-8493-6609-7

About the reviewer: Ming Jiang is with LMAM, School of Mathematical Sciences, Peking University, Beijing 100871, China

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Heidegger would have gotten very different results if his perspective were the history of power instead of the poetics of truth. Or indeed if he had chosen to heed other temples besides the ones at Paestum, or other poets than Hölderlin, if, for example, he had actually listened to Trakl instead of making him say what he must have meant! Or if he had listened to James Joyce, e. e. cummings, or Mallarmé.
–Demythologising Heidegger, John D. Caputo

We have all been warned against creating entries for encyclopaedias. So when a book suggests the possibility of a signpost like this one:

The Modern Word’s natural response is to follow the labyrinthine way suggested by the sign, rather than create a scene by declaring this or that to be the case. This invariably becomes a search for both origins and destinations, the maker of the sign and the place it points to.

The labyrinth has been kind this time – sometimes it is cruel and indicates only dead-ends and signs without substance. This time, the labyrinth directed us straight to the maker himself, John D. Caputo, author of the opening gambits (but not as such) above, distinguished philosopher, writer, and thinker.

After Derrida, Caputo makes use of the term “jewgreek,” a fictive phrase in which extremes are said to meet, but one within (and outside of) which much else of great consequence occurs.

You and I, for example.

From Joyce through Derrida to Caputo there runs a filament – jewgreek – which is intriguing to Joyceans and philosophers, not just because of its genealogy, but because of its destination. As to where that destination lies, it is surely not a single site or a particular place, but our very selves.

Emmet Cole: The first-name John appears on the spine of your books, yet I have found instances in let’s say, less formal environs (including your initial email reply to my request for an interview, for example) of a different first-name – Jack. Is John the author and Jack the man? Which is your proper name? Which is the proper name?
John D. Caputo: You had no way to know this, of course, but that is a very deep question for me, touching upon my whole destiny (if I have one!). Everything is at stake in this question. My “proper name” is John. As you well know, one of the central theoretical problems in what Derrida calls “deconstruction” is the impossibility of the proper name; if it were possible, we would not be discussing this question of my name. But for me the name “John” resonates with nuns, with religious sisters. I think of being a small child in grade school, terrified of those black-and-white figures that hovered over me, like angels of terror, delegates of heaven and hell, of dark powers and vast cosmic forces. I’m sure they were unselfish and very good women, but some of them, I think, were teaching grade school because they loved God, not us. At any rate, they scared the daylight out of me – and they called me “John,” where everyone else, my family and my friends, called me “Jack.” So my world divided between John/Jack, the outside hostile “world”/the familial and familiar. All my life everything “official” and impersonal went under the name of “John.” When I began to publish, I used “John D.,” which was meant to build a wall as high as possible around that scared little boy back in grade school that I am (was/will always be).

What gives this question added depth for me has to do with Jacques Derrida. In 1989 Jacques Derrida published a journal, a kind of quasi-Jewish slightly atheistic Confessions that clearly alluded to St. Augustine’s Confessions, in which he revealed that his name is actually the American name “Jackie.” (Incidentally, St. Augustine’s homeland, ancient Numidia, is modern day Algeria, and Derrida lived as a child on the Rue St. Augustin.) “Jackie” is also a feminine name, the familiar form of Jacquelyn, in French (and English), which among many other things suggests a kind of miscegenation (cousin/cousine) of which he would approve. It was a popular custom among Algerian Jews in the 1930s to name their children after American movie stars, and “Jacques” was named after Jackie Coogan, a child star who had appeared with Charlie Chaplin. When Derrida first began to publish, he decided he could not use a name which seemed ridiculous, so he followed the phonic flow from Jackie to Jacques, although of course “Jack” is the nickname for John/Jean. So it turns out that we have the same name, and one of my most bitter-sweet moments was when, shortly before his death, Jacques signed his last letter to me “Jackie.” Jacques/Jack was torn by the same tensions; we suffer from the same anxieties! As my work makes extensive use of deconstruction, I wrote in one of my books, “I do not know where to draw the line in this game of Jacks.” I cannot remember sometimes whether he said something, or this was a way I put something he said, or I just said it “myself” (if there is one.) We could spend this entire interview on this question, because in one way or another everything is there.

I ask because the pairing of author and man resonates with the pairing of philosopher and ethical actor, which resonates with Greek and Jew. May I call you john jack in honor of this attractive proposition?
That would please me greatly. In fact, it would touch my soul. That would also be, in a certain way, Rousseau’s name, who also wrote a famous Confessions. We could cover everything we have to say under this distinction.

