M's bookshelf: all en-US Fri, 31 Jan 2025 00:37:29 -0800 60 M's bookshelf: all 144 41 /images/layout/goodreads_logo_144.jpg Naked Lunch 24832260 Naked Lunch is one of the most important novels of the twentieth century, a book that redefined literature. A startling tale of a narcotics addict unmoored in New York, Tangier, and ultimately a nightmarish wasteland known as Interzone, its formal innovation, taboo subject matter, and virtuoso style have exerted a significant influence on authors like Thomas Pynchon, J. G. Ballard, William Gibson, and Will Self, as well as on music, film, and the media generally. This restored edition incorporates Burroughs’s notes on the text, several essays he wrote about the book, and an appendix of new material and alternate drafts from the original manuscript. For the Burroughs enthusiast and the neophyte, this volume is a definitive and fresh experience of this classic of our culture.]]> 289 William S. Burroughs M 3 3.28 1959 Naked Lunch
author: William S. Burroughs
name: M
average rating: 3.28
book published: 1959
rating: 3
read at: 2019/07/04
date added: 2025/01/31
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]]> <![CDATA[The Easy Way to Stop Smoking: Join the Millions Who Have Become Non-Smokers Using Allen Carr's Easyway Method]]> 6618 224 Allen Carr 1402718616 M 5 4.22 1985 The Easy Way to Stop Smoking: Join the Millions Who Have Become Non-Smokers Using Allen Carr's Easyway Method
author: Allen Carr
name: M
average rating: 4.22
book published: 1985
rating: 5
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date added: 2025/01/16
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]]> Deliver Me 193438781 At a meatpacking facility in the Missouri Ozarks, Dee-Dee and her co-workers kill and butcher 40,000 chickens in a single shift.

The work is repetitive and brutal, with each stab and cut a punishment to her hands and joints, but Dee-Dee’s more concerned with what is happening inside her body. After a series of devastating miscarriages, Dee-Dee has found herself pregnant, and she is determined to carry this child to term. Dee-Dee fled the Pentecostal church years ago, but judgment follows her in the form of regular calls from her mother, whose raspy voice urges Dee-Dee to quit living in sin and marry her boyfriend Daddy, an underemployed ex-con with an insect fetish.

With a child on the way, at long last Dee-Dee can bask in her mother’s and boyfriend’s newfound parturient attention. She will matter. She will be loved. She will be complete. When her charismatic friend Sloane reappears after a twenty-year absence, feeding her insecurities and awakening suppressed desires, Dee-Dee fears she will go back to living in the shadows. Neither the ultimate indignity of yet another miscarriage nor Sloane’s own pregnancy deters her: she must prepare for the baby’s arrival.]]> 275 Elle Nash M 0 to-read 3.81 2023 Deliver Me
author: Elle Nash
name: M
average rating: 3.81
book published: 2023
rating: 0
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date added: 2024/10/22
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]]> <![CDATA[The Making of Eastern Europe: From Prehistory to Postcommunism]]> 55294240 465 Philip Longworth M 0 to-read 3.88 1992 The Making of Eastern Europe: From Prehistory to Postcommunism
author: Philip Longworth
name: M
average rating: 3.88
book published: 1992
rating: 0
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date added: 2024/09/12
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]]> <![CDATA[Representations of the Intellectual]]> 166314
BBC episodes presented by Edward Said: ]]> 121 Edward W. Said 0679761276 M 0 to-read 4.13 1994 Representations of the Intellectual
author: Edward W. Said
name: M
average rating: 4.13
book published: 1994
rating: 0
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date added: 2024/09/11
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]]> <![CDATA[The future of intellectuals and the rise of the new class : a frame of reference, theses, conjectures, arguments, and an historical perspective on the role of intellectuals and intelligentsia in the international class contest of the modern era]]> 2436514 121 Alvin Ward Gouldner 0816493588 M 0 to-read 3.50 1979 The future of intellectuals and the rise of the new class : a frame of reference, theses, conjectures, arguments, and an historical perspective on the role of intellectuals and intelligentsia in the international class contest of the modern era
author: Alvin Ward Gouldner
name: M
average rating: 3.50
book published: 1979
rating: 0
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date added: 2024/09/11
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]]> <![CDATA[The Dialectic of Ideology and Technology: The Origins, Grammar, and Future of Ideology]]> 185698 320 Alvin Ward Gouldner 0195030648 M 0 to-read 4.20 1976 The Dialectic of Ideology and Technology: The Origins, Grammar, and Future of Ideology
author: Alvin Ward Gouldner
name: M
average rating: 4.20
book published: 1976
rating: 0
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]]> Considerations on France 328697 180 Joseph de Maistre 0521466288 M 0 éé and royalists, and the coalitions that emerged to combat the Revolution � what if every single one of them had been pwned all along?

What if, far from being an indictation that God had abandoned France, the sheer molten plasticity of the Revolution, its resentment and foolishness incarnating itself in numerous constitutions, regimes, reactions, reactions to reactions, using and discarding ambitious politicians as so many masks, was nothing more than a divine purgative, a "great purification", to free the metal of France from its "sour and impure dross", so that it could be made more malleable in the hands of a future king?

Maistre does not formulate the above as a question. Every sentence in Considerations on France appears in the form of a declaration: the Revolution just is God punishing and purifying France; the victory of the Republic against royalist insurgents just is a Providential guarantee of the integrity of France as a nation, not a vindication of republican government. In fact, republican government simply does not exist. We'll come back to that one, but let's be clear: Maistre is not interested in argument, "sound reasoning", or even internal consistency: if any of these things are present, it is not integral; it is merely an effect. The grandiose mad fury of his reactionary conservatism has less in common with Catholicism as a religious practice than it does with the intimidating, inhuman beauty of Catholic architecture.

Nothing could possibly live inside Maistre's architectonic hatred, but even for a nonbeliever it's one hell of a tourist attraction.

*

Maistre does not believe in any such thing as common humanity. With vicious brio, he declares: "In my lifetime I have seen Frenchmen, Italians, Russians, etc.; thanks to Montesquieu, I even know that one can be Persian. But as for man, I declare that I have never in my life met him; if he exists, he is unknown to me."

This embodies the conservative insight that people do not float indeterminately and accidentally through societies that have no hold on them, but exist in and through their history, culture, and language. In Maistre's thought, this is charged with reactionary disgust at cultural and ethical criticism as an unjustifiable and seditious leap into abstraction. Liberal political and ethical theory insists on the impossibility of fixed natural hierarchy, the solubility of ethical disagreement, and the categorical universality of political and ethical laws, and so liberals tend to find empirical reality embarrassing. Forgetting the men they live amongst, they are always inclined to speak of "the natural rights of man". For Maistre, this language commits a category error: rights belong to really existing people, not just to "man", a thing that has never existed and never will.

You may have heard this one before: Every attempt to bring "man" into being leads into satanic inhumanity, tyranny, and � God forbid � atheism...

*

From Maistre's reactionary contempt for the great mass of humankind (which is not the same thing as humanity � human beings are a particular kind of animal requiring constant and harsh discipline; humanity is nothing more than a rationalist hallucination), the following claim emerges: "A large and free nation cannot exist under a republican government." Democracy in modernity is, strictly speaking, impossible. The liberal postulate is that man is a rational animal capable of self-legislation and, by extension, universally valid legislation within a state. Maistre finds this absurd. He doesn't offer a "rational" argument for this and he doesn't feel a need to: empirically speaking, the Revolution is a clear refutation of democratic principles.

"Representative democracy" is a contradiction in terms, and even if it were not, the tendency for representatives to find themselves snatched up by parties, and then for parties to be dominated by certain ambitious personalities, which themselves use the organs of state to intimidate and to crush dissent, demonstrates the futility of this idea of democracy in practice. What is funny is just how modular this critique is. Who still believes in the abstract and universal human being of liberal theory today?

But reading it from the pen of someone like Maistre, does that worry you?

*

"There is nothing but violence in the universe; but we are spoiled by a modern philosophy that tells us all is good, whereas evil has tainted everything, and in a very real sense, all is evil, since nothing is in its place... But let us not lose courage: there is no chastisement that does not purify; there is no disorder that ETERNAL LOVE does not turn against the principle of evil."

I share with Maistre his impatience for rationalist abstractions, and his delight in rubbing the obvious fact of human evil in the faces of reformers and optimists too wilful to see it. Everything else about him is entirely alien to me � and idiotic: his monarchism, his delight in mystical or absurd argumentation, his naive insistence on the intrinsic value of tradition. Not once did I agree with anything in this text that wasn't merely a mirror of myself. This is an otherwordly psychology; a different genus of mind. Don't mistake convergence for sympathy.

People describe Maistre as cold and dry; frankly I think the opposite. The hand that wrote these words was slick with sweat and flush with hatred. As an insight into the fascist mindset, Maistre is exemplary: his contempt is not dangerous; his hope is.]]> 3.97 1796 Considerations on France
author: Joseph de Maistre
name: M
average rating: 3.97
book published: 1796
rating: 0
read at: 2024/09/08
date added: 2024/09/10
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What if everyone involved in the French revolution � not just the Third Estate, the defectors of the French Royal Army, the Sans-culottes, and the Jacobins (including and especially Robespierre), but also the counterrevolutionary éé and royalists, and the coalitions that emerged to combat the Revolution � what if every single one of them had been pwned all along?

What if, far from being an indictation that God had abandoned France, the sheer molten plasticity of the Revolution, its resentment and foolishness incarnating itself in numerous constitutions, regimes, reactions, reactions to reactions, using and discarding ambitious politicians as so many masks, was nothing more than a divine purgative, a "great purification", to free the metal of France from its "sour and impure dross", so that it could be made more malleable in the hands of a future king?

