Arch-nemesis update

If it's really he, he's looking healthier than when last I saw him (sometime in 2004) and seems to have stopped dyeing his hair that ridiculous color.

The worst thing he ever did to me was reveal his uncertainty regarding his undergrad thesis, saying that, after all, it's easy just to repeat what your advisor (Pippin; he was writing about the spiritual animal kingdom section of the Phenomenology) says, but this is after all inadequate as an expression of one's own interests, since in doing so he made it harder to reflexively think of him as unstoppably inhuman and therefore dislikable.  (He was in fact perfectly nice in all my dealings with him, though more than a trifle arrogant, a trait that apparently persists—he refuses to speak German to his girlfriend, the photographer, for instance, even though (though probably actually because) she needs the help.) That self-doubt didn't stop him from citing his own essays written, I can only assume, for other classes, in the draft I saw, nor from winning the unfortunately named Gaylord Donnelly fellowship, which I suppose I need not say I too wanted, to study for a year at Cambridge with a bunch of other nice benefits—after winning which he had the temerity to opine that no one in the philosophy department there really did stuff that interested him, which makes one wonder what was wrong with Raymond Geuss.

I don't think he ever knew that he was my arch-nemesis, and in fact I can no longer remember why I first designated him thus.

Comments

[Kara]

Archnemeses never know that they are such, because everyone considers himself likable and charming, and certainly not the sort to be identified as anyone's A-number-one hated foe. For about six months in the past year, I had a foe. I was telling my mother about him when she dispensed another droplet of motherly wisdom. She said: "Sometimes the people we hate the most are the people toward whom we actually feel the greatest attraction." She did not mean sexual attraction, of course. She meant magnetic pull, of a conceptual sort.

[Blume]

I would add that they also never know that they are such because one's importance in the mind one's arch nemesis is surely never as great as her/his importance in one's own mind. That is to say: the very structure of the arch nemesis relationship seems to require that you think about her/him more than s/he thinks about you.

[ben wolfson]

Yes. The nemesis is not a rival.

The situation is a complex one and merits being thought upon.

[Kara]

Let us set to work on a Pamphlet immediately.