Haters are the best lovers.

My wife is a self-proclaimed "hater." And I think it is worthwhile to develop an argument for why anti-social types with a small circle of friends are actually better than us extroverts.

I don't believe people who claim to love everyone. At the very least this means that having their love is meaningless because they give it away so cheaply. I'd rather be loved by someone who hates most people, because possessing their love is a more exclusive privilege. Being loved by a hater is more difficult, and the most valuable things in life are difficult to obtain; therefore, loved by a hater > loved by a lover.

Furthermore, love is exclusive, and as such it is violent. Fastening on one person causes me to ignore my obligation to every other person, and ignoring my obligation to other others is a hateful act. Every moment I spend with my brother I could be spending with my wife. And every moment I spend with my wife could be spent trying to help a refugee get a job. And every moment I spend doing that could be spent visiting with lonely people who I've never even bothered to talk to, ad infinitum. We have to draw a line somewhere and cut some people out. Those inside the line are those we choose to love, those on the outside are those we don't. I would rather be loved by some who cuts the line a little closer to home so that they have more time for me. But maybe that's because I'm selfish.

But I don’t think I’m alone. Haven't you ever felt guilty for spending time with one person, because you felt that you should also be spending that same time with another? Like on Thanksgiving when you want to go to be with your wife’s family, but you also want to go to be with your side of the family. If they happen to be celebrating at the same time, in vastly different geographic areas, you have to choose. And when you choose, it feels like a betrayal. You feel guilty even though all you’re doing is trying to show love to one group. But that love comes at the expense of another. Not only do we feel guilty, but this guilt is earned, because we put one group of people above another. Extending this logic to all of humanity, we have to choose who to love, and there are millions of people equally deserving of our love. Therefore, we have to commit a violent act and choose (seemingly at random) some people over others. But that is love. It is irreducible to anything else than a choice to elevate one individual to the point of singularity and say this is the One (or one of the Ones) that I will love.

My wife is really clever. (Also, how I exercise power over her.)

So, I'm arguing with my wife, Aubry about what to watch. She wants to watch a sitcom, I want to watch cartoons. The tension is in the air for a stand-off. Before the fireworks can start, I proceed to get her sitcom going on Netflix, yielding to her preference.

Her response, to my giving her what she wanted (my gift), was brilliant.

She said, "you can't concede, and win!" Meaning don't just give in like that! Now, on first blush, her statement seems to be self-contradictory (How can one both concede and also win?). But Aubry was actually exactly correct, as I will explain.

You see, the stage was set for a confrontation. And the fight would follow a predetermined script. We would disagree. We'd stonewall for a bit. One of us would grudgingly yield. The situation was such that one of us was going to get our preference on Netflix, and the other was going to get to yield; thereby rendering the person who got their preference indebted, indefinitely. Thus, the gift of yielding to Aubry's Netflix preference, was no gift at all, since it was in fact a reciprocal exchange. (When a buyer gets a house, in exchange for a promise to pay for it later, it's not correct to say that the bank gave the buyer a gift. It is instead an exchange. Similarly, when I give Aubry her way and make her indebted to me, what I'm doing is not giving a gift. I'm just making an exchange.) We tally up our gifts and debts, and the next time we're trying to decide what to watch on Netflix, the person with the most Netflix IOU's gets to choose. (This is an example of what Derrida and Caputo call the many "cunning ruses of love" and "the gift".)

Now, as to Aubry's objection ("you can't concede, and win!"). What she was reacting to was the fact that I didn't stick to the script. I short-circuited the conflict and skipped straight to the conclusion by immediately giving-in. We knew how it would end, so that wasn't the problem. Insteand, what bothered Aubry is that she was denied the opportunity to make the gift, the initial yield that would set the recipricol exchange into motion, because I (rather than stonewalling and making arguments) skipped right to the end of the confrontation and started her show. By excluding her opportunity to act, I took the choice out of her hands. I conceded and won. I got to choose how the exchange would take place, and secured a debt from her without even giving her the opportunity to object. Not only that, but by acting so quickly and not acting petty about getting my way, I reserved the moral high-ground for myself. This in turn, made her look petty. Therefore, I cheated. I didn't play by the rules. And by conceding so early, I won.

I think I do this a lot. It is just another example of my will to power. In the face of confrontation, even conceding can be form of taking power, and, thereby, winning. You force the other into a position of indebtedness and retain moral authority over her. Perhaps this is what Jesus Christ meant when he taught that the "weak things of the world [will] shame the strong".

