He wasn’t fat

Tragically, a 26 year old man, Lee Marriage, died within a couple of hundred metres of finishing last Sunday’s City2Surf fun-run.  He suffered a heart attack, and the medical staff couldn’t revive him.  Ever on the ball, the newspaper staff have had a geezer at his facebook page, where people have been writing tributes.  Someone who saw it commented (not clear whether in an interview or on Facebook): “He seemed fit, he wasn’t rippling with muscles but he had a slim build – he wasn’t fat.”

O Facebook, source of newspaper stories great and small!  Just before the Olympics, the Tele ran a frontpage story on a couple of our Olympic athletes who had updated their Facebook relationship status.

Are we so ignorant in our consciousness of health, so fixated upon obesity, that this becomes the sole indicator of whether or not we can complete a 14km run and be in tip-top shape?  (Are your muscles rippling?)   Are we so myopic in the face of the vast amounts of information about the world around us, that Facebook is the rule for what is newsworthy?  Can you dumb it down for me, just a little lower, pretty please?

It’s tragic that he died.  It scares me (does it scare you?).  I’m 27, I like to run.  I’ve done the City2Surf.  People in family have high-blood pressure, are obese.  I am not making light of his death.  Nor do I mean to have a go at whoever made those comments.  But, in the interest of public awareness, I’m sure journalists and editors can do a little better, have a little more judgement and responsibility, than Facebook and “he wasn’t fat”.

Filed under: Australia, death, food culture, madness, media, observations, personal, random thoughts, responsibility , City2Surf, death, dumbing it down, facebook, obesity, rant

Institutionalising blogs

Check out this post over at Home Cooked Theory.  Archiving, research, filing institutionalising… what does this say about the state of blogging?  They’ve died, and are now being stuffed and put up on display in a museum.  Of course, this is what they have always been   But if you watch closely, the exhibits move when they think no-one is watching…

Filed under: Blogging, death

Presence, death, signs – Derrida on life

To think of presence as the universal form of transcendental life is to open myself to the knowledge that in my absence, beyond my empirical existence, before my birth and after my death, the present is. I can empty all empirical content, imagine an absolute overthrow of the content of every possible experience, a radical transformation of the world. I have a strange and unique certitude that this universal form of presence, since it concerns no determined being, will not be affected by it. The relationship with my death (my disappearance in general) thus lurks in this determination of presence, ideality, the absolute possibility of repetition. The possibility of the sign is this relationship with death. The determination and elimination of the sign in metaphysics is the dissimulation of this relationship with death, which yet produced signification.

If the possibility of my disappearance in general must somehow be experienced in order for a relationship with presence in general to be instituted, we can no longer say that the experience of the possibility of my absolute disappearance (my death) affects me, occurs to an I am, and modifies a subject. The I am, being experienced only as an I am present, itself presupposes the relationship with presence in general, with being as presence. The appearing of the I to itself in the I am is thus originally a relation with its own possible disappearance. Therefore, I am originally means I am mortal. I am immortal is an impossible proposition.

Jacques Derrida, Speech and Phenomena, Trans. David B. Allison (1973), 54

Filed under: Derrida, Husserl, Philosophy, death, phenomenology, quotations