Jouissance and I!

Academic Pedigree of

 

G.R. Tomaini, 

 

The Protege of Drucilla Cornell, 

 

and Thereby the Cunning of Reason Itself:

 

The Charming and Graceful Dauphin of Deconstruction 

 

October 2023

 

§§§

 

§1) G.R. Tomaini has been the student of Drucilla Cornell, Elizabeth Camp, Derek Parfit, Ted Sider, Cornel West, Gary Dorrien, Etienne Balibar, and Slavoj Žižek. His chief academic inspirations are Drucilla Cornell, Cornel West, Derek Parfit, Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak — the famous translator of Derrida’s seminal Of Grammatology, who positively reviewed Tomaini’s 5th book of Poetry — The Psalms of Babylon: Or, 112 Flowers of Malaise — she was a student of Paul de Man as well as a colleague of Edward Said’s, and she founded the Department of Comparative Literature at Columbia University —, Ted Sider, Elizabeth Camp, and Gary Dorrien, Edward Said, Judith Butler, J.L. Austin, Immanuel Kant, G.W.F. Hegel, but most of all has been an acolyte of Gottfried Leibniz, himself the Co-Founder of Calculus.

 

§2) Drucilla Cornell’s daughter was Jacques Derrida’s god-child — the only of the so-called Virgin Brides of Derrida to be awarded this privileged endorsement. Cornell encouraged the infamous Ethical Turn in Derrida’s thought. Her book, The Philosophy of the Limit, Reconstructs Deconstruction and renames it; Derrida frequently and privately expressed to Cornell that her readings of his works were the most rigorous out of all of his acolytes. Cornell was a regular attendee of Ronald Dworkin and Tom Nagel’s Legal Philosophy seminar for 25 years. When she was not attending the Opera with Seyla Benhabib, or dining with Gayatri Spivak, or hosting Avital Ronell at her Halloween parties, or being friends with Peter Singer, or agreeing to read over Stanley Fish’s latest book, or reminiscing about her days in the Black Panthers with her comrade Angela Davis, she was reconstructing seminal texts left and right. Drucilla Cornell was Tomaini’s Diotima, who taught him everything that the coy, Young Tomaini could grasp. Derrida was the protege of Michel Foucault himself, the most cited scholar in the entirety of the Humanities, where Derrida follows as the 2nd most cited scholar in the entirety of the Humanities. Because there can be no Deconstruction without Foucauldian Structuralism, itself, the focus of the spotlight ought return to the notion itself of the Construction of Ideology, itself rooted in the machinations of Sigmund Freud’s Pleasure Principle, as shall be explicated in Tomaini’s forthcoming text, The Will To Pleasure, which aims to employ Kantian Synthetic Logic in the ambitious enterprise of harmonizing the Philosophies of Jeremy Bentham, John Stuart Mill, Sigmund Freud, Jacques Lacan, Wilhelm Reich, Charles Darwin, Reinhold Niebuhr, Herbert Marcuse, Jacques Derrida, and Michel Foucault himself, the towering Dogen of the Humanities. Derrida was himself derided by his teacher Michel Foucault, who said of his work, “it is either an A or an F,” where Tomaini was berated by Oxford-Rutgers Philosopher Barry Loewer, similarly, for an equally brilliant treatment entitled Discourse On Cognitive Construction, reviewed as being “either a Schönberg sonata or else merely decoration for the wastebasket.” Once, across one of their 800 digital epistles exchanged with one another, Cornell informed Tomaini that he had “become too radical,” after which Tomaini insisted that Cornell, “take Nelson Mandela off of the wall, for he, too, was a radical.”

 

§2) Elizabeth Camp was the student of John Searle, who himself was advised by J.L. Austin, the Father of Speech Acts, whom Jacques Derrida and Judith Butler — the President of the Modern Language Association — have both famously written about. Camp taught Tomaini the Philosophy of Ludwig Wittgenstein and allowed him to audit her graduate seminar on Speech Acts themselves during his time at Rutgers College, containing the world’s 2nd best Philosophy department; during such time as Tomaini served as President of the Undergraduate Philosophical Society and orchestrated some 26 Professorial Lectures to the Society, involving an Animal Rights panel with Peter Singer as well as an international conference planned on Jacques Derrida, which Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak agreed to be a panelist for. During such time as Tomaini knew Camp at Rutgers, she advised the Class of 1970’s Lecture series, a committee that Tomaini persuaded into inviting Jeremy Waldron, himself the student of Ronald Dworkin, himself the infamous student and detractor of Oxford’s one-time Jurisprudence Chair, H.L.A. Hart. 