John Jack, I never fail to recommend Demythologising Heidegger (or How to Recover From Reading Heidegger, as I call it) to those with an interest in the great German, especially those I suspect may be susceptible to falling under the sway of his bewitching prose. I may prescribe Demythologizing Heidegger as medicine, but what were your intentions in writing it?
I wrote it as a medicine for those who were susceptible to the sway of his bewitching prose. (Did you say that I did? Is your middle name “Jack”?) You are exactly right. In the de-Nazification hearings that followed WW2, Karl Jaspers, the much respected German philosopher and contemporary of Heidegger – Jasper’s wife was Jewish and barely escaped the camps – was asked about “what to do” with Heidegger, who was at the least a fellow traveler of the Nazis. Should he be relieved of his position, deprived of his pension, etc.? In answering this question Jaspers said that he thought that Heidegger’s relationship to his students was “unfree.” He meant Heidegger was a spell-binder, a word wizard, so that while Heidegger was constantly appealing to us to “think,” the effect he often produced was thoughtless acolytes who simply processed behind him, chanting words like Ereignis, physis, aletheia. One of Heidegger’s “discoveries” was that Being qua Being speaks only Greek and then, as a supplement and only when it is necessary, Being uses German, which is the spiritual kin of Greek. Heidegger confided to us, that his French friends – surprisingly, there was actually a groundswell of support and admiration for him among the French after the war, including Jean-Paul Sartre – confided to him that when they want to “think,” they have to switch to German! Presumably, when they want to make love, they stay with French. I think they also dine in French, although Heidegger does not go into these, presumably ontic matters. This so-called “spiritual kinship,” of course, is a function of the retardation of the German language. Because of the political disarray of Germany before von Bismarck, the language did not modernize as quickly or as thoroughly as other modern languages, and so did not complete the process of substituting word order for endings. That is why it is still highly inflected and, for that reason, is grammatically more like Greek and Latin. Now as Derrida said, all of this would be extremely funny were it not so dangerous. It is not only a ridiculous thing to say, but it is dangerous, a ruse in which a vicious nationalism and an enormous political stupidity and blindness makes its nest. This was in many ways a rehearsing of a myth that began with Winckelmann about Germania, the place where everything Great and Greek and Originary finds its modern home. Of course, that gives the German people its calling, its vocation, its mandate to lead the West by whatever means necessary out of the darkness, a darkness which Heidegger thought had settled in an especially deep way upon the United States and the Soviet Union, between which Heidegger thought – this was really as much political insight as Heidegger’s “thinking” (Denken) could muster – there was not a dime’s worth of difference. The Nazis could never figure out what their revolution had to do with Heraclitus, but they were glad to have a famous philosopher on their side and glad to hear that “the Greeks” were also on their side.

At a certain point, after many years of studying Heidegger quite faithfully – I even wrote to him, once – I just could not stand this stuff any longer and I decided to lay out my case. So I am kind of Heideggerian apostate and that is how the acolytes treat me. But do not misunderstand me. I do not want to lynch Heidegger, or dismiss him. I was myself in the beginning – this was my first “research program” as they call it in academicese – deeply interested in the convergence between what he called “thinking” (and the thinking that “called” him, as he said in a well known book called in English What is Called Thinking?) and the late medieval mystical tradition whose peak I myself would locate in Meister Eckhart, in whom the young Heidegger had a serious interest. Heidegger made many important breakthroughs about poetry, metaphysics and technology, and he opens the space within which continental philosophy in the second half of the twentieth century takes place. Those who want to simply jettison him go too far. But he has a dark side; he is a spell binder, with an unhealthy oracular voice, telling a too simple and highly elitist and Romanticized story, and he has a tendency to produce not thought but epigones who simply incant what he says, who divide the world up into those who are inside and those who are outside their little esoteric world, and who translate his books into no known language, certainly not English.

James Joyce is mentioned a couple of times (sufficient to warrant this exchange, of course) in “Demythologizing Heidegger.” How did “James Joyce” – a proper and mighty name if ever there was one – find its way to the tip of your pen?
Through Derrida, and I pursued Derrida’s texts on Joyce in The Prayers and Tears of Jacques Derrida even more than in Demythologizing Heidegger. Before Derrida, I had not made any special effort to get to know Joyce beyond what any literate Anglophone would know. Even under the prodding of Derrida I have not become competent in Joyce, which as you know was the first thing I said to you when you approached me about this interview.