Maistre does not formulate the above as a question. Every sentence in Considerations on France appears in the form of a declaration: the Revolution just is God punishing and purifying France; the victory of the Republic against royalist insurgents just is a Providential guarantee of the integrity of France as a nation, not a vindication of republican government. In fact, republican government simply does not exist. We'll come back to that one, but let's be clear: Maistre is not interested in argument, "sound reasoning", or even internal consistency: if any of these things are present, it is not integral; it is merely an effect. The grandiose mad fury of his reactionary conservatism has less in common with Catholicism as a religious practice than it does with the intimidating, inhuman beauty of Catholic architecture.

Nothing could possibly live inside Maistre's architectonic hatred, but even for a nonbeliever it's one hell of a tourist attraction.

*

Maistre does not believe in any such thing as common humanity. With vicious brio, he declares: "In my lifetime I have seen Frenchmen, Italians, Russians, etc.; thanks to Montesquieu, I even know that one can be Persian. But as for man, I declare that I have never in my life met him; if he exists, he is unknown to me."

This embodies the conservative insight that people do not float indeterminately and accidentally through societies that have no hold on them, but exist in and through their history, culture, and language. In Maistre's thought, this is charged with reactionary disgust at cultural and ethical criticism as an unjustifiable and seditious leap into abstraction. Liberal political and ethical theory insists on the impossibility of fixed natural hierarchy, the solubility of ethical disagreement, and the categorical universality of political and ethical laws, and so liberals tend to find empirical reality embarrassing. Forgetting the men they live amongst, they are always inclined to speak of "the natural rights of man". For Maistre, this language commits a category error: rights belong to really existing people, not just to "man", a thing that has never existed and never will.

You may have heard this one before: Every attempt to bring "man" into being leads into satanic inhumanity, tyranny, and � God forbid � atheism...

*

From Maistre's reactionary contempt for the great mass of humankind (which is not the same thing as humanity � human beings are a particular kind of animal requiring constant and harsh discipline; humanity is nothing more than a rationalist hallucination), the following claim emerges: "A large and free nation cannot exist under a republican government." Democracy in modernity is, strictly speaking, impossible. The liberal postulate is that man is a rational animal capable of self-legislation and, by extension, universally valid legislation within a state. Maistre finds this absurd. He doesn't offer a "rational" argument for this and he doesn't feel a need to: empirically speaking, the Revolution is a clear refutation of democratic principles.

"Representative democracy" is a contradiction in terms, and even if it were not, the tendency for representatives to find themselves snatched up by parties, and then for parties to be dominated by certain ambitious personalities, which themselves use the organs of state to intimidate and to crush dissent, demonstrates the futility of this idea of democracy in practice. What is funny is just how modular this critique is. Who still believes in the abstract and universal human being of liberal theory today?

But reading it from the pen of someone like Maistre, does that worry you?

*

"There is nothing but violence in the universe; but we are spoiled by a modern philosophy that tells us all is good, whereas evil has tainted everything, and in a very real sense, all is evil, since nothing is in its place... But let us not lose courage: there is no chastisement that does not purify; there is no disorder that ETERNAL LOVE does not turn against the principle of evil."

I share with Maistre his impatience for rationalist abstractions, and his delight in rubbing the obvious fact of human evil in the faces of reformers and optimists too wilful to see it. Everything else about him is entirely alien to me � and idiotic: his monarchism, his delight in mystical or absurd argumentation, his naive insistence on the intrinsic value of tradition. Not once did I agree with anything in this text that wasn't merely a mirror of myself. This is an otherwordly psychology; a different genus of mind. Don't mistake convergence for sympathy.

People describe Maistre as cold and dry; frankly I think the opposite. The hand that wrote these words was slick with sweat and flush with hatred. As an insight into the fascist mindset, Maistre is exemplary: his contempt is not dangerous; his hope is.
]]> <![CDATA[Conservative Parties and the Birth of Democracy (Cambridge Studies in Comparative Politics)]]> 34840076 439 Daniel Ziblatt 1108300839 M 0 to-read 3.95 2017 Conservative Parties and the Birth of Democracy (Cambridge Studies in Comparative Politics)
author: Daniel Ziblatt
name: M
average rating: 3.95
book published: 2017
rating: 0
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date added: 2024/09/10
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]]> <![CDATA[The Right in the Twentieth Century: Conservatism and Democracy (Themes in Right-Wing Ideology and Politics)]]> 4040599 230 Brian Girvin 0861879813 M 0 to-read 0.0 1994 The Right in the Twentieth Century: Conservatism and Democracy (Themes in Right-Wing Ideology and Politics)
author: Brian Girvin
name: M
average rating: 0.0
book published: 1994
rating: 0
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date added: 2024/09/10
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]]> <![CDATA[Conservatism: The Fight for a Tradition]]> 53232142
For two hundred years, conservatism has defied its reputation as a backward-looking creed by confronting and adapting to liberal modernity. By doing so, the Right has won long periods of power and effectively become the dominant tradition in politics. Yet, despite their success, conservatives have continued to fight with each other about how far to compromise with liberalism and democracy―or which values to defend and how. In Conservatism , Edmund Fawcett provides a gripping account of this conflicted history, clarifies key ideas, and illuminates quarrels within the Right today.

Focusing on the United States, Britain, France, and Germany, Fawcett’s vivid narrative covers thinkers and politicians. They include the forerunners James Madison, Edmund Burke, and Joseph de Maistre; early friends and foes of capitalism; defenders of religion; and builders of modern parties, such as William McKinley and Lord Salisbury. The book chronicles the cultural critics and radical disruptors of the 1920s and 1930s, recounts how advocates of laissez-faire economics broke the post 1945 consensus, and describes how Donald Trump, Boris Johnson, and their European counterparts are pushing conservatism toward a nation-first, hard Right.

An absorbing, original history of the Right, Conservatism portrays a tradition as much at war with itself as with its opponents.]]> 544 Edmund Fawcett 0691174105 M 0 currently-reading 3.67 Conservatism: The Fight for a Tradition
author: Edmund Fawcett
name: M
average rating: 3.67
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]]> Cute Accelerationism 206601357 An impassioned philosophical celebration of the multiple dimensions of contemporary cuteness.Involuntarily sucked into the forcefield of Cute, Amy Ireland and Maya B. Kronic decided to let go, give in, let the demon ride them, and make an accelerationism out of it—only to realize that Cute opens a microcosmic gate onto the transcendental process of acceleration itself.Joining the swarming e-girls, t-girls, NEETS, anons, and otaku who rescued accelerationism from the double pincers of media panic and academic buzzkill by introducing it to big eyes, fluffy ears, programming socks, and silly memes, they discover that the objects of cute culture are just spinoffs of an accelerative process booping us from the future, rendering us all submissive, breedable, helpless, and cute in our turn. Cute comes tomorrow, and only anastrophe can make sense of what it will have been doing to us.Evading all discipline, sliding across all possible surfaces, Cute Accelerationism embraces every detail of the symptomatology, aetiology, epidemiology, history, biology, etymology, topology, and even embryology of Cute, joyfully burrowing down into its natural, cultural, sensory, sexual, subjective, erotic, and semiotic dimensions in order to sound out the latent spaces of this Thing that has soft-soaped its way into human culture.Traversing tangents on natural and unnatural selection, runaway supernormalisation, the collective self-transformation of genderswarming cuties, the hyperstitional cultures of shojo and otaku, denpa and 2D love, and the cute subworlds of aegyo and meng, moé and flatmaxxing, catboys and dogon eggs, bobbles and gummies, vore machines and partial objects, BwOs and UwUs…glomping, snuggling, smooshing and squeeeeing their way toward the event horizon of Cute, donning cat ears and popping bubbles as they go, in this untimely philosophical intensification of an omnipresent phenomenon, having surrendered to the squishiest demonic possession, like, ever, two bffs set out in search of the transcendental shape of cuteness only to realize that, even though it is all around us, we do not yet know what Cute can do.Seriously superficial and bafflingly coherent, half erudite philosophical treatise, half dariacore mashup, 100 percent cutagion, this compact lil� textual machine is a meltdown and a glow up, as well as a twizzled homage to Deleuze and Guattari’s A Thousand Plateaus. Welcome to the nothing uncute makes it out of the near future, and the cute will very soon no longer be even remotely human.]]> 232 Amy Ireland 1915103150 M 0 to-read 3.87 Cute Accelerationism
author: Amy Ireland
name: M
average rating: 3.87
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]]> Fact, Fiction, and Forecast 186133 Science, "raised a storm of controversy" when it was first published in 1954, and one that remains on the front lines of philosophical debate.

How is it that we feel confident in generalizing from experience in some ways but not in others? How are generalizations that are warranted to be distinguished from those that are not? Goodman shows that these questions resist formal solution and his demonstration has been taken by nativists like Chomsky and Fodor as proof that neither scientific induction nor ordinary learning can proceed without an a priori, or innate, ordering of hypotheses.

