On Patiency, or, Don't Just Do Something, Stand There (original) (raw)

Summer 2021 draft Note to the reader. Thanks for engaging with this text. This is the most recent draft of a piece that, in various iterations, has existed since early 2020. Originally, I wanted to do a book-length project around patiency, an idea that I first began to develop at the end of my piece on Trumpian jouissance, 'Brand(ish)ing the Name, or, Why is Trump So Enjoyable?' The projected patiency book would have included chapters on at least three major existing modalities of patiency: mysticism, aesthetics, and psychoanalysis (especially the dynamics of transference). At some point, I decided that I wanted to work on these things separately, over time, and instead to complete a more compact preliminary/promissory statement on patiency in the form of a free-standing piece. That is what you are looking at now. Even in this form, I've struggled to find the right size/scope. I did a couple of talks on the material in the fall of 2020. A longer version of the text was rejected by a major journal some months ago. Quite rightly: it was a mess in ways that I could only see after some time had passed. I spent some time cutting it down and rearranging/rewriting it this summer. I think it's a lot better now, but it's still a draft awaiting completion. There are notes to myself. There isn't really a proper ending. I'd be very grateful for any insights or suggestions you might have about how to land this thing. Fallowships Not so long ago, someone that I know as a tireless engine of Facebook wit posted a status update that said that if he were suddenly to come into a large amount of money, the first thing he would do would be to establish a fallowship for artists and academics. A fallowship? Yes, a fallowship: a grant that would fund a year or so of doing nothing in particular. I was at that time just coming up to a year of sabbatical after three years of being department chair and responded that this sounded pretty much like what I had in mind for the coming year. Whereas every previous bit of time off that I had enjoyed during my academic career had been earmarked for working on something or other-a book, a series of articles, a new bit of fieldwork, whatever-this time it seemed important to get out from underneath the punishing superego that I'd internalized somewhere along the tenure track. The superego that,