You mention Joyce as a representative of a “jewgreek” perspective – an alternative voice that might have saved Heidegger from himself, specifically his totalizing tendencies. First, what does the term “jewgreek” represent? But also, what saving qualities does it hold?
This famous Joyceanism requires a little background. In 1964, Derrida wrote a now classic article on the relationship of the Jewish philosopher Emmanuel Levinas to Edmund Husserl (the founder of “phenomenology”), whom Levinas deeply admired but criticized, and Heidegger, whom Levinas not only criticized but detested (he had lost most of his family in the Holocaust). In this article, one that helped make both Derrida and Levinas famous, Derrida who up to a point is defending Heidegger and Husserl, refers to them as these “two Greeks,” by which he meant philosophers, heirs to the style of thinking both founded by and still today largely derived from what was started by the Greeks, especially Socrates, Plato and Aristotle. That was said to differentiate them from Levinas, the Jew who was also a philosopher, the philosopher who was trying to expose philosophy itself to its “other,” to another voice, one that had its roots in the biblical tradition, where God is “wholly other,” and especially in the prophets, who call for justice. This is an ancient distinction, one that goes back to the discourse to the Greeks about the unknown God that Luke attributes to Paul, and to Tertullian’s famous question, “what does Athens have to do with Jerusalem?” Now a crucial part of the Heideggerian “myth of Being” is a myth of monogenesis, that the “West” is a Greek creation, which means that everything Jewish and Christian is a distortion of its originary essence, a “fallenness” from Greek primordiality. Levinas hated this, and rightly so. As Derrida says, Levinas was trying to interrupt this monologue or soliloquy of philosophy with itself, to push philosophy beyond itself, to widen philosophy’s circle, the result of which would be a new and very radical version of what Levinas called, in the language of Greek philosophy, “ethics.” The result would be not anti-philosophy but philosophy radicalized by biblical ethics, not a philosophy of “Being” (Heidegger) but of what is “otherwise than Being” (Levinas). What Levinas intended, and this was the “saving” element he was introducing, was to break up the hegemony of the paganism and aestheticism that is represented by Heidegger’s “Being” and to insist upon the central fact of ethics and human suffering. Remember the Holocaust.

Now when Derrida comes to the end of this brilliant article, and he wants to summarize what he is saying, to encapsulate it, to give us a way to remember this extremely careful and complicated analysis, he turns to James Joyce. Are we Greeks? (Beauty, truth.) Are we Jews? (Prophetic justice.) Are we one before the other? Can we even say “we”? We live in the difference between the two, Derrida answers, in the space that opens up between them, the space called (Western) “history.” Is this “between” to be understood as a Hegelian synthesis of Greek and Jew (something that Levinas would profoundly contest, for that synthesis would “assimilate” the Jew)? Or it another kind of relationship, less a synthesis than an odd “coupling.” Then Derrida says – this is the final line – “what is the meaning of the copula in this proposition from perhaps the most Hegelian of modern novelists: “Jewgreek is greekjew. Extremes meet.”
Now I leave it to you, or to what Derrida calls the academic Joyce industry, to explicate what that text means for Joyce...

In Ulysses Gramophone, Derrida writes of his fear of addressing Joyce experts, the Joyce industry. I do hope you don’t feel the same way, I can assure you that I am neither expert nor particularly industrious.
I feel less fearful hearing you say that. Then let me tell you what this means for Derrida, which is also what I have in mind whenever I use it. It refers to the irreducible complexity of what we call too simply, as if there were one, “society,” “tradition,” “history.” It refers to the illusion of monogenesis; it is a name, an emblem, for pluralism, polymorphism, polygenesis, and for prophetic justice. (Back to Jacques’s name: we do not know what his proper name is or whether it is masculine or feminine.) It is a name for no proper name, no simple identity that is identical with itself, and hence a name for hospitality and welcoming the other. I say it is an emblem because, in itself, it too, like an name, is immensely limited, since it excludes, right off, and very fatefully today, the Arab, the Palestinian, the non-European, not to mention the African, the Asian. Let us say that “Jewgreek is greekjew” means what St. Paul says, when he says “there is neither Greek nor Jew, male nor female, master nor slave.” It is a name for the non-exclusionary. Not the encyclopedic assimilation of differences into a higher unity but the simultaneous patchwork peaceful co-existence of differences, which is not a bad way to describe what is today called “postmodern.”

However, I couldn’t help noticing in the same work, that at one point Derrida asks “What right do we have to select or interrupt a quotation from Ulysses?” There’s a certain illegitimacy, Derrida observes, in such an appropriation. Placing aside proprietorial questions, questions of Joyce’s ownership of the text, how do you justify spinning Joyce’s thread into your own work? What kind of connection is established when a philosopher draws on fiction?
I should begin by saying that, in the particular case of Joyce that we are discussing – in another text I myself made use of Joyce’s “The Dead” – I am drawing less on fiction than on Derrida, who is drawing on fiction. Still, the question stands. I would say two things. First, the reinscription of a text from fiction in a philosophical text should derive from a reading that also observes the classical protocols, that has worked very hard at reconstituting the sense of the text, its original language, its context, etc. Only then will this reinscription be productive and not simply capricious. But reinscription is both necessary and inevitable; texts do not have a meaning so much as they a history. It will be done anyway, so let us do it well. Secondly, philosophy should turn to literature for instruction, not illustration. Philosophers often “use” literature as an “example,” to “illustrate” a point that has been independently established by philosophy. That is dabbling with literature. I think philosophy must submit to literature, be humbled by it, and allow itself to be taken by it to a place that left to its own resources it cannot go. That is also how I feel about biblical texts, and what Levinas was saying to the philosophers: here is a voice you have not heard before. Incline your head, hear it well.

