Martha Nussbaum, Non-Insider

In 1947 Martha Nussbaum was born. Her name at birth was Martha Craven. She claims to have repudiated her own "aristocratic" upbringing and to dislike elites and in-groups, whether it's the Bloombury group or Derrida. She has taught at Harvard, Brown and the University of Chicago, received more than 60 honorary degrees, and a few days ago she won the Berggruen Prize, which comes with a $1 million cash award.

In the mid-1980's, when Nussbaum was a professor in both the Classics and Philosophy Departments at Brown, she published The Fragility of Goodness, a book which added considerably to her already considerable prestige in academia. In the late 1980's, I was a Collage Scholar in the College of Liberal Arts at the University of Tennessee in Knoxville. We College Scholars were given The Fragility of Goodness to read. Prof Nussbaum came to the University of Tennessee to speak. There was a Q&A after her lecture. I asked several questions.

I have never been particularly drawn to nor particularly repelled by Nussbaum's writing. I think I went to the trouble of coming up with questions for her because I was drawn to the aura of power around her. Double full professor in the Ivy League at around age 40, that's sumpin. Many camerapeople followed her around, including at least one video camera crew. I don't remember what my questions were. I'm quite certain they were uninteresting.

By this time, 1988 or early 1989, I had heard the name Derrida, but not with connotations which tempted me to read him.

Bill Moyers interviewed Prof Nussbaum on TV about The Fragility of Goodness. In his introduction, there are several shots of Nussbaum's visit to the University of Tennessee. In one shot, from behind the speaker's lecturn, in the upper-left corner of the screen, is a small smudge which may or may not be me.

In 2007, Peter Sloterdijk, a German philosopher whom I still liked somewhat at the time, despite numerous German-speaking friends having assured me that he was an asshole, published a book about Derrida. That was the first time I was strongly tempted to read a text either by or about Derrida. However, my competence in the German language never ceases to grow, and the more precisely I'm able to understand Sloterdijk, the less I like him. I didn't get a copy of Sloterdijk's book about Derrida, nor, at the time, did I get any books by Derrida.

Less than 2 months ago I finally began to read Derrida. I've taken an immediate and immense like to him. I'm a postmodernist! Who knew?!