In his new foreword to this edition, Hilary Putnam forcefully rejects these nativist claims. The controversy surrounding these unsolved problems is as relevant to the psychology of cognitive development as it is to the philosophy of science. No serious student of either discipline can afford to misunderstand Goodman's classic argument.]]> 131 Nelson Goodman 0674290712 M 0 to-read 4.01 1954 Fact, Fiction, and Forecast
author: Nelson Goodman
name: M
average rating: 4.01
book published: 1954
rating: 0
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date added: 2024/09/07
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]]> <![CDATA[Meaning and Necessity: A Study in Semantics and Modal Logic (Midway Reprints)]]> 163790 266 Rudolf Carnap 0226093476 M 0 to-read 4.24 1947 Meaning and Necessity: A Study in Semantics and Modal Logic (Midway Reprints)
author: Rudolf Carnap
name: M
average rating: 4.24
book published: 1947
rating: 0
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date added: 2024/09/07
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]]> Bayesian Epistemology 477971 170 Luc Bovens 0199270406 M 0 to-read 3.62 2004 Bayesian Epistemology
author: Luc Bovens
name: M
average rating: 3.62
book published: 2004
rating: 0
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date added: 2024/09/07
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]]> <![CDATA[Logical Foundations of Probability]]> 10845142 613 Rudolf Carnap 0226093433 M 0 to-read 4.31 1950 Logical Foundations of Probability
author: Rudolf Carnap
name: M
average rating: 4.31
book published: 1950
rating: 0
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date added: 2024/09/07
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]]> <![CDATA[The Ways of Paradox and Other Essays]]> 249280
Quine has been characterized, in The New York Review of Books , as “the most distinguished American recruit to logical empiricism, probably the contemporary American philosopher most admired in the profession, and an original philosophical thinker of the first rank.� His “philosophical innovations add up to a coherent theory of knowledge which he has for the most part constructed single-handed.� In The Ways of Paradox new generations of readers will gain access to this philosophy.]]> 350 Willard Van Orman Quine 0674948378 M 0 to-read 4.13 1966 The Ways of Paradox and Other Essays
author: Willard Van Orman Quine
name: M
average rating: 4.13
book published: 1966
rating: 0
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date added: 2024/09/06
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]]> <![CDATA[[(Basic Writings of Kant)] [Author: Immanuel Kant] published on (August, 2001)]]> 126748125 Introduction by Allen W. WoodWith translations by F. Max Müller and Thomas K. AbbottThe writings of Immanuel Kant became the cornerstone of all subsequent philosophical inquiry. They articulate the relationship between the human mind and all that it encounters and remain the most important influence on our concept of knowledge. As renowned Kant scholar Allen W. Wood writes in his Introduction, Kant “virtually laid the foundation for the way people in the last two centuries have confronted such widely differing subjects as the experience of beauty and the meaning of human history.� Edited and compiled by Dr. Wood, Basic Writings of Kant stands as a comprehensive summary of Kant’s contributions to modern thought, and gathers together the most respected translations of Kant’s key moral and political writings.]]> 0 F. Max Müller M 0 currently-reading 0.0 2001 [(Basic Writings of Kant)] [Author: Immanuel Kant] published on (August, 2001)
author: F. Max Müller
name: M
average rating: 0.0
book published: 2001
rating: 0
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date added: 2024/09/06
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]]> Sun & Steel 62804
At one level, it may be read as an account of how a puny, bookish boy discovered the importance of his own physical being; the "sun and steel" of the title are themselves symbols respectively of the cult of the open air and the weights used in bodybuilding. At another level, it is a discussion by a major novelist of the relation between action and art, and his own highly polished art in particular. More personally, it is an account of one individual's search for identity and self-integration. Or again, the work could be seen as a demonstration of how an intensely individual preoccupation can be developed into a profound philosophy of life.

All these elements are woven together by Mishima's complex yet polished and supple style. The confession and the self-analysis, the philosophy and the poetry combine in the end to create something that is in itself perfect and self-sufficient. It is a piece of literature that is as carefully fashioned as Mishima's novels, and at the same time provides an indispensable key to the understanding of them as art.

The road Mishima took to salvation is a highly personal one. Yet here, ultimately, one detects the unmistakable tones of a self transcending the particular and attaining to a poetic vision of the universal. The book is therefore a moving document, and is highly significant as a pointer to the future development of one of the most interesting novelists of modern times.]]> 108 Yukio Mishima 4770029039 M 2 wanted to enjoy this book. Despite my personal politics, I'm by no means allergic to reactionary cranks � as long as they have something interesting (or at least well-written) to say. Hence my enjoyment of Schmitt, Nietzsche, Land, and so on. And I'd always heard Mishima was a truly excellent writer. Perhaps it was just the translation, but he wasn't quite my taste. Which is a shame. If you liked it or it is in someway personally important to you, that's cool, maybe we'll hit the weights in the sun together sometime, but I've gotta vent my spleen on this one. Get a load:

“For man to encounter the universe as he is, with uncovered countenance, is death. In order to encounter the universe and still live, he must wear a mask—an oxygen mask.�


I just... can't take this seriously. Every time I glance back up the page at this quote I start sniggering. HE MUST WEAR A MASK..... AN OXYGEN MASK...... If this passage appeared in Cioran I think it wouldn't stand out too much, but like many of Cioran's aphorisms it would clearly be meant to make you chuckle. Mishima, however, is entirely humourless and he wants me to take him entirely seriously. And there just isn't anything here that I am capable of taking seriously. Topics fumbled with include:

- "The subtle contradiction between self-awareness and existence"
- The appropriate response to twink death (stop going outside)
- Where the "profoundest depths" of the imagination lie (death apparently)
- How important it is to pursue intellectual and physical excellence

I don't know if it's Mishima's influence or just cosmic rightist convergence but I feel like I've heard the following sentiment a thousand times:

“The cynicism that regards all hero worship as comical is always shadowed by a sense of physical inferiority. Invariably, it is the man who believes himself to be physically lacking in heroic attributes who speaks mockingly of the hero...�


Yes, liberal, indeed. You might think it was stupid and pointless for Mishima to do a terrorism, get laughed at by a bunch of soldiers, disembowel himself and then die painfully to a three-times-botched beheading, but have you considered I have already depicted you as the soy wojak?]]> 3.90 1968 Sun & Steel
author: Yukio Mishima
name: M
average rating: 3.90
book published: 1968
rating: 2
read at: 2024/09/05
date added: 2024/09/05
shelves:
review:
Well, I wanted to enjoy this book. Despite my personal politics, I'm by no means allergic to reactionary cranks � as long as they have something interesting (or at least well-written) to say. Hence my enjoyment of Schmitt, Nietzsche, Land, and so on. And I'd always heard Mishima was a truly excellent writer. Perhaps it was just the translation, but he wasn't quite my taste. Which is a shame. If you liked it or it is in someway personally important to you, that's cool, maybe we'll hit the weights in the sun together sometime, but I've gotta vent my spleen on this one. Get a load:

“For man to encounter the universe as he is, with uncovered countenance, is death. In order to encounter the universe and still live, he must wear a mask—an oxygen mask.�


I just... can't take this seriously. Every time I glance back up the page at this quote I start sniggering. HE MUST WEAR A MASK..... AN OXYGEN MASK...... If this passage appeared in Cioran I think it wouldn't stand out too much, but like many of Cioran's aphorisms it would clearly be meant to make you chuckle. Mishima, however, is entirely humourless and he wants me to take him entirely seriously. And there just isn't anything here that I am capable of taking seriously. Topics fumbled with include:

- "The subtle contradiction between self-awareness and existence"
- The appropriate response to twink death (stop going outside)
- Where the "profoundest depths" of the imagination lie (death apparently)
- How important it is to pursue intellectual and physical excellence

I don't know if it's Mishima's influence or just cosmic rightist convergence but I feel like I've heard the following sentiment a thousand times:

“The cynicism that regards all hero worship as comical is always shadowed by a sense of physical inferiority. Invariably, it is the man who believes himself to be physically lacking in heroic attributes who speaks mockingly of the hero...�


Yes, liberal, indeed. You might think it was stupid and pointless for Mishima to do a terrorism, get laughed at by a bunch of soldiers, disembowel himself and then die painfully to a three-times-botched beheading, but have you considered I have already depicted you as the soy wojak?
]]> <![CDATA[The Adonis Complex: How to Identify, Treat and Prevent Body Obsession in Men and Boys]]> 22027644
Trying everything from compulsive weight lifting to steroids, more and more boys and men are taking the quest for physical perfection beyond the bounds of normal behavior. The Adonis Complex � the groundbreaking book that first gave a name to this phenomenon and sparked nationwide interest in the subject � identifies for the first time the symptoms and warning signs of this dangerous problem, including:
� An obsession with exercise, sometimes to the exclusion of all other activities
� Binge eating, anorexia nervosa, and bulimia
� The abuse of steroids, muscle-building supplements, and diet aids

But perhaps more important, it offers readers an explanation of the underlying causes of the Adonis complex, together with hands-on advice for those who have experienced body obsessions themselves, or who see these problems in a boy or man they love.]]> 286 Harrison G. Pope Jr. M 3
This precipitated a massive lifestyle change. I ditched cigarettes, alcohol, and junk food. I got a gym membership. I got into combat sports too, and promptly fucked my knees, back, and shoulders. I bulked too hard, had to diet, then resumed bulking. As a weak, sedentary nerd, I was bound to fuck the whole thing up in every way I possibly could, but somewhere along the line I stopped being injured and worn out all the time and instead I was simply healthy, resilient, strong. Turns out exercise is good for you � who knew?

Now let me tell you what happens when you start trying to get healthy. Capital, as the boundless drive for more, recognises something of itself in the budding athlete's drive for self-improvement, but with an important distinction: the human body, like all living things, is destined to age, decay, and die. Capital is not a living thing, but "dead labour", not given to limits, but continually pushing back its own limits in its never-ending expansion. Understandably, then, "be happy with your body" is bad business, and that's why from the day I started working out, the adverts I've been served have been desperate to give me Body Dysmorphic Disorder:

- CAN'T GET IT FULLY UP LATELY? EMBARRASSED THAT YOU AREN'T ABLE TO GET ENTIRELY, COMPLETELY ERECT WHEN YOU HAVE SEX WITH AN ATTRACTIVE WOMAN? HERE IS A VIDEO OF AN ATTRACTIVE WOMAN LOOKING EXASPERATED. EVER WORRY THAT'S HOW AN ATTRACTIVE WOMAN WOULD RESPOND TO YOUR NOT ENTIRELY ERECT PENIS?