The qualities you attribute to the jewgreek perspective, seem to me to have a lot in common with the values of experimental fiction, especially in virtue of the fact that experimental fiction does not privilege any archê-typal mode or manner of writing. Do you agree that the spirit of experimental writing has much in common with the term “jewgreek,” especially in as much as it consists of marks and erasures and is a call to the particular?
I answer this question only on the condition we both agree that I am completely incompetent to answer it, as I have not studied experimental fiction. But it is a tradition of long and venerable standing for philosophers to answer questions about which they have no competence. Sometimes they even get lucky and say things that are actually right. But what strikes me first about your question is that the answer must be yes if only because Derrida is himself an avant-garde and highly experimental writer. If you look at the simple typography of Glas, with a line down the middle dividing two different texts, one about Hegel, one about Jean Genet, and the little windows inside both columns with still other continuous texts; or the “love letter” format of Postcard; or the autobiographical text of “Circumfession” running at the bottom of the page of a book up above “about” “Derrida,” etc. All of those inventions constitute so many experiments aimed at establishing what he called the “end of the book,” the delimitation of the claim of the book to be a little, or even a big, encyclopedia, which tells the whole story with a beginning, a middle and an end, in a clean edition, with nothing spilling over the margins. These techniques are all so many ways to draw a zone of absolute respect around the singular, the unclassifiable, that which resists enclosure within one genre. That is also why Derrida has so deeply scandalized the professional philosophers, the philosophy industry, who rend their garments when they read his texts. I take that back. Most of them never read his texts – but they rend their garments anyway, based upon what they read about deconstruction in Time Magazine.

Experimental fiction descries inner (and outer) logic, and delights in self-consciously subverting its own logic. How do you think this relates to the jewgreek equation?
We could, if we took enough precautions, let this formula, “jewgreek,” be a stand-in or emblem for all these effects, the point of which would be to produce a new reading. Such deconstructive “subversion” is what Derrida is always talking about, and it is what his books do. In a certain sense, when the young Derrida read James Joyce, he must have felt what Harold Bloom called the anxiety of influence; he must have wondered what there was left for him to do. Of course, there was always a certain ambiguity of Joyce for Derrida, both a glory and a weakness. Joyce’s greatest work was the unfolding, the embodiment, the enactment of deconstruction, that is, the exhibition of the labyrinthine weavings of language, the uncontainable dissemination of the play of differences. But the ambiguity of Joyce for him, his criticism of Joyce, was that he saw this huge and rhizomatic sprawl of differences as a Hegelian gesture, an attempt to encompass everything, to write an encyclopedia.

One key element of your project in “Demythologizing Heidegger” is justice. Can you explain what you mean by the term justice and why you think it is undeconstructible? How does justice avoid becoming another archê if it is always already inviolable?
This is something that religious thinkers have always understood but it took Levinas to instruct the philosophers about it. In the classical – let us say “Greek” – concept of justice, justice is blind. A just law is a universal principle that applies equally to all, that contains no proper names (proper names again!). When politicians write laws that in reality only apply to one person, although their proper name is never used, we call that corruption or political influence. But on the concept of justice that I advocate, justice has to do with only proper names, by which I mean that justice had to do with the singularity of each one of us, precisely in our singularity. The Book of Justice would be then the Book of Proper Names, or what Levinas calls the “Judgment of God,” for it has to do with what befits each one, even the least among us, in the singularity of their heart and mind. It would be like a map that is so perfect that it is the same size as the region of which it is the map. That perfect map, of course, would be a perfectly useless map, and impossible. That is why we distinguish justice, which is the impossible of which we dream, from the “law,” which tries to be as just as possible while remaining in its blinded schematic condition. Now I say this is a more biblical model than a Greek one, more “Jew” than “Greek,” because it has to do with the one lost sheep, not the ninety-nine safe in the fold; the lost coin; with the secret in our hearts that is known only to God; with counting every hair on our head, counting every tear. These are biblical models of justice, not to be found in Plato or Aristotle or John Rawls, who also favors blindness (the veil of ignorance).

Now, on this accounting – and I think you are right to push me on this – every law that we write will be deconstructible, that is, an imperfect instantiation of justice (someone always gets ground under by a law), but justice in itself, if it exists, is not deconstructible. But the point is that it does not exist, at least not as such; it is the undeconstructible of which we dream, a productive fantasy. It is a dream but it is not an arche. It does not provide determinate instruction like an arche. It is not a program to follow, a pattern to repeat, a model we can see, something that can be applied or approximated or approached asymptotically, but what Derrida at a certain point did not hesitate to call a “messianic” expectation of something unforeseeable.

You are, of course, well-known as a theologian...
...let us say a philosophical theologian, or a philosopher of religion. I was trained in philosophy and spent my whole life in the philosophy department at Villanova University. I confess that I have recently gotten religion, that is, I have moved to the Religion Department at Syracuse University, where I have been given the opportunity to spend the last phase of my teaching career peddling my wares among people who actually know a thing or two about religion. It is like a philosopher of science who moves to a physics department. When I speak about religion there I feel like a fellow in one of those old cowboy movies who raises his hat on a stick to see if someone is going to shoot at it...

