Conspiracy! News for affect theory nerds
Posted on | August 14, 2006 |
Has anyone else been following this bizarre story about the former judge, Teresa Brennan and the borrowed silver Lexus? Strange and intriguing. I read her affect book a while ago, and was devastated to find out in the preface that she had been killed in a car accident just as she finished it. I was profoundly moved by that - not only because she was so young, and her work was so exciting. I have always had a phobia that a car accident would happen to me (i.e. I thought it would happen before I turned 18, then before I finished my PhD, and kinda but not really as much now… I’m trying to be less self-obsessed with age!).
The story on the weekend interviewed colleagues of Brennan who have always suspected the death was a hit-and-run, perhaps by someone threatened by Brennan’s plans to expand the ambitions of her department. The Weekend Australian spoke to Harvard’s Alice Jardine, who went so far as to suggest that ‘the motive for Brennan’s death was “professional” - linked to a groundbreaking but hotly disputed doctoral program she had introduced at her Florida university’. Says Jardine:
Brennan designed the program to produce a better standard of public intellectual. It was developed as an alternative to what some social theorists regard as the narrow, must-publish, ivory tower of academe. The course work combined interdisciplinary humanities studies with practical training in the art of the public persona. Brennan had said the course was about “returning to public life some of its intellectual ballast”.
If that wasn’t interesting enough, Brennan is originally Australian (another thing I didn’t know). Another fondness I have for her is because of the anecdote in her book that she once placed a room to let ad on a noticeboard at Cambridge. Apparently it partly read: ‘Would suit feminist academic’.
Amidst all of this mystery and sadness, I have two questionss. If the suspicions about an intentional hit had a basis, how can academics not have the power to mobilise another inquiry? And (not unrelatedly perhaps) who is working on the film script?
Comments
4 Responses to “Conspiracy! News for affect theory nerds”
Leave a Reply
August 15th, 2006 @ 2:27 am
With all due respect for the memory of the deceased, I think Alice Jardine is talking out of her hat.
“Many of us were upset at the failure of the police investigation and some of us went so far as to try and hire private detectives to follow down the clues, but it’s never gone anywhere.”
Assuming Jardine was using proper English, that means she and her friends did not hire private detectives. You don’t “try and hire” PIs; either you hire them or you don’t. Either they were too cheap to pay, or this is just some story Jardine conjured up, ex post facto, to make herself sound important.
Similarly bogus-sounding are Jardine’s claims that Brennan was somehow being threatened (by whom?) due to a program she was developing for public intellectuals. Excuse me, but I taught college English (among other fields) for six-and-a-half years. There was nothing controversial sounding in the descriptions I read of Brennan’s program; frivolous, yes, but hardly controversial. (Practical training on the “persona” of a public intellectual? The very term “public intellectual” is redundantly pretentious; what other kind of intellectual is there?)
Had Jardine spoken of a campaign by Brennan’s friends — writing newspaper op-eds, putting up and handing out fliers with Brennan’s picture, going as a group to visit lawmakers and local, state, and federal law enforcement officials, appearances on TV and radio — then I would take her seriously. But there is no indication in her statement that she or anyone else spent any time, money, or energy seeking to solve the mystery of their supposedly dear friend’s death. All I hear between the lines, is the preening of Alice Jardine, full of sound and fury … It’s doubly sad that not only is Teresa Brennan dead, but that she didn’t have better friends.
As for why Judge Einfeld used her, he may well have known that she was dead, and hoped no one would bother hunting her down. (Since she was a prominent, Australian-born academic, it is possible that the news had reached down under at the time.) I guess the good Judge was thinking more like an academic, than a law enforcement officer.
Since writing my column on the matter, I have learned that the Judge’s primary motive for blaming the ticket on someone else, was that he would otherwise have lost his driver’s license.
August 15th, 2006 @ 11:13 am
hey mel, what did you think of her book? i thought her conception of affect was weird.
August 15th, 2006 @ 9:17 pm
I concentrated more on the transmission part of the theory rather than the affect part - that’s what struck me as most interesting about it, and I liked it a lot.
November 25th, 2006 @ 4:05 pm
Slow on the uptake as always, I’ve just twigged that Justice Enfield’s Teresa Brennan is the Teresa Brennan. This is indeed a strange and sad reappearance. I knew Teresa Brennan, when she was around Melbourne University in the mid-1980s, working on Freud, Lacan, feminism and psychoanalysis. I remember her chairing a seminar Juliet Mitchell gave. A early part to a rich intellectual and political life …