- HELLO MALE IN THE 25-TO-34 AGE BRACKET. PERHAPS YOU HAVE NOTICED THERE ARE MORE HAIRS IN THE SHOWER LATELY. OH, YOU HAVEN'T? WELL. NOW YOU'RE GOING TO WORRY THAT THERE ARE. ANYWAY. IF YOU GO BALD YOU WILL NO LONGER BE ABLE TO HAVE SEX WITH ATTRACTIVE WOMEN. DOES THAT CONCERN YOU? HERE IS A VIDEO OF A BALD MAN WHO IS SAD. DO YOU WANT TO BE LIKE HIM?

- HAVE YOU BEEN FEELING TIRED RECENTLY? YOU NEED TESTOSTERONE REPLACEMENT THERAPY. YOU NEED TO INJECT TESTOSTERONE INTO YOUR BODY. YOU NEED TO PAY US APPROXIMATELY ONE-TWELTH OF THE MEDIAN SALARY IN YOUR COUNTRY PER YEAR SO THAT YOU CAN BECOME DEPENDENT ON US FOR A CONSTANT SUPPLY OF EXOGENOUS TESTOSTERONE.

Yeah yeah, impersonal economic forces embodied in our information infrastructure want me to be suicidally depressed so that I'll give them my money. So what? That's nothing new. Sure, but it's interesting when you consider the premise of this book. I like this book, and I like Pope. He seems like a good egg. But when Pope wrote this in 2000, he believed that by getting men to open up about their experiences of disordered eating, body dysmorphia, "bigorexia", etc. that we'd be able to fight back against the pernicious influence that the media has over our body images. The Spinozist position: knowledge is power. If you know you can't get as big as Arnie without steroids, then you'll stop worrying that you're inadequate as a man if you're not as muscular as him, right?

Maybe. But if you look at the state of fitness-related Instagram accounts, or YouTube channels, or online forums dedicated to fitness, you will see almost nothing but negging, infighting, absurd body standards, blatant steroid users pretending to be "natty", open steroid users saying "natties" are wasting their time, constant whining about women (including incredulous rage about how "she dumped me for a guy who can't even bench press his own bodyweight"), people insisting that if you can't deadlift 180kg or more the first time you walk in the gym you are WEAK, LOW T, etc. The sheer rate of innovation in methods of inducing self-hatred in anyone who happens to stumble across this stuff is impressive. And these are people who on some level ought to know better. Never being satisfied with your physique, always feeling small, putting down anyone who is pleased with a relative improvement in themselves � that's just the culture. It makes the stuff Pope describes in this book seem pretty chill, by comparison.

The truth is, this book is outdated. I'm sure the advice he gives for the worst sufferers (get on SSRIs and see a therapist) would work, but in 2000 the assumption was that for most people, knowledge would be enough. These days, knowledge is abundant, but so is rationalisation and propaganda. For many gym-goers the body is no longer just a personal statement, but a moral and political one, too: leftists are weak, effeminate, soy-eating homosexuals who go to therapy and talk about their feelings all the time � you don't want to be that, do you? Pope at one point suggests that part of the explosive growth of the gym and supplements industries in his time had to do with the "threatened masculinity" men were experiencing in response to feminist successes in gaining economic and legal equality for women. I think that thesis is sadly correct. But Pope is a good liberal, and so he thinks that "political" problems in this sense are given to rational disintegration. But political problems are actually libidinal problems, and those run very, very deep indeed.

None of that is to say that anyone who goes to the gym is a fascist, obviously. Otherwise, that's worrying for me. But ultimately every problem and every trend Pope talks about in the book has been accelerated and radicalised by social media, by the growing perfection of advertising technology, by the centrifugal ideological forces driving us all into ever more intense political and libidinal corners. "Talk about your feelings" is no longer an adequate solution on a large-scale. It probably never was.

But enough about the large scale. I was doing some RDLs a few months ago, probably had something like 120kg on the bar, but I'm not sure. This absolutely massive guy comes up to me and asks if he can work in, and of course I say yes. To my amazement he proceeds to do bent over barbell rows, maybe 7 or 8 reps, and I tell him that it was very impressive, because it was.

"No," he said sadly. "I used to be a lot stronger. Before I got injured."]]> 3.00 2000 The Adonis Complex: How to Identify, Treat and Prevent Body Obsession in Men and Boys
author: Harrison G. Pope Jr.
name: M
average rating: 3.00
book published: 2000
rating: 3
read at: 2024/09/03
date added: 2024/09/03
shelves:
review:
About two years ago I got really ill and I thought to myself: "Oh fuck, I've fucked it haven't I? My youth has ended! AND I WASTED IT ALL ON PHILOSOPHY! WHAT HAVE I DONE?!?!?!?!11"

This precipitated a massive lifestyle change. I ditched cigarettes, alcohol, and junk food. I got a gym membership. I got into combat sports too, and promptly fucked my knees, back, and shoulders. I bulked too hard, had to diet, then resumed bulking. As a weak, sedentary nerd, I was bound to fuck the whole thing up in every way I possibly could, but somewhere along the line I stopped being injured and worn out all the time and instead I was simply healthy, resilient, strong. Turns out exercise is good for you � who knew?

Now let me tell you what happens when you start trying to get healthy. Capital, as the boundless drive for more, recognises something of itself in the budding athlete's drive for self-improvement, but with an important distinction: the human body, like all living things, is destined to age, decay, and die. Capital is not a living thing, but "dead labour", not given to limits, but continually pushing back its own limits in its never-ending expansion. Understandably, then, "be happy with your body" is bad business, and that's why from the day I started working out, the adverts I've been served have been desperate to give me Body Dysmorphic Disorder:

- CAN'T GET IT FULLY UP LATELY? EMBARRASSED THAT YOU AREN'T ABLE TO GET ENTIRELY, COMPLETELY ERECT WHEN YOU HAVE SEX WITH AN ATTRACTIVE WOMAN? HERE IS A VIDEO OF AN ATTRACTIVE WOMAN LOOKING EXASPERATED. EVER WORRY THAT'S HOW AN ATTRACTIVE WOMAN WOULD RESPOND TO YOUR NOT ENTIRELY ERECT PENIS?

- HELLO MALE IN THE 25-TO-34 AGE BRACKET. PERHAPS YOU HAVE NOTICED THERE ARE MORE HAIRS IN THE SHOWER LATELY. OH, YOU HAVEN'T? WELL. NOW YOU'RE GOING TO WORRY THAT THERE ARE. ANYWAY. IF YOU GO BALD YOU WILL NO LONGER BE ABLE TO HAVE SEX WITH ATTRACTIVE WOMEN. DOES THAT CONCERN YOU? HERE IS A VIDEO OF A BALD MAN WHO IS SAD. DO YOU WANT TO BE LIKE HIM?

- HAVE YOU BEEN FEELING TIRED RECENTLY? YOU NEED TESTOSTERONE REPLACEMENT THERAPY. YOU NEED TO INJECT TESTOSTERONE INTO YOUR BODY. YOU NEED TO PAY US APPROXIMATELY ONE-TWELTH OF THE MEDIAN SALARY IN YOUR COUNTRY PER YEAR SO THAT YOU CAN BECOME DEPENDENT ON US FOR A CONSTANT SUPPLY OF EXOGENOUS TESTOSTERONE.

Yeah yeah, impersonal economic forces embodied in our information infrastructure want me to be suicidally depressed so that I'll give them my money. So what? That's nothing new. Sure, but it's interesting when you consider the premise of this book. I like this book, and I like Pope. He seems like a good egg. But when Pope wrote this in 2000, he believed that by getting men to open up about their experiences of disordered eating, body dysmorphia, "bigorexia", etc. that we'd be able to fight back against the pernicious influence that the media has over our body images. The Spinozist position: knowledge is power. If you know you can't get as big as Arnie without steroids, then you'll stop worrying that you're inadequate as a man if you're not as muscular as him, right?

Maybe. But if you look at the state of fitness-related Instagram accounts, or YouTube channels, or online forums dedicated to fitness, you will see almost nothing but negging, infighting, absurd body standards, blatant steroid users pretending to be "natty", open steroid users saying "natties" are wasting their time, constant whining about women (including incredulous rage about how "she dumped me for a guy who can't even bench press his own bodyweight"), people insisting that if you can't deadlift 180kg or more the first time you walk in the gym you are WEAK, LOW T, etc. The sheer rate of innovation in methods of inducing self-hatred in anyone who happens to stumble across this stuff is impressive. And these are people who on some level ought to know better. Never being satisfied with your physique, always feeling small, putting down anyone who is pleased with a relative improvement in themselves � that's just the culture. It makes the stuff Pope describes in this book seem pretty chill, by comparison.

The truth is, this book is outdated. I'm sure the advice he gives for the worst sufferers (get on SSRIs and see a therapist) would work, but in 2000 the assumption was that for most people, knowledge would be enough. These days, knowledge is abundant, but so is rationalisation and propaganda. For many gym-goers the body is no longer just a personal statement, but a moral and political one, too: leftists are weak, effeminate, soy-eating homosexuals who go to therapy and talk about their feelings all the time � you don't want to be that, do you? Pope at one point suggests that part of the explosive growth of the gym and supplements industries in his time had to do with the "threatened masculinity" men were experiencing in response to feminist successes in gaining economic and legal equality for women. I think that thesis is sadly correct. But Pope is a good liberal, and so he thinks that "political" problems in this sense are given to rational disintegration. But political problems are actually libidinal problems, and those run very, very deep indeed.

None of that is to say that anyone who goes to the gym is a fascist, obviously. Otherwise, that's worrying for me. But ultimately every problem and every trend Pope talks about in the book has been accelerated and radicalised by social media, by the growing perfection of advertising technology, by the centrifugal ideological forces driving us all into ever more intense political and libidinal corners. "Talk about your feelings" is no longer an adequate solution on a large-scale. It probably never was.

