Foundational. Absolutely foundational. The friendly kick in the arse I needed to finally convince myself to get my head down and write something whichFoundational. Absolutely foundational. The friendly kick in the arse I needed to finally convince myself to get my head down and write something which is completely trite, derivative and without merit....more
A condensed elucidation of the philosophy of one of the most affable fascist writers around, if that isn’t a too unpalatable turn of phrase, here espoA condensed elucidation of the philosophy of one of the most affable fascist writers around, if that isn’t a too unpalatable turn of phrase, here espousing a gentlemanly Heraclitean ‘war is the father of all things� mentality concerning WWI where one is able to lap up the horror and bloodlust of battle. Walter Benjamin’s distanced enjoyment of his own alienation is here twisted into an exhilaration before the spectacle of one’s own utter annihilation in a far more brutal setting than just your old stereotypical plain Jane petit-bourgeois concrete jungle. This work is the account of a true heir of Nietzsche, with all the warts and chancres and tasteless asides that entails. Definite must-read for fans of Mishima’s Sun and Steel and, like some kind of acrid Europa-endorsing fine wine, I’d pair this book with the discography of Death in June - my go to would be ‘Oh How we Laughed� but ‘But, What Ends when the Symbols Shatter?� would probably do just as well....more
"A belch interrupts the loftiest meditation. You may draw a conclusion if you like: if you don't like, you needn't." "A belch interrupts the loftiest meditation. You may draw a conclusion if you like: if you don't like, you needn't." ...more
The only word I can truly summon for this work that would do it any kind of justice is simply this � magisterial.
Sloterdijk has firmly established hiThe only word I can truly summon for this work that would do it any kind of justice is simply this � magisterial.
Sloterdijk has firmly established himself, in my mind at the very least (which really counts for nil), as the preeminent philosopher of our times. As much as I hate brown nosing I can’t see any other way of describing this book, it seriously is that good. His conception of anthropotechnics, usurped from a rather curt usage circulating around the time of the Russian Revolution, is the summation of all prior technical/practical processes and arduous tasks carried out by the ascetics of history. Ascetics broach a far greater range than just religious mystics or hermits, instead including every individual who attempts to bring about the impossible and somehow make it look easy (athletes, musicians, generals and military leaders, actors, writers, teachers, priests and religious authorities - the list is truly endless). They maintain a vertical tension on ‘Mount Improbable�, paradoxically moving both forwards and upwards simultaneously. Ever since the re-secularisation of the subject from the Enlightenment onwards we have faced an easing and slackening of this vertical tension that is causing mankind to become mere cannon fodder, numerically ordained into various programmes (the forced remoulding dreamed of by Trotsky, the Biocosmists, capitalist globalisation etc.) The question is how we can reappropriate the resources of the past, with their edifices on which they stand effectively laid waste to by now, and be able to go forth without succumbing to ecological disaster and a complete disintegration of the symbolic order.
There’s way too much to discuss in a review here, Sloterdijk practically comes out of the gate like a carnivorous, malignant cancer eschewing ever figure there ever was. His intellectual eye is all-encompassing and intensely scrutinising, picking up on subtle sociological, pedagogical, aesthetic, commercial, religious etc. trends that have shaped the disarray we have to contend with today. This book begs for multiple re-reads and I am more than happy to oblige, a quick summation is simply impossible. Read it, and then re-read it, my review really doesn’t stand up to the colossal project Sloterdijk has only just begun to explicate in outline. I agree, his anthropotechnics stands at the base of a new discourse that will take decades of research before it even begins to cover any considerable ground. But my god, what a start!...more
Certainly a slog at parts but you’d be hard pressed to find a better concretisation of deleuzoguattarian analysis anywhere. The Freikorps and the histCertainly a slog at parts but you’d be hard pressed to find a better concretisation of deleuzoguattarian analysis anywhere. The Freikorps and the historical determinations behind them are fascinating, with the collusion of the conditions of their inception and ours being really quite unnerving. Theweleit’s solutions concerning body-armour and the nature of desiring-production do strike me as somewhat adolescent at times, a bit too new agey and utopian and ooohh ahh embrace your body and skin and the determinations of your feminine unconscious and ooohh this is a discourse written by a man so don’t listen to me pal! but the analysis is so bloody incisive when he isn’t busy trying to derive some generalised prescriptive/normative conclusions from what he’s writing about that I’d consider this a necessary tool in the fight against the fascist tendency - which keeps on rearing it’s godforsaken head (even in writers like Brecht with their implicit misogyny, placing empirical women below the iconography of a great infinite flood/big wet menstruating fanny etc.) - so yeah go out and snatch this piece up sharpish you goddamn fools....more
