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boneglueEroticism, Georges Bataille. 1957. 272pp. Local library.
I guess it’s not cool anymore to just say you hate Bataille on feminist grounds. Well, I do. Or rather I resent him because I expect I would find him so useful if I could extract his ideas from that context. A key idea from this book strikes me as an actual departure from reality, undermining to the whole project: the idea that transgression, the desire to violate the Law which thus requires the Law, the desire to violate, is what lies at the core of all human desire, all human meaning, even. I happen to think this is a subjective quirk that has gained the ground it has because of the predominance in the academy of high-libido male philosophers. To me it’s as foreign and bemusing as if Bataille was saying, “All human desire is founded on wanting a really cool car.” I am going to read some other interpretations to give the whole thing a fair shake.
What about the distaff counterpart, negative transgression—refusing to perform the action that the law would command? I think there is something interesting about a lesbian philosophy that would discuss transgression in these terms.
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Heroes: Mass Murder and Suicide, Franco Berardi. 2015. 224pp. Shelf Life Books, Calgary, AB.
Berardi breaks to a first-person confessional close to the end: “’Why did I write such a horrible book?’ I suddenly asked myself, once I had neared the end of this discourse” (200). This puts it in a different register: sometimes fixation on atrocity is fetishistic and sometimes it’s obsessive—sometimes you scare yourself when you wake up out of the trance. Like all writing in this vein the book wanders toward an unsatisfying non-conclusion because if the conclusion existed yet one wouldn’t have to write it.
I have to make some objection to the idea that PMC techno-anguish is the most defining affect of the era, which is a tone I detect here and there in this type of book. How much of the office’s collective feeling of despairing stuck-ness is simply the bargain we make to keep the compensatory privileges of having a nice work-from-home emails job? Berardi and I could go become monks any time. It wouldn’t help anyone, but neither does reading or writing leftist criticism, and if you read or write too much of it you really start to think nothing helps anyone, and maybe it doesn’t.
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Enjoying What We Don’t Have, Todd McGowan. 2013. 364pp.
As above: it’s funny to get to the last chapter of a book like this and realize alongside the writer that there is no way forward from the criticisms they’ve raised. I’m not satisfied—they say one’s never satisfied—but I’ll keep looking. McGowan has a reading here of An Inconvenient Truth in which this film and the moment of culture during which it arose represents the calcification of the left in the position of the admonishing "good citizen", while Bush Jr.'s right has fun going golfing. I think I've told this story at four parties since reading it, probably after drinking just the number of premixed negronis that would prevent me from detecting whether my interlocutor really wants to hear about a psychoanalytic theory of politics.
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Sula, Toni Morrison. 1973. 192pp. Local library.
I was thinking how one might write essays and criticism to organize, but stories to search; Ballard said that he thought of himself as a “scout who is sent on ahead to see if the water is drinkable or not.” What’s beautiful about Morrison is the sense that she knows from the start the search is hopeless, but she still has hope for it; you can feel her edit, her reflection and self-searching, but nothing is slick or cute. She has this trick of introducing contextless details before the context that is required to understand them, at the paragraph level, raising questions and then answering them. This encourages you to take advantage of what is unique about literature, which is that you and the book sit in time together—she encourages or even requires you to reread paragraphs. Great books reward this sort of achronic engagement because every paragraph of a great book is also its whole, worked and reworked into an incredible density, so dense it could collapse any moment, but it doesn’t: it holds more and more and more.
“Hellfire don’t need lighting and it’s already burning in you.” / "Whatever’s burning in me is mine!" (92)
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Senescence: A Year in the Canadian Rockies, Amal Alhomsi. 2024. 182pp. Lent by a friend.
Aphoristic and profuse. Now, a Zen monk might say that true aphorisms must come from subtraction, rather than profusion. Alhomsi has contrasting urges: to write beautiful prose, and to be continuous with a beautiful world that knows no writing. "Nothing [in nature] is silent, we've just been left out of a conversation that began millions of years ago....we're too proud to forget our names" (135). Is all writing that is so aware of itself a betrayal of nature? I mean, does writing like this insist on the baroque madness of the human above the uncomplaining sanity and thingness of a river or a mountain? God knows I frequently regret this impulse in myself. Alhomsi, I believe, would argue we're doing all right: the chapter I quote layers in many examples of the communication of elk and elephants. Writing is simply the human animal's particular form of calling. So perhaps it's our nature, and to criticize our nature would be to criticize nature. (Encountering a writer in my geographic region on whom I can write a paragraph like this is truly dizzying; I'm so used to thinking of great writing as something that must occur somewhere else.)
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The Demon of Writing, Ben Kafka. 2012. 184pp.
Very useful for me personally. I had a funny moment running across this review by Todd Patterson, which is so brutal I seriously wondered if it was a personal matter. I came of age in a time when Slate was already basically Buzzfeed, so discovering an era of experimental internecine academic hit jobs in its archives was surreal. Anyhow, I found the book very engaging, in contrast to the impression Patterson gives, but I’m forced to admit he's right to say you feel a bit led around by the end. At the same time, I think Patterson underestimates—perhaps because you get the feeling Kafka did at the outset—the intractable, labyrinthine nature of the question he’s interested in. The closer you get to what bureaucrats as state workers are actually doing, the more your conceptualization struggles against most of the best-known and useful tools of leftist political theory, which don’t take this into account at all. In fact, the trouble caused to such theories by the government worker starts to seem downright…repressed. This is something I’ve been thinking about a lot, so Kafka’s book was very exciting to me as a site of thought, even if it didn’t answer all the questions it raises. Like noticing something out of the corner of your eye, and having someone say, “no, you’re right, I saw it too--what was that?”
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Selected essays and stories:
- “Breadshow”, Kenneth Calhoun, in Ploughshares #158. I actually read this months ago, but can’t stop thinking about it.
- “The Living Death Drug”, Lisa Carver, in The Paris Review.
Movies, TV, and performances:
- Don Pasquale (1843), Donizetti, Calgary Opera
- Aida (1871), Verdi, Met Opera broadcast
- Lost Highway (1997) dir. David Lynch
- The Conformist [Il conformista] (1970) dir. Bernardo Bertolucci