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There are times when I resent being a Ph.D student. Y & I talk a lot about the ups and downs of academic work. What it's like to go home with a queasy feeling & spend the evening cursing yourself for not having accomplished anything important. It's difficult to think about something else. Lately, there have been lots of the downs. Yesterday, however, was a good day. I talked to G, whose brutal & kind comments have helped me a lot through the years. "That fucking homeliness.... You have to do something with that part." Ouch. But he's right. That fucking homeliness has to go. Other stuff, too. I learned a lot & got tons of new stuff to digest. Regrettably, today my digestion is in bad shape. I'm trawling articles to put some recent & stylish references into my research plan. Even though I've left the field of business ethics behind, I will try to say something about why this field is so problematic. I read one article. It's about Levinas. Levinas and business ethics. Crazy as that may seem, continental philosophy is quite popular in discipline of business ethics among those who want to be "cutting edge" & those who, despite their attempts to contribute with some alternative views, express their critical stance towards the tradition (rule-obsession, virtue ethics flowerpatterns & so on). But what views do they express? That is often very, very unclear: in many articles, the message is simply that one should take an "alternative" stance and that some model will help us in doing this. It's Bataille & Derrida & Levinas & what not. Mostly, I've skimmed through recent volumes of Business Ethics - A European Perspective. I'm not too impressed. The article I read today (actually there is a recent Levinas-themed issue of that journal) suggested Levinas should be used not to revitalize the field of business ethics but, the authors contended, Levinasian ethics can be applied to management ethics. I suppose this means that Levinas is somehow to help managers in their "ethics issues". According to the article, Management = persons, while a corporation = not a person. (That's fine.) The authors argue that this & that concept may be applied to management situations. They take the example of sending e-mails. Proximity! Meeting the Other! The Encounter! Openness! What beautiful things can be done with Levinas & esp. with the concepts he uses!

Philosophical concepts are allowed a a life in their own here and it appears as if the mere evocation of a bundle of terms will open up a useful "framework" that can be applied to a specific activity (e.g. business). They are simply there. Openness, proximity, the Face. Ready to be utilized as tools for managers who want to devor a good night's sleep. (OK - so what I am so unhappy about is that these authors think that they have left the idea of applied ethics behind but then again they don't seem to have moved very far from that conception.)

And the one single thought in my head is: I did print this thing, didn't I, what a waste of paper! And life is too short for this etc, etc, etc.

At that point, I was ready to throw chairs out of windows & chew concrete. I didn't. Instead, I sit at home, listening to Eric Dolphy really loud (fuck you neighbors, you'd better commiserate). Moping & thinking that the research plan will never get written & that I'd rather dig holes in the ground and fill them up again than surfing the shit wave of my philosophical thoughts right now.