academic frustration, or, burned out?

i've been thinking a lot lately about academia and my own work, wondering why i'm finding it so hard to get motivated to *do* my work. i think i'm starting to take steps toward an answer, but it's inchoate. i'm still interested in my topic, but i'm getting very bored by academic arguments in general. i sit down to read a new piece of academic writing, or to review a theoretical text i've read before, and with very few exceptions i just can't get into it. i can understand it, parse its key insights and major contributions, its "interventions" and its "stakes." but some part of me wants to find a more immediate way of communicating the things i think i have to say--lol, what comes to mind most often lately is "cracking heads," but that seems less than optimal for lots of reasons. then again, i don't think i have anything all that insightful, intelligent, or revolutionary to say...and this isn't a simple case of self-deprecation here. i think i'm pretty smart and all that, and i *get* what i'm reading, i don't feel intimidated by it or anything. i just don't find it terribly inspiring somehow, or feel that i have much (if anything) to add to the discussion it sustains. whenever i pull one thread or another, the discussion i am on the threshold of "officially" entering (via the act of writing a dissertation about it) boils down into such *eternally perennial* debates and conceptual dichotomies as: nature vs. nurture; nature vs. culture; the individual vs. society or the collective; free will vs. determinism; the nature of consciousness; science vs. religion; science vs. politics (i.e. science's conceit that it pursues knowledge in a strictly disinterested fashion, and that the knowledge it produces is politically neutral); the knowability of "things in themselves" (ala kant's noumena vs. phenomena, and vs. post-structuralism/deconstruction's textuality and the "shifting center," whether or not there's a "there there"); etc. etc. etc. since we keep coming back to these questions, each time arguing them in slightly different terms and with slightly different outcomes and insights, i *get* that they are important, central to most (if not all) human projects of meaning-making throughout the ages, including art, literature, philosophy, science, religion, etc. but... and... ???

my literature students all start out saying that literature exists to "express emotion," or that that's its main contribution to the world, or whatever. i respond, "ok, good. that's a start. so, emotion about what and in response to what? whence and wherefore this huge outpouring of emotion?" and more importantly: what *difference* does it make, what difference *can* it make?

that's the question i keep asking about what i read and what i'm supposed to be working on. (i ask it about my teaching, too, in slightly different terms.) it seems presumptuous to want to make any difference at all (who the fuck am i to quibble with plato, kant, derrida, butler, marx, benjamin, balibar, jameson, et. al.?)--the discussion has gotten so huge, esoteric, and complex that a desire for making a "difference" plays an awful lot like a simple desire for *fame* (which in academia, increasingly, seems to be *required* for job security). and i'm *definitely* not smart enough to stand shoulder-to-shoulder with any of that crew. so...short of that, what can i or should i seek to accomplish? and beyond what i'm seeking to accomplish...what am i *actually* accomplishing? anything at all? does it matter?