The Senior Seminar in 1988 was on Friedrich Nietzsche, and was presided over by John Carvalho. I took this as a sign that I could really start playing with paper formats that pushed the bounds of "academic writing." One thing that John did was to assign a student to do a presentation/summary of each day's readings at the beginning of class, which would then set the stage for the day's discussion. I had by that time determined that style was critically important in determining the bounds of what could be said, or even thought. "Language is the House of Being," Heidegger tells us -- it provides the conceptual structure within which thought occurs. I was interested in taking it to the next level -- language is not, after all, simply a set of words and a set of grammatical rules for their use; language exists only as it is used, and the mode of it's use is inextricably tied to what can be said, and even what can be thought. And so I decided that a discussion of Nietzsche's On the Genealogy of Moralsâ needed to be narrated by Batman.
Protocol on On a Genealogy of Morals, Niezsche
My thesis itself is a result of what happens when you spend an intensive month reading Thomas Pynchon's Gravity's Rainbow immediately before writing a major paper on Nietzsche. It only took a semester of teaching at Temple for me to realize that my analysis was naïve and full of middle class suburban values, but I think it's a decent first step.
The Games of Domination: A Prolegomenon to a Psycho-Philosophical Analysis
My professor's response to the paper
Other forthcoming texts from that era include:
