I have limitations. That makes me sad.

Three parent embryo

From the BBC:

"Scientists believe they have made a breakthrough in IVF treatment by creating a human embryo with three separate parents.

The Newcastle University team believe the technique could help to eradicate a whole class of hereditary diseases, including some forms of epilepsy. The embryos have been created using DNA from a man and two women in lab tests. It could ensure women with genetic defects do not pass the diseases on to their children. ... The embryos then began to develop normally, but were destroyed with six days."

The report then went on to quote pro-lifers, which was a shame. And there's another semantic problem; life and choice are not antonyms.

Beginning in the Middle

Thanks again for your wonderful talk in Belfast at the weekend. I really enjoyed listening to your analysis and suggestions and I was so pleased to hear the gnarly topic of why it’s worthwhile at all addressed, or even called out as critical.

It reminded me a little of Paul de Man on pedagogy: I wonder whether if criticism is read (or should be read) as an inherently pedagogical mode then criticism can be recuperated to an non-appropriative exercise that avoids epistemological damage to its subjects by making each encounter with them a fresh engagement. It seems to be that that’s the best way to find ethical subjectivity and avoid the memorializing/objectifying tendency that you point to. If it’d be possible to read the paper through I’d love to to appreciate it better.

How was the rest of the conference for you?

Ethical Subjectivity

Thanks for your email of a while ago. I finally plucked up the courage to have a poke about your website which is, I must confess, a rather intimidating artefact. I congratulate you on putting together that CV, though, seriously. It's enormously impressive. Looking at your stated interests and your mention of ethics jogged my memory of a plenary I saw at the weekend at a conference. The speaker was XXX, whom I hadn't heard of. His title was, I think, Beginning in the Middle: Shakespeare and the New Ethic of Responsbility, and he teased out possibilities of epistemologically hygienic criticism, by which I mean crit that doesn't memorialise or objectify (which is a grail and an impossibility). Anyway, I say all this only to urge you to look out for a forthcoming article by XXX on this - I think you'd find it interesting. He's one of those inspirational guys who just assays the critical field with indomitable confidence.

I'm looking forward to reading your articles in slow moments at work - thanks for sharing the link. I met a guy at Belfast called, I think, XXX, He's Australian, and a third year, and an exceptionally smart guy. His paper was on Paradise Lost and was broadly discursive and entirely captivating. It made me want to go and read PL again. Do you know him?