 

§3) Derek Parfit was an Autistic Genius Speedreader as well as Oxford Researcher at All Souls College, who synthesized Utilitarianism, Deontology, and Virtue Ethics into one system of Ethics, whose protege was Larry Temkin, whose research on Inequality resulted in the expansion of healthcare coverage to over 300,000,000 lives in the Chinese nation-state. Temkin persuaded Tomaini to experience Parfit in the classroom; in the elevator ride up to the Philosophy Department, Tomaini asked Parfit whether he commuted by means of teleportation device. Parfit acted upon the Kantian Synthetic Logic inherent to his own work, although did not realize it. Tomaini expanded Parfit’s corpus to include some 18 Ideal Principles of Morality, all derived from competing Ethical Visions — themselves synthesized together within a novel General Theory of Ethics: Leibnizian Virtue Cyclological Optimalism. The fullest explication of Tomaini’s various Reconstructions of Parfit’s corpus, however, lies within Tomaini’s Tractatus Perfectio-Philosophicus: Or, Discourses On The Dharma of Civilization and Its Odyssey Toward International Harmony: A Treatise On Intercosmopolitan Realpolitik Grounded By The Logical Necessity of Civilizationism. He also visited the Philosophy Departments of Harvard and New York University; Tomaini enrolled in his Advanced Ethical Seminar as a sophomore, during such time as Tomaini enrolled in 6 graduate seminars — two with Drucilla Cornell — and likewise audited 25 more from all across Rutgers College — New Brunswick, which at one point and time, dejected an offered invitation to join its peer institutions assembled under the Ivy League label.

 

§4) Ted Sider — the student of Edmund Gettier — became, once Jerry Fodor left Rutgers’s Philosophy Department, its preeminent scholar. His metaphysical notion of Temporal Parts, as well as Parfit’s own Personality Nihilism, were built upon by Tomaini’s General Theory of Phenomenological Constructivism, as well as the 7-Part Holistic Theory of Personal Identity; these theories were presented in Tomaini’s Encyclopedia of American Idealism: Toward a Novel Method and System of Philosophy, published in 2023, containing, however, the first Western-Style Philosophical System ever written in the United States of America; for, following the logic of Emerson, American Transcendentalism is more so a sporadic Method than a Philosophical System proper; and, following the logic of Richard Rorty, “no good American Pragmatist believes in Systems;” likewise, the title of West’s seminal The American Evasion of Philosophy, too, conveys the objective, public fact of Pragmatism’s being more so a Method than, again, a System proper.

 

§5) Cornel West — a Magnanimous Confucian Gentleman, perhaps one who transcends W.E.B. Dubois’s legacy himself — has been University Distinguished Professor at Yale University, Princeton University, Harvard University, as well as the Dietrich Bonhoeffer Chair at Union Theological Seminary, the world’s pre-eminent divinity school; West was the student of Talcott Parsons, the infamous Systems Theorist whose interlocutor was Jürgen Habermas, himself. His Preface to Tomaini’s Encyclopedia notes that Tomaini, “attempts to grapple with the insights of giants both present and past,” and that Tomaini is a “Poet-Philosopher obsessed with Encyclopedic Scope yet mindful of contingency which undercuts any Grand System of Philosophy,” which turned Tomaini onto the writings of Alfred North Whitehead, the co-author with Bertrand Russell of Principia Mathematica, and the co-founder thereby, of Analytic Philosophy himself, which he later abandoned for his Process Systemography, the last of its kind to precede Tomaini’s own historic publication of his Philosophical System — American Idealism — and its Method — Reconstruction, which syntheses John Dewey’s Method of Reconstruction with Jacques Derrida’s Deconstruction, with a sprinkle of Hegelian Dynamics as well as Whiteheadian

Process Philosophy itself. West is author of the seminal Genealogy of American Pragmatism — The American Evasion of Philosophy, which his infamous mentor Richard Rorty would frequently use to teach American Pragmatism in his own classrooms. Additionally, he is Tomaini’s mentor of 5 graduate courses, as well as one of his Thesis Advisors, alongside the Rev. Dr. Gary Dorrien, who when Tomaini knew him was the Reinhold Niebuhr Chair at Union Theological Seminary, a prestigious Chair, indeed. Profounder discussions on these matters may be found in The Pre-Encyclopedic Journals of G.R. Tomaini, forthcoming in 2024, written during such time as he enrolled in 6 graduate seminars as an Undergraduate, and audited 25 from across the entire Humanities division of Rutgers College — New Brunswick.