Built in to the act of yielding to the other is an act of assuming power over the other. I sometimes wonder, is it possible to escape this economy? Where does love fit in? Is love an economy, or is it something that exists interstitially between the feints and parry's of this ongoing spar?

il n’y a pas de hors-texte

My professor in Legislation and Regulation said something interesting today. She said, "today everyone is some kind of neo-textualist." I was initially appalled, textualism as I understand it is the most boorish, wooden, unsophisticated, type of legal interpretation.

However, even I may be willing to admit to subscribing to textualism, with one caveat: That as I understand it nothing is outside the text. Of course a textualist who recognizes that "there is no outside-text" is essentially meaningless. Because, everything is inside the text, being a textualist should allow one to use everything, words, grammar-rules, dictionaries, historical context, and perhaps most importantly personal life experience to interpret a text.

As per Derrida, meaning is a matter of différance. Différance is a play on the French word for difference. So to say that meaning is a matter of difference, is first to say that a word can only mean something in relation to other words. "Medium hot," means something different than "mild," and something different than "hot," and this difference gives sense to the word. Différance also suggests that meaning is constantly differed. To define a word we use other words, whose meaning is themselves only found by reliance on other words, whose meaning is themselves only found by reliance on other words, ad infinitum. Therefore, meaning is constantly differed. Furthermore, because a word can only be understood relative to every other word; and because there is, literally, an infinite separation between a word and its meaning; there is nothing outside the text.

Therefore, anything a reader brings to bear in their interpretation of a text is legitimate because there is nothing outside the text.

Vampire Romance

I recently watched "Let Me In." The movie is a love story, and is a perfect inversion of the Twilight movies (sorry didn't read the books). Instead of hokey and sappy, the movie is dark and gritty. Instead of a girl falling for manpire, it is instead a story of boy falling for a vampgirl.

The movie is a metaphor for the obscene, dark-side of love. In the movie, a young boy falls for a young vamp girl. But, in order to maintain his love for vampgirl he must learn to accept her as a monstrous Other. (When he asks if she'll go steady with him, she replies that she can't because she's "not a girl." She's a monster.) Ultimately, to love her, he must sacrifice his duty to the human race, because for her to survive she must kill. After witnessing her murdering people, he decides that she means more to him than human life, and at the end of the movie becomes her accomplice in killing others to keep her alive.

"Love is evil" says Slavoj Zizek. And he is right. Love is loving the Other as Other. Love is accepting the monstrous Otherness that exists in one person, even though we cannot understand it, and can't approach it. Singling that one person out from the entire universe as somehow special, unique, and worthy of praise. This is a violent act. It is a sacrifice. By separating the one, from everyone else, we renounce our duty to the world, and instead commit the evil of valuing one single life, above the lives of everything else. See Derrida in The Gift of Death.

The fact that love is evil, is not a reason to renounce it. On the contrary, love is a break from the entire human order. It is a liberating, but it is also a heavy burden. The act of love elevates the one to the level of the Thing, and is sublime. Love, love, love.

Bigotry and Stereotyping and Mormons

Survey results show that many people would not vote for someone based on their religious identity. Mormons, Muslims, and Atheists all had particularly poor showings.

I recently had a Facebook debate with some friends regarding whether this amounts to bigotry. Bigotry is the stubborn intolerance of another person's beliefs. Is not voting for someone, merely because of their religion, bigoted?

Almost all of my friends, who argued that it is not bigoted, relied on generalizations of religious people that are unwarranted. One of those generalizations (stereotypes?) is that religious people lack critical thinking skills (which is apparently why we believe in crazy stuff like an angel showing a kid where a golden book is buried). Considering that there are very many intelligent leader in every religious group, I think this is a faulty assumption. (Not to mention offensive.) This is not to say that all religious people are smart - there are a lot of dumb religious people too. The simple fact is that no matter what group you look at Mormons, Muslims, atheists, you're going to get a good mix of every sort of ability set. Some are going to be real dumb, and some will be smart. Knowing someone's religion doesn't tell you much of anything about that person.

Furthermore, in attempting to justify factoring religious belief into voting decisions, one of my friends went on to say that, "everything that makes up [a political candidate] is fair game." If this is true than race, sex, and ethnicity, are all legitimate reasons not to vote for someone. Which is so wrong. All of these factors (race, sex, ethnicity) are at least as essential in forming a person, and later influencing their political behavior, as religion. To say that being black in the US is exactly the same as being white, is to have some real blinders as to the difference of experience between white America and black America. For this reason, race is incredibly influential in forming a person.

In fact, the correlation between being black and being a Democrat, is much stronger than the correlation between being a Mormon and being a social conservative (which seems to be the big hook upon which my friends hung their argument). Does that mean that it's OK for someone to take someone's race into account when deciding whether or not to vote for them? No, of course not. Evaluate belief based on people's political beliefs and behavior. Don't rely on unwarranted assumptions.

