i am writing!

i promise.

re-reading things i've written, when potential employers ask for writing samples, and i become lost trying to imagine where i was when i wrote them... some strike me, odd, inspiring, well-written... most, though, could use some more editing.

and when the CEO of the Y spoke to me today about "a moment"-- about a path which one takes that is not in the hands of the individual, about a moment in which there is opportunity-- he was speaking in strongly religious terms: faith, god-assigned destiny, white light. i tilted my head, thinking only, "well-summarized, you post-structuralist, you."

the conversation moves forward, though, and i reply to another question, "no, sir, i am not below grunt work."

i come home to re-read that piece which i'd written; yea, here it is.

...the moment of “the political.” Culminated in this moment, this school of thought believes, is every potentiality, a complete openness, an undecided transition; it is Zizek’s “moment of subjectivity” and “nonfounding founding moment,”[1] Laclau’s “moment of antagonism.”[2] This moment, post-structuralists would argue, is every dream, every option, every possibility—free from the social constructs, the structure that culminated to bring us to this moment. Yet once we make a decision, a movement, a hesitation, in any direction, the “political” moment is lost—politics reemerges.

...How to emancipate International Relations from politics? [...] “Emancipation,” the space where humans can be free of the historical and social structures that are in place and actively design a new space through Critical Theory itself, is this school's “political moment.”

Ken Booth extends this theorizing on Critical Theory’s “moment”:

“True emancipation cannot be defined in some timeless fashion, as some-one-thing at the end-point of the human story; secondly, true emancipation cannot be at somebody else’s expense (except, that is, at the expense of the beneficiaries of oppression, and even here I would argue that to be freed of being an oppressor is a step on the road to becoming more humane, and therefore is emancipatory); and thirdly, true emancipation cannot be considered to be synonymous with Western ways of thinking and behaving (though neither are ‘Western’ ways necessarily antithetical to emancipation. If emancipation is seen as timeless, at the expense of others, or simply a cloak for Westernization, it is false emancipation.”[1]

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[1] Booth, 1999: 41.

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[1] Edkins, 1999: 7.

[2] Ibid: 5.