But enough about the large scale. I was doing some RDLs a few months ago, probably had something like 120kg on the bar, but I'm not sure. This absolutely massive guy comes up to me and asks if he can work in, and of course I say yes. To my amazement he proceeds to do bent over barbell rows, maybe 7 or 8 reps, and I tell him that it was very impressive, because it was.

"No," he said sadly. "I used to be a lot stronger. Before I got injured."
]]> <![CDATA[Men Have Called Her Crazy: A Memoir]]> 203931803 A powerful memoir that reckons with mental health as well as the insidious ways men impact the lives of women.

In early 2021, popular artist Anna Marie Tendler checked herself into a psychiatric hospital following a year of crippling anxiety, depression and self-harm. Over two weeks, she underwent myriad psychological tests, participated in numerous therapy sessions, connected with fellow patients and experienced profound breakthroughs, such as when a doctor noted, “There is a you inside that feels invisible to those looking at you from the outside.�

In Men Have Called Her Crazy, Tendler recounts her hospital experience as well as pivotal moments in her life that preceded and followed. As the title suggests, many of these moments are impacted by men: unrequited love in high school; the twenty-eight-year-old she lost her virginity to when she was sixteen; the frustrations and absurdities of dating in her mid-thirties; and her decision to freeze her eggs as all her friends were starting families.

This stunning literary self-portrait examines the unreasonable expectations and pressures women face in the 21st century. Yet overwhelming and despairing as that can feel, Tendler ultimately offers a message hope. Early in her stay in the hospital, she says, “My wish for myself is that one day I’ll reach a place where I can face hardship without trying to destroy myself.� By the end of the book, she fulfills that wish.]]> 304 Anna Marie Tendler 1668032341 M 4 The ants weigh more than the elephants. . . .�
� Fiona Apple, Left Alone

Introduction, or, You People Need To Get A Grip

Let’s get this out the way: I don’t know Anna Marie Tendler and nor do you, not even if you do read her memoir. But from the very little I’ve learned about her from reading this, I quite like her. I don't think she'd like me, but that's okay. I don't tend to make my reviews about other reviews, but this is a special case. Even my rating (4 stars, when realistically it's more of a 3) is a concession to the reception I've seen the book receive both on GR and online more generally. I'm, quite simply, trying to skew the average. Reading some of these point-missing GR reviews written by vampiric ghouls desperate for juicy deets, I’m reminded of the old words: “I don’t watch heat; I got shooters that’ll watch it for me.� I’m happy to be that shooter, Ms. Tendler.

For years now, we have been seeing calls to “destigmatise mental illness�. To paraphrase Orwell, if you want a picture of that future, imagine long-winded and annoying memoirs stamping on a human face � forever. Like all possible futures, this isn't ideal, but what's worse is the seething reaction this memoir seems to solicit. For my part, I truly have no interest in “critiquing� Tendler for her faults and failings, and I’m not sure why anyone does. “But what about the loan-repayment-haircut thing with Theo! She's so ridiculous!� Okay? God forbid a woman do anything, including pen a memoir of middling quality in a time where universal literacy is primarily used for dunking on whatever fragment of the pop culture machine has been favoured by the algorithm “lately�. I’ve even seen one reviewer admit that the only reason they were interested in this book was that they were hoping Tendler would “drag� her ex-husband, but now that they’ve read it, they’re on her ex-husband’s side! HELLO? CRINGE DEPARTMENT?

You People Need To Get A Grip, Part II

To continue this rant a little longer, I think anyone with a spiteful, resentful spirit will have a great time shitting on this book. There is so much to hate Tendler for. I have a comically-large gameshow dartboard mounted on my living room wall, and each segment has a different accusation. My show assistant spins it and I throw my dart with impeccable precision. Its ballistic trajectory carries it squarely into the segment marked: “WHITE WOMEN BE LIKE�. The crowd goes wild. Watch this, dear reader: I make this shit look easy.

“Did you know?� I begin with a malice that will build into an orgasm before I’m through. “That in Chapter 7, Annamarie says that women with consumption were thought to be the epitome of beauty in the 19th Century? She points out that the beauty standard correlates with the symptoms of a deadly disease: ‘impossibly pale, impossibly thin, lips tinted red (from coughing up blood), too tired to speak, too weak to move.� But what she neglects to mention is that the fetishism of a pale complexion mobilises classist and racist anxieties for its efficacy. After all, the 19th Century is the time of the Scramble for Africa, the emergence of scientific racism, the radicalisation of beauty standards by way of white supremacy. Of course it is awful that middle and upper class women should have felt such extreme pressure, but consider the working class and colonised women who were excluded to even make the standard possible! And yet she FAILS to mention that! Am I really meant to feel SORRY for women who willingly sold themselves to BAD MEN rather than GET A JOB?�

The crowd are on their feet, and I personally need a new pair of boxers.

If that bit seems unfair, read some of the one-star reviews of this memoir and come back to me. And if it still seems unfair after that, well, then it was just a joke, so calm down! Can’t you take a joke? Why are you acting so crazy right now?

There’s a serious point to be made here, though. Yes, Tendler is oblivious, privileged, WHITE, needs to touch grass, etc., but it is absolutely out of control to bring that kind of “criticism� to bear on a mental health memoir. Nobody made you pick up the memoir subtitled "a memoir" where a typographical flourish on the front cover squeezes the "M" and "E" in "Men" together in an affront to subtlety so explosive it could escape Earth's gravity. “Oh, this mentally ill person seems strange and annoying and lacks self-awareness!� On god? Were you expecting something else? This entire fucking genre started with Michel de Montaigne!

Why Would A Guy Who Mostly Reads Dead Racist German Philosophers Even Read A Book Like This, Anyway?

Fun fact: I don’t even know who John Mulaney is. Apparently he’s funny for a living? Personally I couldn't give less of a shit about The Divorce. I followed Tendler on Instagram a few years ago for like three reasons:

1. I like her photography, especially Dinner in March. Call me basic and tasteless if you want. I’m a Kantian; that ship sailed a long time ago.
2. I like her sincereposting. People should do it more.
3. I think she’s pretty and I like seeing photos of her every now and then.

Then she started posting about a memoir and I thought, “yeah, I’ll read that. That seems right up my alley.� Does that seem strange to you? Just because I’m Enneagram Type 5 and I rant at women about Spinoza on a first date? Well, it shouldn’t. I had Fiona Apple’s ‘The Idler Wheel� memorised before you had even heard of her (which was after ‘Fetch the Bolt Cutters�, of course). I was on Tumblr before you. I am more smug than you, I am more pretentious than you, I have reached voids of self-awareness you can’t even imagine. I am capable of dwelling on slights that didn’t even happen � in fact I’m doing it RIGHT NOW. My Spotify playlists are legion, and they follow entire narrative and thematic arcs. All of my friends are lesbians � even the men! Now where’s my BRAT vinyl? Oh, yes, right here. “It’s okay to just admit that you’re jealous of me. . . .�

About the Whole Misandry Thing

Maybe it’s just because many of my friends declare their hatred of men on a regular basis, but I wasn’t all that fussed whenever Tendler would express her antipathy for my gender. I don’t particularly like men either, not even the ones I want to have sex with, so she was quite relatable to me.

What you have to understand is that Tendler’s “patchy� relationship history is a symptom: of fear, of early childhood distress, of an inappropriate relationship with her emotionally abusive and unstable mother. Her pain and anxiety flows through the machinery of desire and patriarchy and enables couplings of sometimes devastating and sometimes merely disappointing consequences. It’s a shame we hear so little of what Tendler felt or said during her relationships with men, but I think I understand. A turbulent life with no stable familial foundation can feel like a montage, a series of images drawn with great intensity, but with an absence in the centre. On occasion, I imagine, Tendler was nothing other than this absence, this bristling negativity � negation of past heartbreaks, negation of elitist judgments, negation of childhood dependency on an explosive mother and an inept father, negation of pointless and unrewarding jobs, negation of negation itself, the will to reject all true criticism of parental failure, to refuse to sink into that despairing negativity that points the finger at a mother who meant well but fucked up anyway � my heart broke to hear about the birthday where Tendler was spanked merely because she didn't want her photo taken � and to block off that channel so that all this surplus rage could go the only other place it could go: towards the men in her life who were certainly not innocent either.

“There is a whole history before me and a life she thought she’d have—child-free, working in fashion, living in New York City. Instead, she ended up a stay-at-home mom who cooked dinner every night and carted her children to their activities. She never held that against me; instead she made her whole life about my brother and me.�


That last line is complete bullshit, but if you want to blame Tendler for believing that, you’re one sick puppy!

About the Whole Misandry Thing, Part II

Chapter 29's anti-psychiatric feminist rant had me nodding along as a son of Deleuze. A line from her psychiatric assessment courtesy of Dr Samuels reads: “CAUGHT IN A SADOMASOCHISTIC TRANSFERENCE-COUNTERTRANSFERENCE ENACTMENT�. Wow. Much science. Very insight. And Tendler is right to be sceptical of her male psychiatrist who writes a little too dismissively of her aversion to men. Tendler is right to point out how much easier it is for men to disregard the psychological consequences of patriarchy and instead return to the eternal image of the bad mother. Maybe that's even what I'm doing now, but while Tendler furiously rejects Dr Samuel's suggestion that her hatred of men is the product of a displaced rage towards her mother � and that matters far more than any opinion I could form � I do find it interesting that between Tendler’s description of her mother’s abusive behaviours, and Dr Samuel’s guess that Tendler is suppressing rage against maternal figures, there is mostly silence.

