I was wondering how the other students were perceiving me and I am beginning to think it is as an authority. I am not being a gunner, I promise. A gunner is a term from law school referring to a student who always raises their hand. This instructor is essentially teaching a philosophy class and so she is using me as a sounding board and wants me to teach part of the class tomorrow on Plato and Idealism and in the next class she wants me to lecture on existentialism. I could have given both lectures tonight on an impromptu basis.

An older man, Chris, came up to me after class and wanted to know if I thought that the Marquis De Sade (publishing in 1782/85/87-1800) was responding to Rousseau’s Emile (1762) and I said sure and that there was also dialogue with Voltaire’s Candide (1759) and Thomas Carlyle’s Sartor Resartus (1833) as well.
They are all riffing with Boswell’s biography of Samuel Johnson (1791)– Boswell, Voltaire, and Rousseau all knew each other, spent time together, and Boswell was even involved with Rousseau’s mistress.

I think Chris may have wanted to make a clever but dismissive point about De Sade’s sexual use of “education” and I told him instead about transgression theories of education in the context of William Burroughs and Mikhail Bakhtin’s conceptions of the Carnivalesque. Bakhtin figured that without medieval carnivals that suspended the social order we never would have had the Renaissance and he argues that the novel now does for society what the carnival once did.

Bakhtin argues that all knowledge is constantly in dialogue with all knowledge and I think he’s right. It’s a conversation that I haven’t been participating in. Crap, this class has my brain up and running in the higher gears. I am not used to it, but it feels very good.

So after I walked Chris out, Ed wanted to walk me to my car and talk to me about Plato. Ed is an ex drill sergeant who has just discovered philosophy… I really don’t want to step on the instructor’s toes, but if she really wants me to be a resource I am more than happy to get my feet wet again. Who I am kidding? It’s good to be home. Well, I have a lot of homework and two lectures to prep. It’s best that I get to it.