A Tribute to Jan Blommaert

摘要

Two of my maitres a penser died relatively young. Michel Foucault was 57, Erving Goffman was 60. It is highly likely that I shall die relatively young as well. I'm 58 now, and I have been diagnosed with cancer stage 4 in mid-March 2020. Since there is suddenly very little future left to plan, speculate or dream about, one tends to use such landmark moments as a prompt to reflect on the past. The guiding question in this - quite an obvious one - is: what was important?I will restrict my reflections to the professional parts of my life. This is, of course, an artificial segmentation, and readers must keep in mind that the professional part of life was always interwined with the nonprofessional parts, often in uneasy or poorly balanced ways. Perhaps that story should be told elsewhere. For now, I will focus on the part of me that was called 'academic'.