Party of one

For several years now tv commentators and bloggers have been using the expression "I celebrate" in an unusual way: "Tonight I celebrate the new book by Professor Suzy Q on the fight against FGM". All who use the word in this way, so far as I have heard it, are women who hold no ecclesiastic position. That may or may not be relevant to understanding the career of the locution.

The speakers are not having fun, at least not so's you notice. They are merely stating that they are doing something in the decorous, responsible way suggested by the simple present "I celebrate X", rather than the progressive form "I am celebrating X [, whoopee !]"

"Celebrate" has been a word for what you do at a party, or at high mass. Is "I celebrate" now like "I promise", a speech act in which the saying is already the doing ? Has someone celebrated who says "I celebrate", even though they are holding neither a drink nor a monstrance ?

It's a kind of stateliness scam, I think, more to do with priests than pretzels: "Tonight I will be treating an important topic with all due ritual". It is cheaper than the real thing, since you don't have to buy cases of vino, and you don't actually have to invite anyone nor even sweep out the pews. So whatever you've already got, you have it all for yourself.

Let's be fair

In Selbstversuch, Sloterdijk mentions the European religious wars of 400 years ago: "In the 16th and 17th centuries, all of Europe was a battlefield for confessional armies. In psychoanalytical terms: hysterics and obsessional neurotics, armed to the teeth, were beating each other over the head in an attempt to force their symptoms on their opponents." Somewhere Luhmann wonders why philosophers of ethics do not conclude that one cannot, in good conscience, allow all questions to be decided by a bad conscience - nor by a good conscience. He says that they never address these matters.

I before me, except after p

Self-referentiality is often confused with egotism. But egotism is self-preferentiality.