Rumour of the Hidden King: Irad Kimhi

This is just a short note of a kind of introduction, but not to me. I am not very familiar with academic blogs, though I know they exist. The point here is just to say a few words about Irad Kimhi. Kimhi is an Israeli philosopher who had taught in both the United States and Israel. In the mid-1990's he was an assistant professor in the Philosophy Department at Yale. He has guest-taught courses on a couple of occasions for the Committee on Social Thought at the University of Chicago. As I understand it, his regular gig is to teach courses in Tel Aviv in Israel. His name and reputation are well known among a fairly small group of cognoscenti, including friends, colleagues and former students (like myself). He has a kind of magical reputation to him, unique as far as I know in the academic world: He has not to my knowledge published a book and I don't know that he has published even any articles, but several of his draft manuscripts circulate privately among ravenous devotees of his thought. When he taught courses at the U of C this past Autumn and Winter, established, famous professors sat in on the classes and took notes as eagerly as the attendant graduate students.

University of Chicago Conference on the Financial Crisis (April 10, 2009), Panel 1: Sources of the Crisis

[What follows is my reportage of the Panel 1 of the conference, which I attended. I took pretty thorough notes, but they are necessarily incomplete. I welcome corrections. In the coming week I will better type up my notes on Panels 2 and 3. I did not attend Panel 4. The impatient can find the rough notes to Panels 2 and 3 in my earlier stub post.]

Conference on the Financial Crisis
Co-sponsored by the Money, Markets and Consumption Workshop, Economica, and other organizations. Held at the Franke Institute in the Regenstein Library at the University of Chicago, April 10, 2009. It was mighty.

Panel 1: Sources of the Crisis

Moderator: Gary Herrigel (Department of Political Science, University of Chicago)

Douglas Diamond (University of Chicago Booth Graduate School of Business)

Diamond gave a slightly slow-moving but persuasive talk on financial crises in recent historical perspective. He argued that basically such crises are all the same, being caused by runs on short-term debt. Diamond unfortunately did not do a great job dumbing down his talk, so that my sense was that it was difficult for many people in the room to understand it well. (See below my account of the Q&A session at the end of the panel, where I give more detail on Diamond’s ideas. I took bad notes at the beginning and good notes at the end.)

Mark Mizruchi (Sociology Department, University of Michigan)

Mizruchi presented other, perhaps deeper causes

Financial Crisis Conference 2009, University of Chicago (transcript)

[Dear Reader: What follows is a transcript of the conference held today at the University of Chicago on the origins and implications of the current financial crisis. It was enormously stimulating. The panelists were twelve professors of economics, history, sociology and anthropology from the University of Chicago, Rutgers, the New School for Social Research, the University of Michigan, and the University of Missouri at Kansas City. NB This is the raw transcript; I will correct it for spelling and turn it into full Thucydidean prose in the next week or so.]

Panel 1: Sources of the Crisis
(see separate posting, where I have typed these up complete)

[What follow are the rough notes to Panels 2 and 3. I will turn them into prose soon.]

Panel 2: Crisis in Perspective: Historical and International Comparisons

You are not the one who dreams your dreams

"Who is dreaming your dream? It is not you, but it is also not someone else. It is not like your heart beating. The... point in Freud is that the one who is dreaming my dream is the one who is living my life. [It is not a man within the man, but rather another form of] strange agency... This is an inversion of the [expected relation of conscious and unconscious.] It is not that the conscious has an unconscious, but rather that the unconscious has a conscious..." --Irad Kimhi, October 8, 2008