As I have said before, “Anna� is often not the name of a person in this memoir, but instead the name of an absence. Platitudes about how difficult life was for her mother aside, I’ve seen very little to indicate any sort of healthy coming-to-terms with her mother's behaviours at all. I don’t believe in sadomasochistic transference enactments because I’m not a hack, but even a hack can pick up on suppressed maternal resentments, and Tendler’s disavowal does not convince me, even if I absolutely agree that the men in her life have done plenty of damage themselves. I'm not angry with her that she doesn't see completely eye-to-eye with me, a random stranger (and a man too!) about the relevant facts of her life, and I admire her bravery in putting this information out there.

Anyway, enough is enough. I was told that after Rayman 2 I'd be cast as a tormented artist who falls for a girl with great, big... eyes. And here I am, still playing the sidekick in a low-budget flick. See ya in Rayman 4!]]> 3.42 2024 Men Have Called Her Crazy: A Memoir
author: Anna Marie Tendler
name: M
average rating: 3.42
book published: 2024
rating: 4
read at: 2024/08/26
date added: 2024/08/26
shelves:
review:
“My ills are reticulate; my woes are granular.
The ants weigh more than the elephants. . . .�
� Fiona Apple, Left Alone

Introduction, or, You People Need To Get A Grip

Let’s get this out the way: I don’t know Anna Marie Tendler and nor do you, not even if you do read her memoir. But from the very little I’ve learned about her from reading this, I quite like her. I don't think she'd like me, but that's okay. I don't tend to make my reviews about other reviews, but this is a special case. Even my rating (4 stars, when realistically it's more of a 3) is a concession to the reception I've seen the book receive both on GR and online more generally. I'm, quite simply, trying to skew the average. Reading some of these point-missing GR reviews written by vampiric ghouls desperate for juicy deets, I’m reminded of the old words: “I don’t watch heat; I got shooters that’ll watch it for me.� I’m happy to be that shooter, Ms. Tendler.

For years now, we have been seeing calls to “destigmatise mental illness�. To paraphrase Orwell, if you want a picture of that future, imagine long-winded and annoying memoirs stamping on a human face � forever. Like all possible futures, this isn't ideal, but what's worse is the seething reaction this memoir seems to solicit. For my part, I truly have no interest in “critiquing� Tendler for her faults and failings, and I’m not sure why anyone does. “But what about the loan-repayment-haircut thing with Theo! She's so ridiculous!� Okay? God forbid a woman do anything, including pen a memoir of middling quality in a time where universal literacy is primarily used for dunking on whatever fragment of the pop culture machine has been favoured by the algorithm “lately�. I’ve even seen one reviewer admit that the only reason they were interested in this book was that they were hoping Tendler would “drag� her ex-husband, but now that they’ve read it, they’re on her ex-husband’s side! HELLO? CRINGE DEPARTMENT?

You People Need To Get A Grip, Part II

To continue this rant a little longer, I think anyone with a spiteful, resentful spirit will have a great time shitting on this book. There is so much to hate Tendler for. I have a comically-large gameshow dartboard mounted on my living room wall, and each segment has a different accusation. My show assistant spins it and I throw my dart with impeccable precision. Its ballistic trajectory carries it squarely into the segment marked: “WHITE WOMEN BE LIKE�. The crowd goes wild. Watch this, dear reader: I make this shit look easy.

“Did you know?� I begin with a malice that will build into an orgasm before I’m through. “That in Chapter 7, Annamarie says that women with consumption were thought to be the epitome of beauty in the 19th Century? She points out that the beauty standard correlates with the symptoms of a deadly disease: ‘impossibly pale, impossibly thin, lips tinted red (from coughing up blood), too tired to speak, too weak to move.� But what she neglects to mention is that the fetishism of a pale complexion mobilises classist and racist anxieties for its efficacy. After all, the 19th Century is the time of the Scramble for Africa, the emergence of scientific racism, the radicalisation of beauty standards by way of white supremacy. Of course it is awful that middle and upper class women should have felt such extreme pressure, but consider the working class and colonised women who were excluded to even make the standard possible! And yet she FAILS to mention that! Am I really meant to feel SORRY for women who willingly sold themselves to BAD MEN rather than GET A JOB?�

The crowd are on their feet, and I personally need a new pair of boxers.

If that bit seems unfair, read some of the one-star reviews of this memoir and come back to me. And if it still seems unfair after that, well, then it was just a joke, so calm down! Can’t you take a joke? Why are you acting so crazy right now?

There’s a serious point to be made here, though. Yes, Tendler is oblivious, privileged, WHITE, needs to touch grass, etc., but it is absolutely out of control to bring that kind of “criticism� to bear on a mental health memoir. Nobody made you pick up the memoir subtitled "a memoir" where a typographical flourish on the front cover squeezes the "M" and "E" in "Men" together in an affront to subtlety so explosive it could escape Earth's gravity. “Oh, this mentally ill person seems strange and annoying and lacks self-awareness!� On god? Were you expecting something else? This entire fucking genre started with Michel de Montaigne!

Why Would A Guy Who Mostly Reads Dead Racist German Philosophers Even Read A Book Like This, Anyway?

Fun fact: I don’t even know who John Mulaney is. Apparently he’s funny for a living? Personally I couldn't give less of a shit about The Divorce. I followed Tendler on Instagram a few years ago for like three reasons:

1. I like her photography, especially Dinner in March. Call me basic and tasteless if you want. I’m a Kantian; that ship sailed a long time ago.
2. I like her sincereposting. People should do it more.
3. I think she’s pretty and I like seeing photos of her every now and then.

Then she started posting about a memoir and I thought, “yeah, I’ll read that. That seems right up my alley.� Does that seem strange to you? Just because I’m Enneagram Type 5 and I rant at women about Spinoza on a first date? Well, it shouldn’t. I had Fiona Apple’s ‘The Idler Wheel� memorised before you had even heard of her (which was after ‘Fetch the Bolt Cutters�, of course). I was on Tumblr before you. I am more smug than you, I am more pretentious than you, I have reached voids of self-awareness you can’t even imagine. I am capable of dwelling on slights that didn’t even happen � in fact I’m doing it RIGHT NOW. My Spotify playlists are legion, and they follow entire narrative and thematic arcs. All of my friends are lesbians � even the men! Now where’s my BRAT vinyl? Oh, yes, right here. “It’s okay to just admit that you’re jealous of me. . . .�

About the Whole Misandry Thing

Maybe it’s just because many of my friends declare their hatred of men on a regular basis, but I wasn’t all that fussed whenever Tendler would express her antipathy for my gender. I don’t particularly like men either, not even the ones I want to have sex with, so she was quite relatable to me.

What you have to understand is that Tendler’s “patchy� relationship history is a symptom: of fear, of early childhood distress, of an inappropriate relationship with her emotionally abusive and unstable mother. Her pain and anxiety flows through the machinery of desire and patriarchy and enables couplings of sometimes devastating and sometimes merely disappointing consequences. It’s a shame we hear so little of what Tendler felt or said during her relationships with men, but I think I understand. A turbulent life with no stable familial foundation can feel like a montage, a series of images drawn with great intensity, but with an absence in the centre. On occasion, I imagine, Tendler was nothing other than this absence, this bristling negativity � negation of past heartbreaks, negation of elitist judgments, negation of childhood dependency on an explosive mother and an inept father, negation of pointless and unrewarding jobs, negation of negation itself, the will to reject all true criticism of parental failure, to refuse to sink into that despairing negativity that points the finger at a mother who meant well but fucked up anyway � my heart broke to hear about the birthday where Tendler was spanked merely because she didn't want her photo taken � and to block off that channel so that all this surplus rage could go the only other place it could go: towards the men in her life who were certainly not innocent either.

“There is a whole history before me and a life she thought she’d have—child-free, working in fashion, living in New York City. Instead, she ended up a stay-at-home mom who cooked dinner every night and carted her children to their activities. She never held that against me; instead she made her whole life about my brother and me.�


That last line is complete bullshit, but if you want to blame Tendler for believing that, you’re one sick puppy!

About the Whole Misandry Thing, Part II

Chapter 29's anti-psychiatric feminist rant had me nodding along as a son of Deleuze. A line from her psychiatric assessment courtesy of Dr Samuels reads: “CAUGHT IN A SADOMASOCHISTIC TRANSFERENCE-COUNTERTRANSFERENCE ENACTMENT�. Wow. Much science. Very insight. And Tendler is right to be sceptical of her male psychiatrist who writes a little too dismissively of her aversion to men. Tendler is right to point out how much easier it is for men to disregard the psychological consequences of patriarchy and instead return to the eternal image of the bad mother. Maybe that's even what I'm doing now, but while Tendler furiously rejects Dr Samuel's suggestion that her hatred of men is the product of a displaced rage towards her mother � and that matters far more than any opinion I could form � I do find it interesting that between Tendler’s description of her mother’s abusive behaviours, and Dr Samuel’s guess that Tendler is suppressing rage against maternal figures, there is mostly silence.

As I have said before, “Anna� is often not the name of a person in this memoir, but instead the name of an absence. Platitudes about how difficult life was for her mother aside, I’ve seen very little to indicate any sort of healthy coming-to-terms with her mother's behaviours at all. I don’t believe in sadomasochistic transference enactments because I’m not a hack, but even a hack can pick up on suppressed maternal resentments, and Tendler’s disavowal does not convince me, even if I absolutely agree that the men in her life have done plenty of damage themselves. I'm not angry with her that she doesn't see completely eye-to-eye with me, a random stranger (and a man too!) about the relevant facts of her life, and I admire her bravery in putting this information out there.

