Culture
Kevin Hilke
Around 5:00 a.m. on a cold Northern California morning in 2005, Aaron Fielding of Los Altos, artist, poet, and musician, 27, entered his mother’s bedroom and told her that he may have to castrate himself. Caroline Fielding expressed concern for her son while Aaron lay down beside her on her bed. Aaron saw before him an hourglass full of sand as real as Macbeth’s dagger. He knew that the hourglass was illusory, but he also saw that it was about to run out. Its purpose was to communicate a message from God: You’re running out of time and you’re going to go to Hell if you don’t castrate yourself, Aaron.
Culture
Kevin Hilke
Between the two idioms in which the event was advertised—as a “lecture” (an academic idiom) “in commemoration” of Richard Rorty (an elegiac idiom)—Habermas chose to lean heavily toward the second, the elegiac, in the form of hewing to Rorty’s life and work to the exclusion of other topics and ultimately to the extent that Habermas could have been anyone, a generic if eloquent deliverer of Rorty’s biography and intellectual lineage. Habermas wasn’t Habermas as Habermas, the thinker with unique ideas that engage uniquely with Rorty’s; he was our leader in group tribute. And so the man who asked Habermas, at the conclusion of his remarks, a question about his relative silence on how the new prominence of new media might affect his thinking about the public sphere was told, by Habermas, that such a question was inappropriate, that we were “here to talk about Dick.”