Let's go a step further, ad absurdum. Blacks and latinos have higher rates of incarceration compared to whites in the good ole USA. But it would been incredibly prejudicial to allow this to inform your decision when voting for a black candidate. Relying on broad generalizations to assess an individual of a certain group is terrible reasoning. In this instance it's straight-up racist. Each person should be evaluated on an individual basis. And when voting tolerance requires that we should give individuals the benefit of the doubt; regardless of their religion, and definitively regardless of race.

Political candidates should be evaluated on only those factors that have a direct bearing to their performance in office. Religion, race, ethnicity, gender, sexuality, do not. Past performance in office (or in other leadership roles) along with stated political preferences do.

Furthermore, my friends are atheists. They were (somewhat ironically) arguing against their interests. The basic form of their argument is the same as a bigoted religious person would put forward to justify their decision not to vote for an atheist . Religious bigots will rely on stereotypes and generalizations to justify prejudicial treatment of an atheist candidate (and poll results show that atheists are in a worse position than Mormons due to unfair generalizations). Mormons, atheists, and Muslims are all marginalized groups in US politics. We should be teaming-up, not undercutting each other. I'm sure bigoted individuals would be more than happy to join atheists in bashing Mormons and Muslims, and then turn around and bash atheists and Muslims with a bunch of Mormons, and then bash atheists and Mormons with a group of Muslims. As minority religious groups we should be building bridges of tolerance and acceptance, rather than trying to excuse ourselves for relying on stereotypes.

Basically my friends were working hard to distinguish between religious-bigotry and other forms of bigotry, in order to justify not-voting for Mormons, but this is a contradictory exercise. To justify stereotyping in politics you have to say, 'anything is fair game!' Anything about a politician can influence who they are, and should therefore be used to evaluate a person. But this begs the question, race and gender are essential parts of a person? Are they fair game? We've gotten past the point where it's OK to say that race is a factor. So then my friends make the move saying that race is different or 'Most aspects of a person - race, gender, sexuality, etc. - are not fair game!' So put it together and you get, every part of a person's social identity is fair game, besides most every social identity (with the exception of religion). This move attempts to mask the contradiction, but it doesn't do a very good job. Unless they're doing some Derridean move that I don't understand. Absent that, I spit on your faulty reasoning. Ptooey!

History is the story of the Present

History is not the past. History is the story of the now - specifically how and why it came to be. For this reason, history has no objective existence. History is a story. Stories are nothing but representations. Furthermore, there are many versions of this representation, and it will change according to the teller. Also, it cannot be said that there is one meta-story to rule them all, because we lack the power to determine which, if any, is true. We can’t even say for certain if there is an objective truth to history.

As such, history is not primarily shaped by what happened (in the past) but what is happening (in the present). History is being written write now. Furthermore, the History that we know is based on a shifting nexus of power relations. For instance, historians will talk about authoritative texts or the credibility of a source. How are these authorities (power-relations) determined? They are determined by the struggle between the dominant discourse - who get to say what is authoritative now - and the dissenters - who through struggle may supplant the dominant discourse and change that which is authoritative. This is not to say that history is wrong, but merely to say that history is made by power. Knowledge in general is not divorced from power, but is in fact a product of power (and thus ideology). Michel Foucault was particularly important to our development of this understanding. John McGowan said of Foucualt's work, "In this holistic model, 'there is no outside.' (Foucault, 1979). There is no disinterested or objective knowledge, just as there is no autonomous self."[i] Foucault wrote:

"Perhaps we should abandon a whole tradition that allows us to imagine that knowledge can exist only where power relations are suspended and that knowledge can develop only outside its injuctions, its demands and its interests... We should admit rather that power produces knowledge (and not simply by encouraging it because it serves power or by applying it because it is useful), that power and knowledge directly imply one another, that there is no power relation without the correlative constitution of a field of knowledge, nor any knowledge that does not pressupose and constitute at the same time power relations."[ii]

History is a discipline because there are rules, and for rules to mean anything someone or some group has to enforce them. Who enforces the rules? Well in the knowledge-discipline of history it is other historians. For instance, to be published, you must satisfy a journal editor and peer reviewers; to be considered interesting enough to add to the story of history (i.e. to be quoted), you must satisfy the entire community of historians; and to be considered authoritative, you have to impress even more people. Therefore, history is controlled by a complex web of relations that impact how the story comes out.

