we r family

i have finally finished my autumn semester of uni, it did not end as well as i had expected, but i think i am over it, uni has become a matter of going through the motions - i expect to go fairly average this semester.

during this semester i have been indulging myself in french philosophy (...yes, again) but instead of the more typical post modern stuff that i read, i have had to read about phenomenology and existentialism, topics i needed to broach for my research project. While flipping through the pages of Satre & Merleu-Ponty i was quite amazed at how diverse the schools of thought in france are, and how public the debate can be.

Satre talks about how this sense of belonging to particular ideologies is known by the people of france as 'our families of the mind'. Each family is a school of thought.

I have a strange sense of nostalgia for this. Nostalgia because i enjoy this little reminder as i read satre's book. Strange because it is not my memory, i have not lived it. I would love for public debate to occur on the streets, random conversations, intellecual mags and pulp books. While this stuff happens at the moment, in ways that are more supperior at times, it is the intensity that is just as important to take into account.

Thus this is nostalgia becuase it maintains a sense of loss - time has separated then from now. Today people to dont talk politics so readily, there are no families of the mind. left and right circulate, but with on passion - we are the step children of these families, we struggle in negotiating how we should belong to these families, to these thoughts, and not all encounters between child and adult is one of unconditional love in this family.