Apologies. Although you are unknown as a theologian, your words cause me to wonder whether the concept of jewgreek, as you employ it, is a component part of a postmodern Christology? That is, part of an attempt to discover a post-secular model of Christ. How does the term “jewgreek” relate to the Christian concept of Jesus as Word made flesh?
Once again, given enough precautions, we could say that this is indeed just what it is. I have a new book entitled The Weakness of God that will be out sometime in 2005. This will be my most theological statement, philosophical-theological, that is, and here I speak of something I call a “sacred anarchy” – I take special note and heartily approve of your use of “Joyous Anarchy.” There is tradition of “Christian Anarchy,” in Jacques Ellul, for example. By this expression I mean that the divine favor rests on the one who is out-of-power and authority (arche), the left out and left over; on weakness, not power; on the last, not the first; on the lost, not the safe. That I think is the philosophical lesson to be learned from meditating the life of Jesus, and what it means for God for take the form of flesh. If Jesus spoke Greek instead of Aramaic, if he had an urban and Greek instead of an Aramaic, rural and biblical imagination, if he uttered propositions instead of telling parables, if he used the Greek word “ethics,” then my prediction is that such an ethics would be an “anarchical” one, where the real meaning and force of the “teaching,” Torah, or the “law,” the alpha and the omega of the Torah, to speak a little Jewgreek, would be that the mark of God lies on the face of least among us, the an-archical. I wax a little heretical in this book by extending this anarchy to God’s own being, which I want to maintain is marked by weakness not strength, which is emblematized in the Crucifixion. There is something like this in Moltmann, but there I think it is still consistent with the orthodox teaching of omnipotence, whereas I am not so sure that I am orthodox.

Ulysses ends with a fleshy affirmation of Molly’s particular existence, a “Yes” that is committed to the indeterminateness and chaos of the flesh. This reminds me that in every moment, we are, according to the meaning of the phrase under discussion, first and foremost, Jews. Yet the phrase “jewgreek,” qua philosophical signifier, is Greek. Is there any need or way to escape universalizing Greekness, open to philosophers, novelists, and friends?
There is no way to stop speaking Greek if we use this in the widest sense of the gift of the inherited philosophical framework handed down to us by the Greeks, and it would be ungrateful of us to try. But there are many ways to interrupt this voice, to disturb its hegemony, to loosen its grip, to expose it to its other. That is what deconstruction does all the time, and that is what is emblematized by this word “Jewgreek,” upon which we have been meditating. The aim is not to destroy “the” Greek or “the” philosophical but to widen its circle, to disturb any attempt to close the circle, keep it open to the surprise, to what it does not and cannot see coming, which is what makes life interesting. That being said, we are all Jews, we are all Greeks, not to mention all the other things we are, not to mention that we cannot quite say “we.” We can say oui, but not we. Not we, we, but oui, oui. Yes, I said, yes. Molly’s absolutely magnificent hymn, her Mollyian if not quite Marian Magnificat, yes, I said yes, let it be, let it happen, let it come, that is what deconstruction is: yes, to the coming of the other (“coming” having in English a happy polyvalence that is missing in French). Derrida says again and again, yes, that deconstruction is affirmation, yes, welcoming the other, yes, and that yes is yes only if it is repeated, oui, oui. When at a wedding, the bride and groom say yes, “I do,” well, we don’t know if they do. Maybe they do, maybe they don’t. We’ll find out, and it will take a lifetime of repetition to find out.

I reminded that we are first and always Jews again, for I wish I could shake your hand to thank you for this interview. However, my email software doesn’t yet extend me such luxuries.
Do not be nostalgic. There is no pure origin. The Heideggerians complain about technology and want to replace technology with the “hand,” with the things that are handmade, which they say are primordial and originary, and they look down upon the world-poor animals who they say have no hands, poor things (so let’s eat them!). (I do not even mention his notorious remark about Hitler’s hands.) But an amusing anecdote: as I mentioned above, when I was a young man I wrote to Heidegger and, mirabile dictu, I actually got a response – but, will you believe, it was typewritten!! I should have seen then that the whole thing had to be demythologized! Now, do not misunderstand me, I am not against hands, but I say yes to technology, and I think you do, too, and yes to email, which has allowed us to extend a hand to each other and made this exchange possible. This is the whole problem of the pharmakon in “Plato’s Pharmacy,” which I was recently rereading, but we cannot take this up here.

Please accept this lonely termination instead.
I am not alone, and I will say a little prayer that you are not either, but I thank you very much for your questions, which were probing and provocative and, as we Americans say, quite a handful.

Additional Information
Prof. John Caputo joined Syracuse University in Fall, 2004 after retiring from Villanova University where he taught from 1968 to 2004. He is currently working on the notion of the “weakness of God.” Caputo conducts a series of biennial conferences on related themes in the philosophy of religion, the first of which (April, 2005) will be entitled “St. Paul Among the Philosophers.”
Recently, two books have appeared about his work: A Passion for the Impossible: John D. Caputo in Focus, ed. Mark Dooley (SUNY Press, 2002), and Religion With/Out Religion: The Prayers and Tears of John D. Caputo, ed. Ed. James Olthius (Routledge, 2002). Demythologizing Heidegger was published in 1993 by Indiana University Press.