Therefore, reading histories, it's not enough to consider the political motivations of the authors - though they likely affect their conclusions. Instead, one must consider the entire field that constitutes knowledge-power, and how that affects the outcome of the story. This is likely what Michel Foucault was getting at when he said he wanted to write a "History of the Present". He wanted to write a history that recognized that power is essential to any understanding of history and cannot be divorced from its study. Furthermore, the source texts, upon which our histories are based, are products of other complex nexuses of power-relations, and therefore, need to be considered as such. The question is thus, how did they constitute themselves (as subjects and objects in a web of power relations), in order to perceive the world in such a way? And, how is it that we now constitute ourselves differently, in order to perceive the world in a different way? The story of the past is, in this way, more about how we think now, and less about what really happened then. Michael S. Roth explains it like this, “Writing a history of the present means writing a history in the present, self-consciously writing in a field of power relations and political struggle.”[iii] Reading and writing history is a political act, and should be recognized as such. Furthermore, to participate in this activity requires a great deal of introspection and self-criticism. History is an exercise in power; it shapes how we perceive, and relate to, ourselves and others. Therefore, history should be handled with great care and attention, because it is so critical to our present and future.

One final note, this discussion should also make us pause and think critically about how the story of history is shaped by the dominant discipline of positivism. Thus, it should not surprise us that the story of history is basically the story of the progress of science and rationality. There may be some validity to this, science did have a roll in opening-up new modes of thought, but a critical reader should recognize this is not the whole of the story. Science too is a product of power, and can be just as freedom killing as other disciplines of knowledge-power. Therefore, avoid scientism.

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[i] Foucault, Michel. Discipline and Punish: the Birth of the Prison. New York: Pantheon, 1977. 120-21. Print.

[ii] McGowan, John. "Postmodernism and Its Critics." Google Books. Cornell University Press. Web. 28 Aug. 2011. .

[iii] Roth, Michael S. "Foucault's 'History of the Present'" History and Theory 20.1 (1981): 32-47. EBSCO. Web. 28 Aug. 2011. .

The Rule of Law

The Rule of Law is a concept that is very important to the legal profession, because it is upon this rock that the legal establishment builds its legitimacy and prestige.

The idea of the Rule of Law is that the law, and the law alone, controls the direction, process and outcomes of the legal system. Therefore, no person, no matter how powerful or influential, is above the law. The courts do not make the law, they merely enforce the law. Based on this logic, the decisions made in courts of law are - or at least should be - impartial, objective, and immutable. Like a prophet is a mouthpiece for God's word, the legal system is a mouthpiece for The Law - and deserves to be respected and honored on this basis. Where the legal system fails to accurately uphold the law - we are told - the legitimacy of the system is questionable.

The real shtick with this line of thinking is that in order for the law to rule, regardless of the people, there needs to be some kind of objective legal rule to follow. The problem, of course, is that there is almost never a clear legal rule to follow. Every legal pronouncement is subject to interpretation. If there were simple, objective legal objects about which everyone agreed, then we wouldn't have so many legal disputes. Furthermore, through the course of these legal disputes people, largely legal professionals, end-up assigning meaning to the law - in other words, they make the law (which did not really exist beforehand). Therefore, it is not enough to say that the law determined the outcome - the law does not have a will, it cannot determine anything (Schlag, 1998) - instead, it is more accurate to say that people infuse their will into the law in order to make it speak, and thereby determine the outcome. Thus, we find behind the proverbial wizard's curtain, not A Law that Rules (Rule of Law), but fragile mortals with their hands on the levers of power.

(For a more in depth discussion about the inherent ambiguity and contingency of all language, including law, read Derrida, Foucault, and Schlag).

Now, people - especially in the legal profession - will interact and exert social pressure on one-another in a way that will tend to enforce a set off norms. These norms can easily be mistaken for the "Rule of Law." But this nexus of social pressure is always driven by people, who make the law in the very act of enforcement. Now, I happen to believe that a certain degree of social coercion and even violence is inevitable, and I would like to be able to preserve the prestige of the legal system in order to be able to use it to make a good living some day. However, I do not want to whitewash the inherent fuzziness and moral ambiguity involved in legal practice. And I certainly don't want to pretend that there is some magical, objective, form-of-law which justifies all the violence and ugliness that has been perpetuated in the name of law and order. The law as mystical objectivity does not exist, instead there is only the law as we people apply it. We have always and will always have the power to shape the law into forms that are either more or less horrible.

Acknowledging that the legal system is fueled by people, (who create and enforce norms) is particularly important for us lawyers to recognize, so that we don't become so enchanted with the Law (Schlag, 1998), that we begin to trivialize the impact of our decisions on people. We need to recognize that the violence of the system is a violence for which we are personally responsible. We cannot disavow the pain we cause others. Hopefully, this understanding will serve to somewhat mitigate the violence. But, at the very least it should prevent us from excusing ourselves. There is no Big Other (Zizek, Lacan). We are alone. When bad things happen it is not the The Law that wills those bads things, it is the people who make and enforce the law, which is all of us.