April 12, 2005
New York, NY

I felt like enlightening myself tonight, so I went to a lecture at NYU by a pretty famous French intellectual, Didier Eribon. For anyone who cares, he is the biographer of and an expert on Michel Foucault, a pretty important French philosopher.

It was fairly incoherent for the most part, until Eribon, the speaker, points out a woman in the audience and starts raving about how surprised he is that NYU could invite a prominent homophobe to be a visiting professor.

He got back to his lecture, and things were going pretty smoothly until the question and answer session began. The woman he pointed out, some French sociologist, stands up and speaks her peace. This starts a verbal combat in true gallic fashion. Cries of "homophobe", "liar", and Eribon screaming repeatedly in French "did you or did you not call artificial insemination by lesbians the 'butchery of procreation?'".

Graduate students and professors were running around like it was a riot. It was fucking hilarious. The professors shut the lecture down with students behind me screaming about censorship.

I might be a geek, but that was fun.