Originally published in The Modern Word. Reproduced here with permission.

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The second must be, to write solely in Irish is a deliberate act of political and cultural significance.

How deliberate is it? Is there a choice in the use of the language? Although she can speak six languages how many can she write poetry in? The only poetry of hers in English we do have is that of her own translations included in ‘Rogha Danta’, her first collection of translations.
And so we have this problem. Of her three books available, the first two are selections from three previously untranslated books. This is a blessing in its way, it does away with any kind of chronology for the poems, they all inhabit the same now space.

She has been very well represented by her translators, the ‘Rogha Danta’ translator Michael Hartnett keeping closer to the original than the various ‘personalities’ of ‘The Pharoah’s Daughter’. A comparison between the first stanza of ‘An Crann’ of ‘Rogha Danta’ and ‘As for the Quince’ by Paul Muldoon in the latter book, will have to suffice:

The tree
The fairy woman came
with a Black and Decker.
She cut down my tree.
I watched her like a fool
cut the branches one by one.

As for the Quince
There came this bright young thing
with a Black and Decker
and cut down my quince tree
I stood with my mouth hanging open
while one by one
she trimmed off the branches.

There is no overt reference to a quince tree in the Irish. The racy language is caught, but at what expense?

The last book, ‘The Water Horse’ is served better, in particular the translations by Medbh McGuckian stand out, capturing both the tone and richness of the language, and economy of expression.

To write solely in a minority ‘dying’ language has its modern day precedents: Sorley MacLean and Derick Thomson in Scots Gaelic. In Wales Menna Elfyn is makes a similar plea for the language.

This latter writer is particularly apposite to the case of Nuala Ni Dhomhnaill: both are politically active writers. Menna Elfyn has been imprisoned twice on Welsh Language issues, and Nuala Ni Dhomhnaill took part in the Bloody Sunday march in Derry.

This political awareness is also evident in her latest book ‘The Water
Horse’, ‘Eithne the Hun’: ‘…but the lamb must still be waiting/to be led to the altar/by the mess they’ve just made/of those three in Gibraltar.’

Born in Sutton Manor Coalfield near Burnley (“What did you do in England, Nuala?” “Watched t.v.”), she returned early with her family to the family home on the Dingle peninsula in the far west of Ireland. Here it was a matter of being “farmed off” amongst relatives for years. Her aunt became a surrogate mother.

The language-issue seems particularly tied-in with her family. It was her father’s side that kept the language alive. Her mother perhaps thinking of her daughter’s future in a predominantly English speaking world, played down the Irish. This becomes especially important when Nuala had taken the decision to write solely in Irish. At this period, the late 1960s, the very idea of basing one’s creative life on a ‘dead language’ had very little credibility.

Nuala does not write autobiographical or confessional poetry, all her characters are carefully stylised in the manner of the folk tales she draws on. So when we come across a poem as hard-hitting as ‘Mother’ we must make an effort to remember not to read it as personal:

Mother
You gave me a dress
and then took it back from me.
You gave me a horse
which you sold in my absence.
You gave me a harp
and then asked me back for it.
And you gave me life.

At the miser’s dinner-party
every bite is counted.

What would you say
if I tore the dress
if I drowned the horse
if I broke the harp
if I choked the strings
the strings of life?
Even if
I walked off a cliff?
I know your answer.

With your medieval mind
you’d announce me dead
and on the medical reports
you’d write the words
“ingrate”, “schizophrenic”.

It is just as easy to read this as an attack on the Irish Catholic Church with its communion dress and blended medieval iconography of holy mother and thereby idealised mother, and threat of excommunication always present for strayers off the narrow way.

Nuala Ni Dhomhnaill’s awareness of vocabulary is always contemporary; rarely if ever does she resort to archaic terms or syntax, and never without good reason.

Whereas references to her father’s side frequently crop-up in comments, articles and poems her mother never does. This cannot but be felt. The question is, how far can one read this as an estrangement from her mother. I think Laura O’Connor has the most salient comment here: ‘… both Nuala Ni Dhomhnaill and (Mebdh) McGuckian rely on “the enabling myth of the disabling mother”, citing “hostile, rather than nurturant mothering” as their impetus to art.’ It is a device for both moving on and for subverting implied obligations to limited and limiting ideals. In ‘Words for the Branwen Theme’ she writes ‘Civil Rights was my mother.’

Here we deal with an important distinction between biological parent and the parent, or agent, of awareness: political, cultural and feminist. These are shifting distinctions, I admit, but relevant.

