The State of my desk today sums up my year. It’s been messy. It broke my heart multiple times and I experienced loss in way I did not know was possible. I am still broken but I try to see it as a chance.
Today, I didn’t tidy up my desk. Maybe tomorrow. But I have my laptop and after pausing my PhD for about 9 months, I have started again. Baby steps.
Today I read a lot. Mainly on the history of power theories. Contextualising before delving into Foucault. Or so I tell myself. Was lucky as our new puppy slept all day. (the other reason for the messy desk – saving papers from her).
I filed notes on notecards, I wrote in my book (sorry), I thought of ideas and added articles to Zotero. And at the end I found the most amazing quote, which made today all worthwhile. Not for the PhD maybe but for me. Thank you John Rajchman:
“In this sense Foucault’s art of seeing might be said to be the art of seeing outside ourselves, or seeing the “absence” in our work. Not to look within to a true or authentic self; not to master one’s time by holding it in one’s thought; not to find a place for oneself within society or state, but to look out from oneself, to open one’s time to what has not yet been seen, to transform or displace one’s instituted, assigned identity at a time and place. In this sense Foucault’s art of seeing is an art of looking out, which would “give new impetus, as far and wide as possible, to the undefined work of freedom.”
John Rajchman, October, 1988
Vita Activa (H Arendt).
Not knowing and living with the ‘absence’. Still doing. For what lies ahead. In work and life. To honour the lives lost.
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