An Eye Most Apt in Gelatines and Jupes

Everyone, in my experience, is aware of two ways to eat at a Chinese restaurant. The first involves every member of the dining party ordering a different dish from the menu. When the dishes arrive the entire party eats small helpings of every dish that has been ordered. If you happen to dislike something one of the dining party members ordered you deal with it privately; chances are someone resents you for your choice as well. This first method, I suppose, could be considered the “family style” method.

The second method is wrong.

For a long time this has been my de facto test of potential friends and sexual partners. If when the dishes arrive at the table the acquaintance pulls their ordered dish toward him/herself and removes the oversized serving spoon (an obvious sign of the superiority of the “family style”) I understand that the relationship will not advance from the table. From that point on I have the freedom to treat the meal like a farewell luncheon. I ask my failing acquaintance long-term questions about the direction s/he thinks his/her life might go. When we split the bill not into equal parts but instead pay individually for every dish ordered I am reminded of why I am letting this person disappear into the ether of my consciousness.

Fuck you, Time magazine

I do not read the introductions of books until I have finished the book that is being introduced. Generally this is so I can better ridicule the introducer. Usually the book will be introduced by a scholar with a chair in some prestigious east coast university. S/he will use his/her advanced biographical knowledge of the author s/he has attached him/herself to like a lamprey eel in order to illuminate the more obscure autobiographical notes of the text. Usually these observations can simply be summed up as “wrong,” or, as is often the case, “laughably wrong.” Occasionally a work of fiction will be introduced by a contemporary author judged to be similar to the master whose work demands introduction. Such is the case of the piece by John Updike which grows like a malignant tumor off the front end of the Complete Works of Franz Kafka. Updike has nothing to say about Kafka, and yet says it for nearly forty pages. If I were to sum up all the useful information a reader of Kafka could glean from reading Updike’s introduction, I would have to do it thusly:

“ .”

Conceal/Reveal

John V. Smyth, the author of The Habit of Lying, is fond of an example which in his estimation illustrates the extent to which deception naturally permeates and mediates human behavior. The example is clothing. It’s simple to understand, really: we choose our clothing as a means of disguising and defining ourselves. When the body is revealed as the clothing is removed, the viewer of the exposed body is treated (presumably) to the unveiling of a closely kept secret. Hence the historical ugliness associated with sharing your secret with too many people: once everyone knows about it it’s not much of a secret.

The problem with this example is that I’m convinced it’s completely ironic. Clothing is not the “natural” sign of man’s tendency towards deception—it’s the body itself. While the sloughing off of clothes is an easy way to illustrate the conceal/reveal move to power that dictates Foucault’s system of “confession,” it is an inherently false construction. Exposing your body only exposes the many different ways you are concealing anything and everything you do; it illustrates that human deception runs so deep it can only be sloughed off in the realm of the symbolic, dictated by the authority we all bow to when engaging in this erotic ritual. In this way, natural human deception is not mediated through dressing oneself, but by feeding oneself.

Deception mediates feline society as well.

I finished reading Enjoy Your Symptom! without reading the introduction (as usual). I was intrigued by any introduction to a Zizek work. Would Zizek allow a completely wrong introduction to preface his book? Or would he get one of the many brilliant people who are on a first-name basis with him (e.g. Judith Butler) to expose his many ironies? As I began reading it I was convinced of the former. The introduction writer begins by explaining how he hates the “family style” of eating Chinese food, “insist[ing on] finishing [his] plate alone.” Then he talks about the proposed psychoanalysis of this preference: a tablemate suggests that the introduction writer conceals his fear of sharing sexual partners with his “repulsion” towards sharing Chinese food dishes. The introduction writer then turns the haphazard psychoanalytical suggestion around by claiming that it would be more likely that one would insist on sharing sexual partners in order to disguise one’s hatred of sharing Chinese food. This kind of game is very cute and Zizekian but it ultimately left me wondering who this knob was that wrote the terrible introduction.

Of course it was Zizek.



The inherent question this all poses is, where is the act of concealing in sleep-eating? Is it the sleeping, or the eating? Furthermore, to what depths does the answer to the previous question suggest that human deception runs? How far do we go to deceive ourselves? And, lastly, is the sexual act always disguised by some other act (sharing Chinese food, etc.), or—as Nabokov once suggested—is it really always the other way around?