Beautifully devastating, as if someone with the psychological insight of a Dostoevsky attempted to reproduce Lucky Jim. Believe the hype people, it’s Beautifully devastating, as if someone with the psychological insight of a Dostoevsky attempted to reproduce Lucky Jim. Believe the hype people, it’s one of those books you’ll put off reading because of its popularity... but trust me, you really shouldn’t. ...more
“Don’t take our word for it! Alas, we’re not all that logical. We say God - though in reality God is a person, a particular individual. We speak to hi“Don’t take our word for it! Alas, we’re not all that logical. We say God - though in reality God is a person, a particular individual. We speak to him. We address him by name - he is the God of Abraham and Jacob. We treat him just like anybody else, like a personal being...�
“So he’s a whore?�
“_�
This work is turgid with concepts structured like thicket bushes, with terms such as ‘summit�, ‘chance�, ‘risk�, ‘impalement�, ‘laughter� and ‘theopathy� bristling with contradictory value judgements. We have here limit concepts that induce a pendulum to continually swing between anguish and unbridled joy, clinging on to a minute prospect of naked chance. Us, the race of gamblers, not being able to recognise the permeable border between eroticism and ascetic mysticism - of a God we make a whore out of, a God weak due to his immutable nature.... never taking a chance (and chance, against the vicissitudes of time, being the most affable thing) - we are forever lacerated by attempts to communicate with one another, by trying to tell one another about the labyrinthine logic of the summit we each clamour towards.
I believe this work, in conjunction with Virilio’s Speed and Politics, really does provide a bulletproof anthropology, a perfect assessment of the current state of affairs. Speed and Politics has a macroscopic lens which becomes hyper focused in Bataille’s own interior monologue, with the fraught tension of occupied France being the backdrop of these contemplative diary entries seeing Bataille pushing toward the beyond of his particularlity, attempting to affect an abortive summit toward a transcendent nothingness.
In certain respects this work supersedes that of Cancer. If Cancer is a work that revolves around fluids, around the Seine, around piss, spermatozoa eIn certain respects this work supersedes that of Cancer. If Cancer is a work that revolves around fluids, around the Seine, around piss, spermatozoa etc. then Capricorn is one of solids. In Brooklyn we find ourselves forced to go toward the spiritual Land of Fuck, in the Southern States we are forced to contend with arid landscapes and racial tensions so tense that they could kill a man through a mere gaze.
The best way to describe the work is to highlight Miller’s own self described evolution from skater to swimmer to rock. Having broken through the futility of Dante’s ice, Miller quits the skating shtick and joyfully dives in to the freshly thawed oceans, before realising that one must become immutable at the very depths of the ocean. One must paradoxically be bone dry surrounded by the sea, a lighthouse that stands strong against the ensuing waves.
So yeah, this shit was pretty fucking good. Especially loved whenever he brought up Dostoevsky, Bergson or Nietzsche, it’s fun to see what he reads into them....more
Remarkably clear writing even in spite of Heidegger having the gall to write a 90 odd page long chapter without any breaks. The unabashed discussions Remarkably clear writing even in spite of Heidegger having the gall to write a 90 odd page long chapter without any breaks. The unabashed discussions of the inner greatness of National Socialism and the determination of a people are quite rightfully toe curling but aside from the slapdash quibbles randomly strewn about in these lectures criticising the West and Russia etc. they’re thankfully mostly ignorable. Is Heidegger’s fundamental ontology fascist? I’m not in a good enough position to say, but I think his tenacious examination of the Presocratics as well as Plato and Aristotle are so bloody good (even if his etymologies and translations are spotty in parts - so I’ve heard at least) that I’m willing to throw up my hands and be a nonpartisan in the whole thing. I can now gladly admit to the ŷ community at large that my cringeworthy Deleuzean sensibilities at 17 have been replaced by Heidegger’s investigation into Being. Brace yourselves folks, it’s gonna be a bumpy ride!!...more
(Those uninterested in the blathering I’m about to clumsily type out should just know that this is the greatest book I have ever read, really bar none(Those uninterested in the blathering I’m about to clumsily type out should just know that this is the greatest book I have ever read, really bar none - Joyce has managed to diminish every other thing I’ve read and has achieved something that almost seems beyond a novel, he transcends the medium, although when pressed I don’t think I could give a particularly cogent answer as to why I think that is. It’s just a fucking tour de force, and makes Miller and Bataille, those prior favourites of mine, look like absolute amateurs in comparison.)