The hostile mother here is the mother who preferred the English language, and therewith the English cultural heritage. Englishness has permeated every aspect of Irish culture: English is the language of school, commerce, business and every transaction outside the home. The inroads by the Gaelic League of the nineteenth century helped preserve the language on the ground level, the Settlement of 1921, the territory left to the language.

“The issue of the native language and its suppression has intrinsically a vast political dimension….At surface level it offers parallels with the position of Ireland’s women.”

For Nuala to take up the cause of the Irish language, she is in a way exchanging one set of cultural shackles for another. With the language goes all the iconography of nationhood, the personification of Mother Ireland, and, through the Catholic Church its conflation with the image of the suffering mother. The cult of the Virgin also has endorsed not only chastity and motherhood as womanly ideals, but also humility, obedience and passive suffering. Even more so, “The spiritualized ideal as Erin is… intensified by and linked to the puritanical and asexual ideal of woman by the Catholic Church….”.

Put like this the imagery would seem to go so deep into the psyche of Ireland it would seem almost impossible to change or alter anything. Throughout the 1970s and early 80s “the assault on the traditional encoding of women…by Irish women poets…did a great deal to destabilize the conventions…” This was the period of the Innti group of Gaelic broadsheets with whom Nuala was involved at Cork University, also the nation-wide women’s’ workshop movement with which Eavon Boland was connected.

It could be argued that one of the most malleable weapons for destabilising standards and long settled traditions, is humour, whether as the waspish sting of satire or the alternative realignment of tradition into absurd or exaggerated antics. This is both Nuala’s great weapon and saving grace: “…a poet at her finest in the comic mode…” and a saving grace in that her great gusts of laughter lift her out of the swamping of cultural iconography: “She… handled (sic) Gaelic tradition in a more subversive fashion than did (sic) the English-language poets. Her “An Crann”…. is infinitely more satisfying than…. programmatic assaults on the Sean-Bhean Bhocht of national tradition…”

For Nuala it would seem humour is a way of subverting the chaste, Madonna image, the suffering mother image, and also a way of laying claim to one’s own sexual identity. This last is a major tenet of second-wave feminist thinking, particularly in the writings of Julia Kristeva . For Nuala it makes its appearance in poems tackling nationalist images, as ‘The Great Mother’ .

By using humour to subvert tradition, and by using the Irish language, she is also preserving a tradition. Like all old traditions the Gaelic is full of its own stereotypes and male dominance. The Ulster Cycle reeks with testosterone; this she takes issue with in her Cu Chulainn series from

‘Rogha Danta’:
Cu Chulainn 1
Small dark rigid man
……………………
who still lacks a lump on your shoulder
…………………………………….
…………………………………….
Don’t threaten us with your youth again
small poor dark man
and goes on to be portrayed as a mithering brat who treats his mother to his rudeness.

The Connaught Cycles however are much more amenable, Queen Mebd figures hugely and her position as royal equal to Aillil forms the backbone of ‘The Tain’. The poem ‘Mebd Speaks’ is very telling here:
Mebd Speaks
War I declare from now
on all the men of Ireland
on all the corner-boys…..
………………………….
on the twenty-pint heroes……
…………………………
just looking for a chance
to dominate my limbs –
…………………………

I will make incursions
…………………
my amazons beside me
(not just to steal a bull
……………………..
but for an honour-price
…………………….
my dignity).

: that is, the “integrity of the body” .

Eibhlin Evans writes: “Poetry is not required to be oppositionalist and the writing of the women does include other motivations…” For Nuala Ni Dhomhnaill these “other motivations” she finds already embedded in Gaelic culture and language. The Gaelic Heritage she describes as “… a relationship between people and their objects of desire…” According to Helene Cixous “the discovery of desire necessarily precedes the discovery of a writing practice grounded in female pleasure and power.”

The grounded female embodiment of pleasure and power is the dominant figure in all of Nuala Ni Dhomhnaill’s writing.

“The Gaeltacht language I grew up with,” she writes, “fell out of history before the Enlightenment, and before many other things, including Victorian prudishness; and the language just isn’t prudish. The language is very open and non-judgemental about the body and its orifices.”

Here again is the issue of the ‘integrity of the body’.
In the opening poem of ‘Rogha Danta’, ‘We are Damned, My Sisters’ she
writes of:
“ ………………………….
we who swam at night
on beaches, with the stars
laughing with us
……………………..
without shifts or dresses
………………………
who accepted the priests’ challenge
…………………………………
We who didn’t darn stockings
we who didn’t comb or tease
…………………………….”
We find the female stereotypes, the Church control, all cast away as with the shifts and dresses, the ‘sisters’ laugh with the stars; this is a poem of challenge, but also triumph, whilst at the same emphasizing the on-going nature of the struggle for self identity and fulfillment: to be damned is to be on the outside of the community, and the sisterhood image an alternative community in the making. Whether in material terms, or imaginative terms, both are equally valid at different times.

Originally published in Parameter Magazine. Reproduced here with permission.

⁽⁰⁾

For school owners, a shovel or even a JCB would be suitable.

