How to fight the loneliness

Writing my dissertation is a lonely process. Although I kept the Zizek book a secret until I had submitted the manuscript, I did have Brad, along with a few others, to read my chapters and especially to discuss things as I went along. This time around, I only have my advisor, and even though he’s great and really responsive, it’s not the same as having a peer to hash things out with in abstraction from the degree process.

The big problem is that I’ve painted myself into a corner: I’m doing representative figures from patristic and medieval theology, but I’m using them to get at a constructive theological/philosophical project. Thus I’m dealing with figures that few people are really familiar with in any detail (aside from Anselm), and the people who are familiar would be critical scholars who would tend to be nervous about my constructive use of these figures simply in principle — particularly since I’m taking a “close reading” stance that brackets a lot of the historical concerns in an attempt to get at the peculiar logic underlying the texts. I’m not saying that their objections would be wrong or unhelpful, of course, but just that their stance wouldn’t be what I’m looking for — a peer who is “on board,” able to view the project from within to a certain degree.

I frequently use the term “negative sweet spot” for situations like this, but it’s probably inherent to the dissertation process rather than peculiar to my own project. The whole point of the dissertation is obviously that no one has thought of my idea before, and the natural consequence is that before the project is completed and somehow endorsed by the big Other, it’s difficult not to alternate between feeling that my idea is laughably simple and obvious or else that I’m a total crank.

Every time someone wants me to explain my project, I want to say, “Just read the book!” But the book doesn’t exist yet! And if it ever does come into existence, it may well be in a $120 hardcover edition that you have to order through interlibrary loan! My megalomania leads me to want it published in a regular trade paperback that can be assigned in courses and basically exercise influence in the field, because I really do think I’m saying something that’s both important and unrecognized, but the natural conflicted emotions that come with writing a dissertation sometimes make me think, “Well, maybe it’d be okay if I just got a CV line and then filed the thing away.”

Part of that is just the preemptive discouragement at its reception among tradition-oriented young theologians of the type I tend to run into on the internet — yes, I’m doing stuff with tradition, but I’m using it to say things people don’t want to hear (i.e., arguing that we need to change the way we talk about theology in a way that’s not simply a reassertion of the inherent goodness of some past theologian), and I’m also taking seriously feminist, womanist, liberation, black, and Korean theology in the process, which might even be a worse mistake than referring to Altizer as anything but a swearword.

Now obviously I’m not giving you any concrete information about what I’m doing in my dissertation, and I hope you, my dear reader, won’t take it personally when I say that unless you’re going to be that magic person, it seems like a waste of time to discuss it until the book actually exists and has been endorsed by the big Other — otherwise, I’m bound to be discouraged even by sympathetic questions or comments that don’t seem to “get it.” And how can you be expected to “get” something that takes a book to establish when I’m only writing a little paragraph on a blog, right?

My only option, as we all know, is to smile all the time. Or else grind my teeth till meaningless and sharpen them with files.