september 2024
Oct. 14th, 2024 02:33 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
boneglueCrime & Punishment [Преступление и наказание, Prestupleniye i nakazaniye], Fyodor Dostoevsky, transl. Richard Pevear and Larissa Volokhonsky. 1867, transl. 1993. 624pp. Shelf Life Books, Calgary, AB.
I began a reading jag this month of scholarly books which I feel underqualified to comment on. But this is only a diary, so I’ll try. I usually see Agamben’s landmark idea deployed to the effect that the defining power of the state in the modern era is the power to define which populations don’t count as legal people, or even more bluntly, which populations it is permissible for the state to kill, along with a couple of other corollary theses. In detail it’s much more complicated than that and all. I think if you were in my exact situation—interested in the idea above regularly attributed to Agamben by other writers, but lacking much background in medieval or classical political philosophy— you could get away with reading backward, starting with Part 3, “The Camp as Biopolitical Paradigm of the Modern”, and decide from there whether you also want the first two parts, which are, that said, definitely interesting even for the layperson.
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First as Tragedy, Then as Farce, Slavoj Žižek. 2009. 157pp. Local library.
Fear of Knowledge, Paul A. Boghossian. 2006. 139pp. University library.
Stacking these two books together in the diary may seem like an odd decision. Nearly as odd as the experience of reading them one after the other. I organize them here because in both cases my notes on the work are riddled with the red pen I use to comment my disagreements and irritations. There are foibles of rhetoric I dislike which I perceive in both writers, especially the willingness to conflate opponent terminology with their own mental representations of opponent ideas, and the willingness to draw on flimsy sources if doing so will own the libs. The virtue of Žižek is that one enjoys reading him. On the other hand, like other analytic philosophers I have gratefully encountered after reading too much theory, the virtue of Boghossian is that one can read him. But I find disagreement generative, as I think they do; we can all be grateful to one another for that.
I was going to compliment Boghossian’s willingness to improve his enemy’s argument for him, a rhetorical norm in analytical philosophy that I appreciate, until I learned he’s one of those guys who submits fake “social theory articles” to sociology journals to get his chuckles. This behaviour is annoying but in a way that I also find somehow pitiable. It often seems to me that the authors of these “hoaxes” have misunderstood the purpose of a piece of writing in this rhetorical genre, which is not, for the record, to make a factual argument of which publication indicates wholehearted endorsement. Provocative, strange, slightly nonsensical commentary may be found useful if it is interesting to read and promotes genuine engagement with ideas, stretching the boundaries of thought, turning texts on their heads. Therefore, in most cases I have heard of, scheming would-be Sokals seem to wind up accidentally….writing and submitting pieces of mediocre social theory writing. Gotcha! I am also perplexed as to whether they don’t have some kind of research to do in their own fields, which might be more important than breaking into the rival high school to steal the mascot costume.
Knowing about Boghossian’s participation in this silliness, I now feel justified to relay a fantasy I first redacted: putting these two writers in a cage match where they toddle around tearing at one another’s shirts. I never felt bad about putting Žižek in this fantasy, because I think he would have fun with it.
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The Collected Schizophrenias, Esme Weijun Wang. 2019. 224pp. Local library.
Tears and Saints [Lacrimi și Sfinți], E.M. Cioran. 1998. 154pp. University library.
It’s embarrassing, or maybe a relief, but I don’t have anything to say about either of these books. I may return to Tears and Saints, or else read later Cioran when he realized the fascism was a mistake (it doesn't appear in this book to my reading, anyways).
Now I’ve been keeping this journal for going on two years, and these last few months I’ve been reading at an accelerated pace, and a part of me feels that I’ve said all I can say for the moment about any book. Obviously untrue in the sense that much more could be said be somebody about some book. Possibly true in the sense that I, now, have come to the extent of my current ability. I started to make this journal because it bored me to think of judging every book I read on a scale from one to five stars or whatever, determining whether books are "good" or "bad", but it unnerved me to think about reading without some sort of process to capture and treasure what I learned. Isn't there something more interesting to be done with a book--to honour the reason I love to read, which is not merely to form opinions and declare my tastes? And now I fear that, when I'm lazy, even in this journal I produce three paragraphs that translate to "three stars".
You know, a friend of mine once told me a story about her family’s seaside cabin in Nova Scotia. (This isn’t as much of a class marker as you might think — land in Nova Scotia was very cheap for a long time — my friend’s mother was a hairdresser.) She said her entire large extended family had come for a reunion and they all went mudding on the flats at low tide. Dozens of children were covered in mud. Everyone rushed to wash off. But it happens that in this part of the world all the houses use water systems that were drilled as long as a hundred years ago. In fact, I know of Nova Scotia communities where every well in the town runs dry in the summer due to the changing climate. People have to drive two hours south to Yarmouth and fill up hundred-gallon tanks on the back of their trucks. That day, my friend’s family used so much water at once to wash the mud off that the pump began to pull up seawater somehow. Ever since then, the shower runs salty and they can’t drink from the tap.
So I feel like I’m close to drinking seawater. Something more interesting might exist somewhere. I’ll keep playing around. Dispatches from the front.
+++
♫
A disturbed man navigates social challenges in his family and neighbourhood, coloured by the fact that he has just murdered an old woman for dreadful philosophical reasons. That bloodbath that sets off the events—Lord have mercy. The climactic events are also riveting. Yet I found myself increasingly unforgiving of Dostoevsky’s melodrama in the middle sections. A second soppy Christian ending after the one in Brothers Karamazov outraged me outright. When I read The Double, a woman in my book club originally educated in Russian seemed to gently imply that she didn’t really understand why we admired Dostoevsky above Gogol or Pushkin, whom, embarrassingly, none of us had read.