Presumably you already know this. How else did you become a DOS? However, in case you ascended to your exalted station through some other means (all the other teachers killed in a most unfortunate accident, you the only sane candidate with a Celta, your abundance of fraudulent qualifications not questioned at interview), here are a few tips.

The Greeting Gush
This is what you do quite spontaneously on catching sight of the owner emerging from her Mercedes. A squawk of pure rapture should burst from your lips.

“Heavens! Mrs Gorgon!” you trill. “What a splendid surprise!”

Flutter your hands and eyelids (as when Mr Humphries in Are You Being Served? spots a customer) and swoop down on her car. Do all sorts of unnecessary fussing: shutting the car door, steering the owner around a dangerous puddle, carrying her diamond-encrusted handbag inside. Keep up a commentary on the weather, her new hairdo (“It’s so you, Mrs G”), the predicted joy of the staff when they see her.

The local staff, on cue, will appear at the school entrance, beaming and curtseying, as the owner glides in, extending a few fingers to be brushed by reverent digits.

If the owner is a man, a minimally butcher approach might be preferable, but do not stint on the fawning.

Any loitering English native speakers should be got rid of fast.

Escort the owner to your office and ease her on to the sofa. Offer all manner of refreshments. (You can always send out for these.) Sit in the armchair opposite. Try to echo her posture.

The Preamble
And I would have our courtier try to act in this manner, even if it is against his nature, in such a way that whenever his prince sees him he believes that the courtier will have something agreeable to say.

And I would have our courtier try to act in this manner, even if it is against his nature, in such a way that whenever his prince sees him he believes that the courtier will have something agreeable to say.
Baldassare Castiglione, The Book of the Courtier (1528)

Do not start talking about the various school crises straightaway. First you must make small talk.

Acceptable topics include:
1. Owner’s new hairdo/clothes/accessories. Your own deficiencies in this respect.
Typical comment: “Oh, Mrs Gorgon, if only I had your figure, I’d kill for a trouser suit like that.”
2. Political situation in the nation’s capital. Warning: school owners are virulently in favour of authoritarian regimes.
“You know, I often wish we had old General Shutemol back, we all felt so much safer then.”
3. Golf. You may have only a sketchy idea of how the game is played, but enthuse anyway.
“I hear the new course at Slumclearance Park was designed by Buldoza himself, and it’s frightfully difficult.”
4. Holidays.

“Will you be getting away to the Bahamas this autumn?”

Once you have covered these topics for ten to fifteen minutes, you can go into the Huddle. Close the office door.

The Huddle
In lowered tones, leaning forward confidentially, raise the topic of the school’s latest crisis (no students, accountant vanished with funds, teachers on strike, teacher on remand for molesting accountant, etc).

Imply that you could not make a decision without drawing on the owner’s wisdom, experience, judiciousness, discernment, sensitivity and so forth.

Obviously your main aim will be to dispel any scintilla of a shred of suspicion that the crisis is in any way your fault. The owner will be looking for someone to blame, so you had better have a candidate lined up. Your predecessor is a good choice for up to twelve months, after which it gets rather difficult. Assistant DOSes and senior teachers are also possible. Do not blame the local admin staff, as they will be far more expert at passing the buck than you. (And they are almost certainly the owner’s relatives.)

Although most school owners are uneducated and dim, they possess a stock of peasant cunning and criminal know-how. They may not know an adjective from an adjutant, but they will soon sniff out an employee who is siphoning off school funds.

You should have an inexpensive answer to the crisis already worked out, but try to make it look as though the owner has thought of it herself. Look stunned by this brilliant solution.
After the Huddle, the owner may decide to inspect the school. You will have to take her to the teachers’ room.

Presenting teachers
Risky. Local teachers will reliably bow and scrape, but what about (say) Americans or Australians?

School owners may not in fact object to their rough ways, in the same way that the proprietor of a zoo may be amused by the sight of her pet gorillas scratching their balls. But it might still be advisable to prime her.

“OK, Mrs Gorgon, let’s go to the teachers’ room, where you’ll meet Nigel and Bruce. Nigel’s British and he’s, er, rather shy. So don’t be surprised if he doesn’t stand up or speak to you or, er, even look round. Bruce is from Australia, so, well, I’m sure you won’t be at all surprised by anything he says. Or does.”

Warn the teachers beforehand that anyone who is not on their best behaviour will be teaching Chatterbox 1 for the rest of their contract.

A few more tips
Do not be afraid to tease the owner (in an obsequious way, of course). They love to think they are not stuffed shirts.

Say things like, “It’s no good flattering you, Mrs Gorgon! You see through everything.” Or, “I know you don’t respect yes men...”

Mention God a lot. This goes down well in most countries.

The Farewell Fawn
Essentially a reversal of the Greeting Gush. The staff turn out once more, you open the car door and hand the owner in, everybody waves tearfully until the Mercedes disappears over the horizon, then you head out for a stiff drink.

Originally published on http://www.englishdroid.com. Reproduced here with permission.

⁽⁰⁾