Thursday, March 28, 2013

あっという間に

One of the things about an academic career is the jangling temporality of things, since projects circle back at different stages of completion, and even sometimes continue circling back after that! I suppose those folks with the good fortune or lack of imagination to be working only on a single project don't experience it that much, but an academic scatterbrain like me is often concurrently in several time zones. I mentioned this last when Leibniz strode back into my life last semester, as if he'd just stepped out for a quick smoke: "where were we?" We?It's happening again. Just as we're putting together the full draft of the book we hope comes out of last year's "Queer Christianities" conference, the copy-edited draft of the Job book shows up for my approval. (Good thing i's Spring Break - and I do my real breaking between semesters!) But that's nothing compared to what tomorrow has in store: I've been invited to participate in a discussion about the Japanese ethicist Watsuji Tetsuro 和辻哲郎- remember him? We became best buds during my year in Tokyo 1992-3 and he was my ticket to Paris in 2001; I even published two essays on his ethics in 1999 (in Japanese!) and 2005 and organized a forum on him in 2004... but I haven't actively worked on him since.

(I took the above photo at the Watsuji Museum in Himeji in 2004. The post title - meaning something like "before you know it" - is a play on Watsuji's most famous concept, aida 間, tho' here it's pronounced ma.)