+++
I began a reading jag this month of scholarly books which I feel underqualified to comment on. But this is only a diary, so I’ll try. I usually see Agamben’s landmark idea deployed to the effect that the defining power of the state in the modern era is the power to define which populations don’t count as legal people, or even more bluntly, which populations it is permissible for the state to kill, along with a couple of other corollary theses. In detail it’s much more complicated than that and all. I think if you were in my exact situation—interested in the idea above regularly attributed to Agamben by other writers, but lacking much background in medieval or classical political philosophy— you could get away with reading backward, starting with Part 3, “The Camp as Biopolitical Paradigm of the Modern”, and decide from there whether you also want the first two parts, which are, that said, definitely interesting even for the layperson.
+++
First as Tragedy, Then as Farce, Slavoj Žižek. 2009. 157pp. Local library.
Fear of Knowledge, Paul A. Boghossian. 2006. 139pp. University library.
Stacking these two books together in the diary may seem like an odd decision. Nearly as odd as the experience of reading them one after the other. I organize them here because in both cases my notes on the work are riddled with the red pen I use to comment my disagreements and irritations. There are foibles of rhetoric I dislike which I perceive in both writers, especially the willingness to conflate opponent terminology with their own mental representations of opponent ideas, and the willingness to draw on flimsy sources if doing so will own the libs. The virtue of Žižek is that one enjoys reading him. On the other hand, like other analytic philosophers I have gratefully encountered after reading too much theory, the virtue of Boghossian is that one can read him. But I find disagreement generative, as I think they do; we can all be grateful to one another for that.
I was going to compliment Boghossian’s willingness to improve his enemy’s argument for him, a rhetorical norm in analytical philosophy that I appreciate, until I learned he’s one of those guys who submits fake “social theory articles” to sociology journals to get his chuckles. This behaviour is annoying but in a way that I also find somehow pitiable. It often seems to me that the authors of these “hoaxes” have misunderstood the purpose of a piece of writing in this rhetorical genre, which is not, for the record, to make a factual argument of which publication indicates wholehearted endorsement. Provocative, strange, slightly nonsensical commentary may be found useful if it is interesting to read and promotes genuine engagement with ideas, stretching the boundaries of thought, turning texts on their heads. Therefore, in most cases I have heard of, scheming would-be Sokals seem to wind up accidentally….writing and submitting pieces of mediocre social theory writing. Gotcha! I am also perplexed as to whether they don’t have some kind of research to do in their own fields, which might be more important than breaking into the rival high school to steal the mascot costume.
Knowing about Boghossian’s participation in this silliness, I now feel justified to relay a fantasy I first redacted: putting these two writers in a cage match where they toddle around tearing at one another’s shirts. I never felt bad about putting Žižek in this fantasy, because I think he would have fun with it.
+++
The Collected Schizophrenias, Esme Weijun Wang. 2019. 224pp. Local library.
Tears and Saints [Lacrimi și Sfinți], E.M. Cioran. 1998. 154pp. University library.
It’s embarrassing, or maybe a relief, but I don’t have anything to say about either of these books. I may return to Tears and Saints, or else read later Cioran when he realized the fascism was a mistake (it doesn't appear in this book to my reading, anyways).
Now I’ve been keeping this journal for going on two years, and these last few months I’ve been reading at an accelerated pace, and a part of me feels that I’ve said all I can say for the moment about any book. Obviously untrue in the sense that much more could be said be somebody about some book. Possibly true in the sense that I, now, have come to the extent of my current ability. I started to make this journal because it bored me to think of judging every book I read on a scale from one to five stars or whatever, determining whether books are "good" or "bad", but it unnerved me to think about reading without some sort of process to capture and treasure what I learned. Isn't there something more interesting to be done with a book--to honour the reason I love to read, which is not merely to form opinions and declare my tastes? And now I fear that, when I'm lazy, even in this journal I produce three paragraphs that translate to "three stars".
You know, a friend of mine once told me a story about her family’s seaside cabin in Nova Scotia. (This isn’t as much of a class marker as you might think — land in Nova Scotia was very cheap for a long time — my friend’s mother was a hairdresser.) She said her entire large extended family had come for a reunion and they all went mudding on the flats at low tide. Dozens of children were covered in mud. Everyone rushed to wash off. But it happens that in this part of the world all the houses use water systems that were drilled as long as a hundred years ago. In fact, I know of Nova Scotia communities where every well in the town runs dry in the summer due to the changing climate. People have to drive two hours south to Yarmouth and fill up hundred-gallon tanks on the back of their trucks. That day, my friend’s family used so much water at once to wash the mud off that the pump began to pull up seawater somehow. Ever since then, the shower runs salty and they can’t drink from the tap.
So I feel like I’m close to drinking seawater. Something more interesting might exist somewhere. I’ll keep playing around. Dispatches from the front.
+++
The Hour of the Star [A hora da estrela], Clarice Lispector, transl. Benjamin Moser, New Directions centennial edition. 1977, my ed. 2020. 93pp. First Light Bookshop, Austin, TX.
Brilliant. Shocked me into believing in prose again for several days.
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Selected short stories:
- “Featherweight”, Sterling HolyWhiteMountain
- Succession S4 (2023), showrunner Jesse Armstrong
- Fancy Dance (2023) dir. Erica Tremblay
- Drive-Away Dolls (2023) dir. Ethan Coen
- Invasion of the Body Snatchers (1978) dir. Philip Kaufman
♫