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I apologize for leaving the discussion yesterday, just as things were getting hot. The new expansion of my life involves the restriction of catching trains that (sometimes) leave on time. Anyhow, if I had stayed, I might have said something along these lines...

I appreciate the challenge that we had spent most of our time talking conventionally, as academics do, not taking the risk of actually practicing "against." That, as per Sontag's critique, we were using interpretation to protect ourselves, refusing to engage in an "erotics of conversation."

I would add only that what feels like "outside" to some of us  feels like "inside" to @ least one of us (me).

I am very familiar with the convention of "turning to the text," when the conversation in a classroom gets too heated, or too personal; I've even been known to use that trick myself on occasion. But when I asked that we "focus on the texts" this time 'round, I really had something else in mind:  not an avoidance of our "real," "free" selves (I don't think I know what those terms mean*), but an invitation to explore, and re-shape, them together, via a shared text, a shared experience.

(*Is the self who grew up in Oakland more "real" or "free" than the one re-shaped by experiences @ Bryn Mawr? Is what is real-est what comes first? And freedom the expression of that first-ness? I don't think so, but I thought that's what I heard in the conversation....)

While we're doing personal testimony: I grew up in a rural area where the authority of personal testimony was often used, not to open up, but rather to halt conversation (Linda Kauffman has written about this, in yet another good essay w/ "against" in the title; hers is called, predictably, "Against Personal Testimony"). Given that background, for me a very important aspect of academia has been its insistence on a larger frame than that provided by personal experience, on testing the authority of what one knows experientially against what others have to say....

Which is to say, I see the inbetween space Bharath sketched out as one that draws on both the personal and the academic, on a kind of thinking that feels, a sort feeling that thinks...

but let's not throw out the baby w/ the bath water!