Thinker Under Arrest

There is a poem by W.B Yeats called “The Scholars”. I’ve quoted it here at CS before. It ends with the line (I’m quoting from memory) “what would they say, should their Catullus walk their way”. The point, made with the sharp brevity of a good espresso, is that the last thing academics would want to encounter is the actual, three-dimensional incarnation of their object of study, its repetition in the present.

The academic or ‘scholastic’ (Bourdieu) attitude is content to classify, to place in a canon, to assess ‘influence’, to trace allusion and to see the work reflected in the endless mirrors of intellectual – literary, philosophical - tradition. That their chosen author made also a fierce proposal about existence, that taking their author seriously might involve a commitment to something other than library hours, this lies outside the mirrors. It is not just true of the Catulluses, the literary and artistic figures whose work is an ongoing demand to ‘change your life’. Equally, there are philosophers, thinkers, whose ideas do not, so to speak, bear repeating. To study Walter Benjamin’s Theses is one thing; to turn them on the present, to re-open what the book of canonisation has closed (but without mentioning Benjamin, without the dutiful nod), to take him at his word rather than simply ‘editing and annotating’ his words, this would have the scholars calling the police.