Anyway, enough is enough. I was told that after Rayman 2 I'd be cast as a tormented artist who falls for a girl with great, big... eyes. And here I am, still playing the sidekick in a low-budget flick. See ya in Rayman 4!
]]> <![CDATA[The Joyous Science (Penguin Classics)]]> 39074568 The Joyous Science is a liberating voyage of discovery as Nietzsche's realization that 'God is dead' and his critique of morality, the arts and modernity give way to an exhilarating doctrine of self-emancipation and the concept of eternal recurrence. Here is Nietzsche at his most personal and affirmative; in his words, this is a book of 'exuberance, restlessness, contrariety and April showers'. With its unique voice and style, its playful combination of poetry and prose, and its invigorating quest for self-emancipation, The Joyous Science is a literary tour de force and quite possibly Nietzsche's best book.]]> 368 Friedrich Nietzsche 0141195398 M 5 to-read Bumpin' that, bumpin' that, bumpin' that, bumpin' that"
� Charli XCX, 365

Let me begin by saying this book reaches heights of preposterousness, mediocrity, and absurdity that I didn't know Nietzsche was capable of � and I've had the displeasure of reading Twilight of the Idols / The Anti-Christ. It must be noted, though, that the worst of this book is highly concentrated in its 5th part, which was added in 1887 for the second edition. By 1887, Nietzsche was fully in his late period, characterised by immense productivity, a voluptuousness of style, and an increasingly excited mentality that would infuse his most famous works with incredible vigour before his mind completely snapped in 1889. Therefore, the first four parts of The Joyous Science (originally published in 1882) seem relatively sober looking back, but make no mistake, there's still plenty in all five parts to laugh at, be frustrated by, to ponder, to rant at one's friends about, and so on.

The style of the book is aphoristic, though certain centres of gravity prevail at times (Book II, for example, mainly discusses women and the arts, and is consequently of almost no value). In the interests of maintaining my own sanity then, I'll be choosing the themes and ideas that seemed to be of the most interest to the Walrus Man, and discussing them relatively independently of each other. This is a review of Nietzsche, though, so I make no apologies if anything leaks.

Nietzsche's Terrible, Horrible, No Good, Very Bad Critique of Immanuel Kant

Poor Kant. Little read, often discussed. This is his fault for being a truly awful writer. How could he possibly contend with Nietzsche, one of the best prose stylists in philosophy? Unfortunately this means that any insight that is properly and thoroughly Kantian can (and will) be passed off as Nietzsche's own, even as he takes any opportunity he can to mock the "Chinaman of Königsberg" (for Germans of a certain historical period, accusing your philosophical opponents of being Chinese or Indian was devastating). Allow me, dear reader, to make this concrete by weaving a tale of almost inexplicable hypocrisy:

Kant's critical philosophy posited a distinction between things as they are for us (the "apparent world" of our senses) and the way things really are "in themselves" (the "transcendental object = X", "things-in-themselves", the "real world"). Nietzsche did not like this. Look, I've got my copy of Twilight of the Idols right here. Get a load. In this book alone Kant is characterised as an "underhanded Christian", a "concept-cripple", a teacher of "nonsense", and so on. Remember that. It's very important that you remember! And also remember this: Kant's real/apparent distinction is necessarily a theory of consciousness: there is the conscious empirical "you", but there is an unknowable X that can never be an object of the senses, even though this X must exist for the empirical "you" to be possible. I like to call this X "The Knower", because "The Knower" rolls off the tongue more easily than "The Transcendental Subject", let's be honest.

Nietzsche, who does not believe in a "real" world and for whom only the "apparent" world counts for anything at all, proposes an evolutionary genesis of consciousness in Aphorism 354, Book V. It's a good theory. What's the point of consciousness when, as Nietzsche says, "we could in fact think, feel, will and... 'act' in every sense of the word" without consciousness ever being required? His answer is that consciousness is required only to solve the problem of communication: consciousness allows us to translate our unique, personal impulses, desires, grievances, etc. into objects of public discussion: "consciousness has developed only under the pressure of the need for communication." Nietzsche is insistent here: because we think using language, and because language is a system of signs aimed at social communication, consciousness is always-already communal. But there's a problem here. We tend to think of consciousness as self-awareness, but on this account the only thing we're aware of are the parts of ourselves that can be socially disclosed: "No matter how hard we try to understand ourselves as individuals... [we] will never bring into consciousness any more than what is non-individual in us..."

I honestly think that's very interesting. I think that it's Hegel's dialectic of recognition reheated in the microwave after 8 decades and given a couple shots of begrudging Darwinism, but I do think it's interesting. But put your nose into the air and breathe deeply. Do you detect a hint of Konigsberg? Listen closely. Do you hear Old Kant calling for coffee? Go outside. Touch grass. Destroy your SIM card and throw your phone into the river. Choose a direction - any direction - and walk without regret into the unknown. Do not stop until you find yourself reflected in the clear water. Strip naked. Gaze upon yourself and wonder if that Edenic innocence of Adam and Eve could ever return to us. Wonder what we lost when we took our steps out of Nature. Then ask yourself the following question, much as I did: "What the fuck?"

Seriously. So Kant says there's The Knower, who does all the unconscious world-building, and there's The Empirical Self, which is you, and you can't know anything about The Knower or express anything about him. But Nietzsche says that's a load of Christian-socialist bullshit. Nietzsche knows the truth, which is that there's An Individual Self, who does all the unconscious world-building, and there's The Communal Self, which is you, and you can't know anything about The Individual Self or express anything about him.

Poor Kant!

On Taking Nietzsche Out of Context

The Walrus Man tires me, dear reader. Oh! How he exhausts me! Something like 70 years of post-Nazi reinterpretation of Nietzsche has transformed his corpus into a true FREAK of nature. Nietzsche had to be rescued from his reputation as the Nazi philosopher - but to achieve this feat, all Nietzschean negativity was transferred into his sister and driven over the edge of a cliff like that herd of pigs Jesus killed in Mark 5:1-20. Now you can't even say, "Nietzsche said some crazy shit about slavery, huh?" without some pencilneck interjecting: "Actually, all he meant was follow your dreams!"

Nietzsche didn't help matters either. Look at Aphorism 381, Book V: "We not only want to be understood when we write, but also just as surely not to be understood."

How interesting. What do you say to that, Aphorism 173, Book II? "Whoever knows that he is profound strives for clarity; whoever would like the crowd to think he is profound strives for obscurity."

A 5 year gap is a long time for anyone, let alone Nietzsche, so perhaps that accounts for the difference in opinion. But maybe, tantalisingly, this is a test! Are you intelligent enough to decode Nietzsche's real meaning? Are you a supple and sophisticated enough thinker to tell when he does and does not mean what he says? Can you handle multiplicity? Does irony scare you? Do you know when not wanting to be understood is a sign of GOOD BREEDING, and when it's a sign of THE RABBLE? Are you THE RABBLE? You wouldn't want to be THE RABBLE, would you?

Not Gay Enough, Eh?

My copy of this book is called The Joyous Science, but I've always known of this book as The Gay Science. The translator, R. Kevin Hill, figured "gay" would be a bit confusing these days, which is why I prefer to stay in the closet and use "gay" only to describe one of my rare good moods. But I digress.

Nietzsche is a bit like Mishima for me in that I imagine if I met him I'd be unable to contain my amusement at their hyper-masculine postering in spite of their obvious frailty. Occasionally, though, in the parts of this book written in 1882, something genuinely moving pokes through. From Aphorism 16, Book I:

"There was a time in our lives when we had grown so close to one another in friendship and brotherhood that nothing seemed to stand between us except this little footbridge. Just as you were about to step upon it, I asked you: ‘Do you want to cross this bridge to me?� But then you no longer wanted to, and when I asked you again, you fell silent. Since then mountains and torrents and all that divides and estranges have come between us, and even if we wanted to be reconciled with one another, it was no longer possible. However, when you think back to that little footbridge, you are at a loss for words � but filled with tears and wonder."

This punches me in the gut every time I read it. Boy, have I felt this feeling, and it was completely straight, leave me alone. But this is a remarkable passage, isn't it? This is Nietzsche, the arch-bastard of misogyny and proto-fascism, and yet � this pain, this weeping heart, this stone sinking in my throat, this slow death of hope. I see Nietzsche there on one side of the footbridge, his hand outstretched. Perhaps it is raining. A moment's passing, and Nietzsche's hand closes. The Walrus Man drops his arm. His moustache conceals the twitching corners of his mouth, but that tall, broad forehead keeps no secrets. This moment of rejection, heartbreak, devastating loss - the Walrus Man chose to immortalise this, to etch his pain into eternity, to make a graven image of his defeat in that most human of endeavours: love. And what produces the desire to immortalise? Aphorism 370, Book V: "This desire can also be the expression of the tyrannical will of someone who undergoes great suffering, struggles and torture, someone who would make what is most personal, individual and intimate, what is actually idiosyncratic about his suffering, into a binding law and constraint and thereby take his revenge upon all things, so to speak, stamping and branding them with his own image, the image of his own torment."

Spinoza said it best, didn't he? Great hatreds follow great loves.

Death, the Immobile Motor

A bone to the "all he meant was follow your dreams" crowd: I like 1882 Nietzsche (Books I through IV) a lot. I even think he and I could have been friends if he would stop scaring the hoes and referring to everything he doesn't like as Chinese/Jewish/Oriental/Indian/feminine/etc. In fact, before I get to the point of this section, I'd like to note the absurd juxtaposition of aphorisms 141 and 142.

Aphorism 141, in brief: "What? A God who loves men provided they believe in Him, and who casts terrible glances and hurls terrible threats at anyone who does not believe in this love? ...How terribly Oriental it all is!"

Got it. The problem with Christianity is it isn't European enough. Take it away, Aphorism 142! "Buddha says: ‘Do not flatter your benefactor!� Repeat this saying in a Christian church � and it immediately cleanses the air of everything Christian."

