Last Long Teaching Day of the Summer

This morning I deliver my last lecture for my "What Is Compelling?" summer intensive: a discussion of two selections from Judith Butler, one from Undoing Gender on mourning and one from Precarious Life on the Levinasian identification of discourse with the injunction "Thou Shalt Not Kill." Later today, I'll be lecturing on Petronius' Satyricon the reductio ad absurdum of the patriarchal agency that is assertive/insertive, in which the targeting of all the world for penetration renders the penetrator target for penetration, in which the satisfaction of potency collapses into impotence, in which possessiveness dispossesses, in which to be alive is always to be dying. A last long day, sure to be lengthened by a slew of last-minute last-ditch gambits and reckonings in extended office hours, and then one more lecture tomorrow to complete my second intensive. And then, of course, another geyser of grading.