 

§6) The Rev. Dr. Gary Dorrien was the student of John Rawls at Harvard University, who has kept alive the Rawlsian Neo-Kantian impetus in his research for decades. He has an encyclopedic intelligence in perhaps 30 or more fields and disciplines, and is less a Renaissance Man and more so a Byzantine Man — for the Byzantines were more cultured, erudite, and resourceful, at any rate, than the Italian — not Roman — philistines existing within the Renaissance time period. Dorrien taught Tomaini everything he knows about Theology, including the Systematic Theologies of Immanuel Kant as well as G.W.F. Hegel himself. Tomaini’s notion of the Rawlsian Game Theoretics of Civilization came from a discussion question posed to Dorrien in his class on International Justice, which yielded Tomaini’s Theory of International Harmony, inspired by Immanuel Kant’s own seminal text, Perpetual Peace. Dorrien has been hailed as the Greatest Theologian of the 21st Century, and Tomaini was, reiteratively, his student toward an accomplished Master’s Degree in Systematic Philosophical Theology. Below is the review Dorrien wrote of Tomaini’s Tractatus Perfectio-Philosophicus, which scored the highest possible grade: 

 

“Greg, congratulations on completing your astute, high-flying, encyclopedic, and in the end, very Leibnizian thesis on the science of love, exploring what is perfect to know, what is perfect to do, and what is perfect to aspire to. You make a splendid and persuasive case for Martin Luther King Jr. as the knight of faith and paragon of love who passed Kierkegaardian tests for both. You register a valid caveat about the odd lack of a strategic calculus in the “Letter from a Birmingham Jail,” which launches a Grand Tour in your signature fashion of Kant, Kohlberg, Hegel, Goldman, Sosa, Rawls, West, Nussbaum, and Fukuyama on what is perfect to know. Your succeeding reflection on civilization, social justice, Leibnizian harmony, Kantian subjectivity, and God covers a mighty waterfront on what is perfect to do, and splendidly prepares the reader for the Leibnizian dialectical harmony you espouse, a vision of reconciliation transcending the dialectical materialism of Marx and, as you contend, Hegel. You have scoured the landscape of Western philosophy to develop a just world theory that draws cogently upon Kant’s world federalist vision of perpetual peace, the dialectical “harmonism” that you take from Leibniz, and an appreciative word for a contemporary with a similarly synoptic vision, Jürgen Habermas. You have a pronounced tendency to feed thinkers into a blender that some resist, but you recognize that some thinkers you otherwise admire, such as Marx and Rosa Luxembourg, cannot be so blended. For you, the utopian impulse is not to be denigrated, including utopian speculation about the destiny of the human race. Congrats on completing your ambitious teleological genealogy of international harmony, a construct even more ambitiously deduced from your calculation of need—Marx’s test of a worthwhile endeavor, and in your case, a thesis deserving Credit with Distinction. With all good wishes, Gary.”

 

§7) Etienne Balibar was the student of and co-author of the seminal Reading Capital with the notorious Louis Althusser, the ingenious scholar whose readings of Karl Marx’s Das Kapital have influenced innumerable generations of Social Theorists and Marxist Political Economists. Tomaini’s encounter with Balibar at the Birkbeck, University of London’s Institute for the Humanities proved fateful: Tomaini informed Balibar that he and Althusser had produced a masterpiece of the Western Philosophical Canon, perhaps with a few flaws. Tomaini informed Balibar as to his Reconstructions of Reading Capital, which are chiefly explicated in Tomaini’s Encyclopedia of American Idealism: Toward a Novel Method and System of Thought, specifically in the subchapter entitled: Genealogy of the Hegelian-Lacanian Linguistic Superstructure, which discourses around the notion of Phenomenological Constructivism, or the idea that the root base of Society is itself Consciousness; yet, the root base is also Noumenal in an Orthodox Kantian sense, as well as Hypercomplex in its Social Reflexivity — therefore, Marxian Economics and the grand theory of Dialectical Materialism  are berated as Pseudo-Scientific, whereas Leibnizian Dialectical Harmonism is championed above and beyond any Pseudo-Scientific enterprises of Mind — such as Analytic Philosophy, for example.

 

§8) Slavoj Žižek is a genius of unparalleled proportions who was dumbfounded initially by Tomaini’s first question to him during the Birkbeck, University of London Critical Theory Summer School in 2022, which Žižek dodged by rejoinding: “it would take me 3 hours to answer your question on Hegelian Dialectics,” to which Tomaini replied: “Well then you had better get started!” Tomaini then proceeded into a tangent and — in what was truly a queer passion crime, for isn’t Ludwig so beautiful? — tore up a photograph of Ludwig Wittgenstein, saying, “fight the real enemy!” Žižek subsequently positively reviewed Tomaini’s Encyclopedia and argued that Tomaini’s text would “bring fresh air into our academic debates.” Tomaini then walked Žižek back to his hotel, fiercely debating with him for the entirety of the now historic 15 minute walk, as did Plato and Aristotle debate during their walks. Žižek was the analysand of Jacques-Alain Miller, who was himself the son-in-law of the infamous psychoanalyst Jacques Lacan.