poster by Nancy Bernardo*
Scott Shershow is a great friend and was a fantastic mentor
of mine at UC Davis; he directed my dissertation on airports in American literature and culture. Scott visited New Orleans a couple years ago and gave a fascinating talk
at Loyola last year on the philosophical debates that undergird laws and ethics around the topics of suicide and the right to die. The book that developed from that talk, Deconstructing Dignity, has just come out, and Scott has a terrific post at the University of Chicago Press's blog on recent episodes where these issues have flared up once again in the news, stirring up a range of tense (and not always consistent) emotions, attitudes, and ideas. This got me thinking back to Scott's talk at Loyola last year, and I realized I might as well put my introduction to Scott here on my blog. The introductions we write for guest speakers often become so much more ephemeral work done by academics—a crumpled page in the recycle bin or a forgotten file in a blue simulacral folder, never to be looked at again. So, here it is:
--
Professor Shershow’s work ranges across conceptual
boundaries with relentless ease, making sophisticated and always surprising
connections between political economy, Western philosophy, visual arts,
literature, and anthropology—to name a mere few of the fields that his work
traverses.
I’ve been referring to Shershow’s “work,” but what I really
should say is that Shershow excels at unworking
texts—and not just literary texts, but all sorts of structures and textures
that form and inform everyday life.
Whether he is elaborating the most troubling and perplexing
implications of torture, describing precisely how a Sarah Silverman line clinches a philosophical knot,
unpacking the dense rhetoric of ‘sacrifice’ in post-9/11 discourse, or
delineating the conflicting economic schemas that course through the Hollywood
blockbuster Titanic—in all these
cases, Shershow’s thinking maintains a buoyancy, a rigor, and a flexibility
that is always refreshing, and equally challenging.
Where I am tempted to quote something from the philosopher Jacques Derrida in order to
further elaborate Shershow's contributions to contemporary critical theory, I will instead turn to a few lines by Wallace Stevens,
from “The Ultimate Poem is Abstract”—these lines, I believe, evoke the spirit
of Scott Shershow’s unique and inspiring style of inquiry, unworked:
If the day writhes, it is not with
revelations.
One goes on asking questions. That,
then, is one
Of the categories. So said, this
placid space
Is changed. It is not so blue as we
thought. To be blue,
There must be no questions. It is
an intellect
Of windings round and dodges to and
fro,
Writhings in wrong obliques and
distances,
Not an intellect in which we are
fleet…
