Step 2: Write The Goddamn Paper

Done. And it seems like another triumph, natch, although my physical senses stopped working correctly sometime around hour 30 of this Battan death march (figuratively, I mean--relax). We're now in the 49th hour, although I will admit to taking something that could be construed as an hour long nap during hour 38. It's tough to tell, because I was very far from off the high from all the stimulants I abused, and so rather than sleep the way that people do, I entered a kind of vegetative, catatonic state of partial sensory-awareness. I can't remember if my eyes were closed.

Before I sleep until next week, a quick fuck you to the commenter who called me pretentious for employing the phrase "post-Hegelian anti-rationalism," and wished me to fall into Ivan Karamazov's late-novel dimentia (uh, spoiler alert). I'm slightly stumped about how to react to that in a way that's consistent with my own intuitions, since my pet interpretation of the conclusion of the novel is that Ivan is the last sane human left in the universe and everyone else is insane. But, to reiterate, fuck you.

Also, why hang the pretentious charge on that particular phrase? Hegel managed to step over the appriopriate boundaries of non-empirical systematization pretty egregiously, in terms of ambition, comprehensibility, and acknowledgment of his own finitude and fallibility. An unintended consequence of Hegel's campaign of genocide against natural language was the emergence of post-Hegel and anti-Hegel critics who rank among the greatest prose stylists who ever lived. Like Kierkegaard, and Nietzsche, and er, Dostoevsky. I say things that are a lot more jargony and pretentious (and less meaningful) than that all the time.

Maybe, just maybe (speaking of pretension), I'm already the founder of the analytic philosophical school of criticism I alluded to here. In writing this paper, I banged out phrases like "Dostoevsky's ontology of dreams," and "the epistemology of the Dostoevskian dreamscape" half in jest, then took a second look at them and realized that they were keepers.