I suspect many of us have experienced (and probably enacted) one of the standard put-downs of intellectual life. It may be a seminar paper, a student presentation, a conference lecture, but at some point or other someone will ask: ‘have you read such and such?’
Given the veneer of respectability that surrounds such events, you usually have two options: say yes, you have, and cut the person off; say no, and give up the high ground completely.
So, after discussing this with Christina, let me make a few alternative suggestions for how to respond:
1. ‘Given that your suggestion is a blatant effort at one-upmanship, I’m not going to engage in your desperate game’.
2. ‘Isn’t word association a wonderful thing! Obviously, a word I said has triggered something in your cerebral cortex, and out pops a suggestion for a book’.
3. ‘Could you say a bit more? … No, I’m afraid that’s completely irrelevant to my work and I have no idea why you brought it up, you tool’.
4. ‘I bow to your superior knowledge and wide reading …’
18 February, 2013 at 11:40 pm
or, you could ask for a pencil and write it down…graciousness supersedes intellectual wankiness
19 February, 2013 at 9:02 am
That is a very common response, but it plays the game. I’d rather call the bluff on the put-down.
20 February, 2013 at 5:36 am
“yes, but I only read it in the Polish edition which, as I understand, was a somewhat free translation”
20 February, 2013 at 12:09 pm
Deane, I didn’t know you could be funny.
20 February, 2013 at 7:45 am
“Define ‘read’.”
20 February, 2013 at 12:10 pm
Actually, you could do a Derrida here and spend 15 minutes ruminating: ‘what does it mean “to read”?’
20 February, 2013 at 11:27 pm
I’d prefer Julia Kristeva. But yes, same/difference.