So, I've been reading this one book and...

For the new year, I wanted to bring you flowers but I bring your French theory instead

I had grand plans for the first post of 2024. I mean, it’s the first post of the new year, and there are expectations (mostly mine) about what it should look or feel like, a great return, a fresh outlook, a wild twist to previously shared content, or a bold return to form.

I’m not offering any of those today.

While sitting in front of my computer, the cursor blinking asking me “what next?”, I’ve come to realize that I was lapsing into that old pesky habit of waiting for perfection—the perfect moment for writing, the perfect topic, the perfect tone—and forgetting that this space was supposed to be one of consistency first and foremost. Oops.

Perhaps it’s another one of those old pesky habits, but when I was writing my dissertation, whenever I was unsure of what next step to take, I would fall back into the books. One bad habit to save me from another.

So books it is.

Or rather, the one book I’ve been slowly reading since last year. I had plans of finishing it, having thoughts about it, then sharing them. I haven’t gotten through the second of five chapters, but I am going to embrace this work-in-progress as it is because I think there’s something to be said about enjoying the ride for itself rather than the destination. Or, in this case, enjoying the process of reading for what it is, rather than what it may bring.

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After 2022/2023, I think I have earned the right to call myself a reader again, but the second semester of last year brought me the realization that not all the novels and short stories in the world could bring me what I had been craving from books: the tingle of excitement or that little itch of incomprehension that often come when reading as a study exercise.

It took me long enough, but I finished re-reading Edward Said’s Orientalism in early December (after starting it all the way back in September). I then decided I wanted to move to something a little closer to my academic interests while not wanting to dive back into anything truly related to my dissertation research (so, no medieval queens, no bodies, no Gothic art). I took a look at our shelves, trying to find something about art in general (I had just finished my big museum romp, so that felt adequate), and landed on Jacques Rancière’s The Future of the Image (translated by Gregory Elliott).¹

I’m only on page 51 (of 138), sipping some by-now tepid coffee as I’m writing this, and here’s a non-exhaustive list of things I have googled so far:

• Bresson’s Au hasard Balthazar

• Simultaneist art

• “explosante fixe”

• “haecceity”

• Manet’s The Dead Christ with Angels

• Godard’s Histoire(s) du cinéma

• Jean Giraudoux’s Siegfried et le Limousin

• Fritz Lang’s Die Nibelungen

• Charles Ferdinand Ramuz

• Sergei Eisenstein’s Alexander Nevsky

• Lessing’s Laocoon

• “Laocoon Group in Rome”

• Marx Brothers’ A Night in Casablanca

Currently, I have three tabs open to try and understand one passage: one with Zola’s Le Ventre de Paris from Project Gutenberg, one with Schiller’s Letters upon the Aesthetic Education of Man from the Internet History Sourcebooks, and one with another article by Rancière titled “The Aesthetic Revolution and Its Outcomes.”

I don’t think I’ll finish this book anytime soon. I’ve probably really got about 40% of what I’ve read. I probably spend more time adding notes to the margins than reading the paragraphs. Someone asked me if the book was being “useful.” I have no idea what kind of utility I can derive from it, other than trying to keep my brain alert and my handwriting tiny enough to fit a lot of it as marginal gloses.

Yes, I purposefully matched the highlighter and the fineliner to the yellow cover; the pencil was a fortuitous coincidence.

Maybe no great idea will pop up by the time I come to page 138. Maybe I’ll forsake French theory entirely.² But that is fine. In fact, I would say that is perfectly fine. After so many years reading things so I could argue for or against its ideas, it’s somewhat refreshing to just spend hours with a difficult text, pursue some rabbit holes, come out the other side completely exhausted by it and that’s it. No application. No placing it into a literature review.

But it’s been fun.

And the reason why it’s been fun is because it makes my brain tingle and itch in all the right ways (it helps to have a specialist in early aesthetics at hand to try and make sense of some of it). And I get to sit with the tingles and the itches for as long as I want.

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At the end of the day, when I close Rancière’s book after reading a couple of pages and turning to google about half a dozen times, I feel content. I have claimed this online space as one where I could reconnect with writing as a moment to stretch some dormant muscles and to reconnect with the joy that it once brought me. I think I’m on the way to this, even when I have to fight against natural tendencies to avoid the blank page.

Maybe I’m also on my way to reconnecting with another thing, one that despite everything has brought me joy continuously for the last decade: researching, whatever I like, for the sake of doing it.

Even if takes me a month to finish reading one short chapter.

1. The original title of this collection of lectures is Le Destin des images. I guess “destiny” or “fate” didn’t sound adequate in English. It is still funny then to turn to the first paragraph of the first essay, also titled “The Future of the Image” to see Rancière-in-translation then mention “a certain idea of fate and a certain idea of the image”… But I digress.

2. I hope not. I had planned on finishing Barthe’s The Fashion System this year if only because I first started it back in 2017, abandoned it halfway through it, and still feel bad about it.