So admittedly I was in no real rush to type up my thoughts on Ulysses until I had properly come to terms with Penelope, I really had waited with bated breath for a great portion of the book to hear what Molly Bloom had to say in her own voice. At first, combined with the (admittedly prima facie) denouement of Ithaca, Penelope left me absolutely heartbroken and depressed, I’d almost say crushed (David Lynch’s passing obviously didn’t help much, and I must say that overall it made for a rather somber Friday evening).
Let’s think for a moment of what actually occurs during those last two or three rapturous pages of Penelope. Molly is reminiscing of her and Bloom on the Howth, the very apex of their relationship. She is in the revery of memory, of the what-was, that is the source of her joy. All she has, in the summation of her relationship with Bloom, are memories. When Bloom himself thinks back on their time on the Howth he too can only bring to mind the great chasm that now exists between him and his wife; the present offers forth the same indetermination as the “I AM A� that he wrote in the sand at the end of Nausicaa. And we cannot even really speak of great joy in her remembrance - what does she do prior to grabbing Bloom and pulling him down toward her? She weighs up her past, of Lt. Gardner whose embrace elicited in her a passion that Bloom has never really managed to stir in her, of Mulvey who at any moment she would be willing to get down and do the deed with if he was ever to return, of the Gibraltar of her youth, essentially of many things that aren’t Bloom. In a sense it is a memory of resignation, not of contentment, it is her accepting her lot in life.
Now my Penguin copy of the book has the starting lines of Telemachus at the very top of the title page and then the final lines of Penelope at the bottom, and I, and I believe I am not the only one who has made this mistake and am therefore not entirely foolish in my train of thought, figured that the book would end with some kind of sexual congress in the present day, that the ten years of sexual incontinence (barring Bloom’s godawful pillow talk and arse-on ejaculations) between the couple would be resolved in one great swelling moment of intimacy. It was not to be. In fact any talk of real resolution is minimal, and when it is spoken of it concerns Molly having the tantalising power and ability to change the situation if she really wanted to. You have to give it to her, she knows the way to a man’s heart. Instead a great deal of the chapter myopically focuses on her sexual fantasies, and in a way it feels as if she is eliding the central question. I must confess I was rather angry with her, or probably it’d be fair to say frustrated, especially in light of the fact that 900 pages of text have consistently shown Bloom’s inherent goodness (aside from a few kinks and some patronising tendencies). Killeen speaks of the scandal of this chapter as being neutered or defanged (not his exact words, but you get the gist) in the modern day, but I really am not sold on this point, I still think it has a great tenacity, even if it’s not quite as outrageous as Bloom’s pocket wank in public over a partially disabled minor. As always, I can only blame my prudish English sensibilities.
But RTE’s absolutely first-rate recordings of the book changed that impression, much as the realisation that Stephen and Bloom actually carried out a farcical mass prior to pissing side by side in Ithaca made me warm up to their rather disappointing encounter. Molly is rather venomous with many of the people she knows throughout the chapter, but she almost regretfully makes frequent compliments of Bloom. She is forced to. She must admit he is a good father, that he is knowledgeable, that he is clean and respectable. She must care a great deal about him to give a shit in the first place about whether or not he has been to Nighttown with a prostitute or has been carrying on an affair with Josie Breen. She must care if she’s so determined to get Bloom away from the nationalist Sinn Féin crowd who make so many jokes about him behind his back. And Boylan is no great substitute for him, aside from his huge cock, and all the men she thinks of in a lurid manner she really just wants attention from, to be seen. She wants the medical student on the opposite side of the road at Holles Street to look at her, for Mr Cuffe to gaze at her cleavage, to be made a kind of Godhead by Stephen in his poetry. She wants to be held twenty times a day. She is no great whore, and she isn’t the Great Mother either - she is a lonely, underappreciated woman, only thirty three and already thinking (in a way) that her life is over, that her beauty will soon wane, and that when it finally does that she’ll have to deal with the terrible question of what meaning her life has without it. But she affirms it all, and upon a first reading I failed to appreciate and hear her Yes in the truly Nietzschean sense she gives it, to her assent to the great horror of the eternal recurrence. Funnily enough after hearing the RTE performance the chapter sounds a hell of a lot more like an X-rated rant from one of the dissatisfied wives in The Last of the Summer Wine than some truly vitriolic takedown of her husband’s deficiencies.
