Eric Jarosinski, The Man Behind Nein Quarterly

Paul Holdengraber continues his conversation with Eric Jarosinski, the man behind Nein Quarterly, on the fine art of philosophy in 140 characters. Part one is here.

Eric Jarosinski on the difference between the aphorism and the joke on Twitter…
The things I write for Twitter now are really much closer to jokes than the aphorism tradition. I tried to formulate that also once, something like, “There’s a line separating the joke from the aphorism, the secret is to cross it.” And for me, that’s very much how I see Twitter now. It’s for a certain type of writing, the explosive punchline kind of thing.

Eric Jarosinski on mining the news for material…
I spent most of the day following the news. I’m looking for the talking points, the catch phrases, the clichés, that are being bandied about, because I want to take exactly those terms and see what I can do with them; ways in which I can unpack them and rearrange them, or do something interesting. That to me is the fun of it. Having the function of what we think of as the classic political cartoon, but working at the level of text language [on Twitter].

Eric Jarosinski on the importance of irreverence in the intellectual…
If there’s one thing that motivated what I do its not some idea of popularizing difficult ideas, or making them easier, or teaching someone anything, it’s mainly about demystifying in some form. Making it clear that you might show the greatest respect towards a critical thinker, or a radical thinker, by being irreverent with their work. By having, what I often consider, a respectful irreverence towards their work. Because that’s often what I miss as an academic, the type of—how would I put it—I guess, an aura surrounding someone like Walter Benjamin in terms of their position within the academy and so on, that often people find intimidating to the extent that they’ll never meaningfully engage with a number of these thinkers, because they’re scared off by it from the offset.