It really is a terrific chapter, and every chapter, each of it an organ and part of whatever you could conspire to characterise Ulysses as in its entirety, is a book in itself. I’m amazed people take up to a year to read it - how aren’t they sucked in? How don’t they give themselves up to the archivist role Joyce puts them in, burrowing down and finding out the meaning of references (no matter how arcane or ephemeral or seemingly irrelevant) with a feverish passion? I read it in two months and had to purposefully stop myself from getting through the thing too quickly, reading a book or two between each chapter. It really is a world unto itself, and I think John Hunt is truly right to say the book demands that you become a resident of Dublin yourself. I think my rather quick reading may have nudged Joyce’s jocoserious approach further toward the serious than the jovial for me. For instance, I felt each barb in The Cyclops acutely, and I was frankly surprised to see how comedically it has been interpreted by the secondary literature I have read so far. Even after listening to the RTE recording and chuckling at a few lines the overall impression of hatred and prejudice and conspiracy still generated disgust in me. The Citizen and No-man are some of the grandest, most malicious cunts in all of literature.
Ulysses is the book of compassion, the greatest statement of compassion written. It’s just mind boggling, the whole thing. I remember trying to explain/sell Oxen of the Sun to a friend in a pub (shoutout to you Pete if you got this far) and the difficulty was almost insurmountable, even with the assistance of a few beers I struggled to really communicate the brilliance of that particular chapter, although on the whole I think my enthusiasm was still fairly palpable (which I think is a good summary of this review itself, a tad incoherent and messy but with a lot of spirit). Without reading the thing itself I think the impression can be that Joyce, certainly in the second half of the book, engages with form for form’s sake - I know that Killeen certainly emphasises that shift in Joyce’s thought process in Ulysses Unbound, but I do think that denigrates it somewhat, I don’t think anything could be further away from form for form’s sake (although Killeen wouldn’t go that far, instead speaking of a movement away from the symbolism of earlier chapters to a kind of serious textual play in the later ones). You just have to read the bloody thing.
I’ll leave you with a couple of lines I scribbled to myself around a month ago, before I had gotten into the meat and potatoes of Oxen of the Sun and Circe, those real game-changing heavy hitter chapters that properly shake up the Bloomian/Dedalusian style of internal monologue. Here they are.
Joyce has justified humanity’s existence by writing this book; not by exonerating our petty history, but by fulfilling the destiny of the human project. I once thought Samuel Beckett the death knell of literature, a howling echo never to be answered, the end of the line, and yet we will, we must, return to Joyce, as we are fated to do so. He is our culmination.
Bowler hats off to the Joyce Project and Chris Reich’s engrossing series of discussions on YouTube as well, they’re indelible, essential stuff. Oh and one last thing,
The heaventree of stars hung with humid nightblue fruit.
I underlined that with such ferocity I almost ripped through the page.
Like literally every review I do this is a rambling stream-of-rememberances-of-random-passages-and-impressive-sounding-but-poorly-understood-jargon buLike literally every review I do this is a rambling stream-of-rememberances-of-random-passages-and-impressive-sounding-but-poorly-understood-jargon but all I really need to do to in order for the uninitiated to get a taste of this work is to mention one essential line Lacan delivers a little over halfway through the seminar, and because I’m lazy I’m just going to roughly paraphrase it, that there is an impatience that exists to tell the truth about the truth, but in wanting to tell it there is often not much truth left - that seems to me to be a decent summation of Lacan’s teaching method, it’s somewhat analogous to when you as a freshly pubescent and audacious young man used to spend hours upon hours, going way past your usual sleeping schedule, sending a torrential flood of excessively smutty and lewd snapchats to one or two girls you only really knew tenuously. Once the 3AM/4AM lull hits, and as soon as this sad little reciprocal gift exchange has come to its logical conclusion (a Potlatch where the aim of the game is for each player to see who can expose themselves in the most degrading way possible, and as a heady consequence find out who can be the most ashamed of themselves in the morning) you hit the pillow hard with an acute sense of dissatisfaction. But just then as now, I loved it. This book was great, and there’s no one better than Lacan to give you blue balls. Now for a few more fairly standard and milquetoast comments.
Really quite ridiculously good to be honest, perhaps even fundamental in a sense. This seminar was taught 63 years ago and I still don’t believe we’ve quite come to grips with the distinction between the service of goods borne out by traditional ethics and the approach toward the Sadean second death that Lacan has evoked here. Of course the issue of desire, that whole problematic, is as elusive as ever. And if Lacan was unable to integrate Das Ding, that enigmatic beyond which refracts and distorts from a distance, then we sure as shit are gonna have a hard time doing so, but that probably isn’t the most attractive of projects anyway, as we as subjects stamped by the signifier probably couldn’t withstand it, even if we try to bring it forth through an anamorphosis or through the patsy of art. Might have to reread Seminar XI now, because my god I hated that one....more
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