You might say this is deliberate ironic juxtaposition, but you are forgetting that (1) I am entirely without a sense of humour, and (2) I am behind you with a katana saying "Nothing personnel," and driving its perfect blade directly through your lumbar spine, automatically scoring critical damage that kills you instantly. Problem? Should have leveled vigor, kid.

Now where was I? Yes, Death, the Immobile Motor. Sick heading, right? I stole it from Deleuze. Aphorism 26 begins thus: "To live � that means: to continually slough off something of ourselves that wants to die..." This is what I came here for. An insight that I've already seen before in Spinoza and Whitman but expressed with just that extra bit of spice and beauty. Yes, there are parts of me that are exhausted, parts that have run their course, that have achieved their ambitions or been frustrated in their aims - they long to die, to cede to new forces eager to test their mettle in this world. That is life and will-to-power! I hear you Walrus Man! Oh? You had something else to say?

"...to live � that means: to be cruel and implacable to all that is old and feeble in us, and not only in us. To live � then doesn’t that mean: to be without piety towards the dying, the wretched and the old? Always being a murderer? And yet old Moses said: ‘Thou shall not kill!�"

I stay my hand, and resist the low-hanging fruit. Do you know what this could mean? Sometimes, the Walrus Man isn't just being an edgelord. To be a true friend to others, we must be ruthless towards what longs to die in them too. Their weaknesses, their failings, their delayed ambitions. And I think of the times my friends have been true to me, and when I have been true to them, and I suppose we have been murderers in a fashion, and in that fashion we did far more good than harm. And if life proceeds by way of death, spinning around that immobile motor, then perhaps we underestimate the value of negativity, perhaps we are rarely ever immoral enough. . . .

Sometimes You Can't Just Blame His Sister

So about Elizabeth Förster-Nietzsche. If you've heard anything about her, you've probably heard she's his "Nazi sister" who doctored a bunch of his writings to make them compatible with National Socialist doctrine. To be fair, Elizabeth did spend a little bit of time on a doomed PURE ARYAN COLONY and she did join a nationalist party in 1918. So that's pretty damning. In addition, she was instrumental in the publication of The Will to Power as executor of Nietzsche's estate. I've heard that the version she had published had a bunch of stuff changed to make it more amenable to German nationalist tastes, which makes sense, since Nietzsche hated German nationalism. He even has an aphorism in this book (377, Book V) where he rages against nationalism and "race-hatred" and the vanity of the German spirit. So case closed, right? Nietzsche wasn't a Nazi in 1887, therefore the only reason you'd think there's anything fascist about Nietzsche is that you're either a moron or you've been tricked by his sister.

Unfortunately, I've been reading Nietzsche for half my life and I've read him well, which means I foremost wish to be honest about him. Fervent Nietzsche apologists are like the undesireable disciples he discusses in Aphorism 32: “One cannot say no to anything, and the other wants to water everything down.� Eerily prescient: the right-wing readers of the Walrus Man know to take him seriously (and reject what they see as his nonsense about rejecting nationalism) and the left-wing readers are almost all just embarassing. For instance, why does Nietzsche reject nationalism? Is it...

A) Because nationalism is very naughty and mean and it gets people killed and stuff?
B) Because nationalism and national self-determination historically go together, and Nietzsche saw the latter as an inevitable vector of democracy, which Nietzsche despised because he believed it brought the few great men of culture down to the level of the mob and introduced "equal rights" and "modern ideas" into a society that could instead seize the opportunity to abandon Christian ethics and return to the warrior-aristocrat model of ancient civilisation?

If you choose A, well - the thing where I kill you with a katana again.

Likewise Nietzsche's dismissal of "race-hatred" is not a dismissal of racism. Nietzsche was very racist: he believed in different European races and believed they had different traits and qualities that inhered in the blood. It's just that he thought the answer was race-mixing (yes, even with "the Jews") and pan-European empire. Nietzsche thought nationalism was nothing other than resentment and slave morality: why segregate and quarantine the people of Europe just to protect the living stands of the mob? Why not, instead, bring together Europe's true elite, its would-be ruling nobility, and interbreed them to create a class that is truly superior - the warrior strength of Europe and the intelligence and cunning of the Jews - and institute "a new social order", even "a new slavery"? As he says in Beyond Good and Evil: "The time for petty politics is over."

Be honest, now. Is it really so hard to believe that a Nazi could read this man, see the shit about Jews running the European press (aphorism 361), or about the natural inequality of men and women, or how everything humane and socialist in the world is actually oriental and foreign, and think to himself: "Man, this guy was right about everything! But that European empire stuff is obviously just unrealistic." Is he really misreading anything?

Epilogue

I've spent this review shitting all over Nietzsche. Called him a proto-fascist, implied he's a plagiarist, mocked him for being hoeless, etc. So why 5 stars?

Well, you see, there are a lot of people happy to uncritically praise the Walrus Man. I think that does him a disservice. I think he wanted enemies, he wanted harsh replies and criticism. What other reason could he possibly have for being such an insufferable bastard? I think philosophy is too often bloodless and dull. It probably must be that way - but it is still too often. I think Nietzsche is perennial, but seasonal - one reads him as a gateway to philosophy, but one must also return to him later, when you can see how wrong he is about almost everything, but wrong in ways that lighten the spirit, that make thinking in opposition fun, that make opposition itself a moment of positivity and not ressentiment.

This really may be his best book.]]> 4.25 1882 The Joyous Science (Penguin Classics)
author: Friedrich Nietzsche
name: M
average rating: 4.25
book published: 1882
rating: 5
read at:
date added: 2024/08/25
shelves: to-read
review:
"Bumpin' that, bumpin' that, bumpin' that, bumpin' that
Bumpin' that, bumpin' that, bumpin' that, bumpin' that"
� Charli XCX, 365

Let me begin by saying this book reaches heights of preposterousness, mediocrity, and absurdity that I didn't know Nietzsche was capable of � and I've had the displeasure of reading Twilight of the Idols / The Anti-Christ. It must be noted, though, that the worst of this book is highly concentrated in its 5th part, which was added in 1887 for the second edition. By 1887, Nietzsche was fully in his late period, characterised by immense productivity, a voluptuousness of style, and an increasingly excited mentality that would infuse his most famous works with incredible vigour before his mind completely snapped in 1889. Therefore, the first four parts of The Joyous Science (originally published in 1882) seem relatively sober looking back, but make no mistake, there's still plenty in all five parts to laugh at, be frustrated by, to ponder, to rant at one's friends about, and so on.

The style of the book is aphoristic, though certain centres of gravity prevail at times (Book II, for example, mainly discusses women and the arts, and is consequently of almost no value). In the interests of maintaining my own sanity then, I'll be choosing the themes and ideas that seemed to be of the most interest to the Walrus Man, and discussing them relatively independently of each other. This is a review of Nietzsche, though, so I make no apologies if anything leaks.

Nietzsche's Terrible, Horrible, No Good, Very Bad Critique of Immanuel Kant

Poor Kant. Little read, often discussed. This is his fault for being a truly awful writer. How could he possibly contend with Nietzsche, one of the best prose stylists in philosophy? Unfortunately this means that any insight that is properly and thoroughly Kantian can (and will) be passed off as Nietzsche's own, even as he takes any opportunity he can to mock the "Chinaman of Königsberg" (for Germans of a certain historical period, accusing your philosophical opponents of being Chinese or Indian was devastating). Allow me, dear reader, to make this concrete by weaving a tale of almost inexplicable hypocrisy:

Kant's critical philosophy posited a distinction between things as they are for us (the "apparent world" of our senses) and the way things really are "in themselves" (the "transcendental object = X", "things-in-themselves", the "real world"). Nietzsche did not like this. Look, I've got my copy of Twilight of the Idols right here. Get a load. In this book alone Kant is characterised as an "underhanded Christian", a "concept-cripple", a teacher of "nonsense", and so on. Remember that. It's very important that you remember! And also remember this: Kant's real/apparent distinction is necessarily a theory of consciousness: there is the conscious empirical "you", but there is an unknowable X that can never be an object of the senses, even though this X must exist for the empirical "you" to be possible. I like to call this X "The Knower", because "The Knower" rolls off the tongue more easily than "The Transcendental Subject", let's be honest.

Nietzsche, who does not believe in a "real" world and for whom only the "apparent" world counts for anything at all, proposes an evolutionary genesis of consciousness in Aphorism 354, Book V. It's a good theory. What's the point of consciousness when, as Nietzsche says, "we could in fact think, feel, will and... 'act' in every sense of the word" without consciousness ever being required? His answer is that consciousness is required only to solve the problem of communication: consciousness allows us to translate our unique, personal impulses, desires, grievances, etc. into objects of public discussion: "consciousness has developed only under the pressure of the need for communication." Nietzsche is insistent here: because we think using language, and because language is a system of signs aimed at social communication, consciousness is always-already communal. But there's a problem here. We tend to think of consciousness as self-awareness, but on this account the only thing we're aware of are the parts of ourselves that can be socially disclosed: "No matter how hard we try to understand ourselves as individuals... [we] will never bring into consciousness any more than what is non-individual in us..."

I honestly think that's very interesting. I think that it's Hegel's dialectic of recognition reheated in the microwave after 8 decades and given a couple shots of begrudging Darwinism, but I do think it's interesting. But put your nose into the air and breathe deeply. Do you detect a hint of Konigsberg? Listen closely. Do you hear Old Kant calling for coffee? Go outside. Touch grass. Destroy your SIM card and throw your phone into the river. Choose a direction - any direction - and walk without regret into the unknown. Do not stop until you find yourself reflected in the clear water. Strip naked. Gaze upon yourself and wonder if that Edenic innocence of Adam and Eve could ever return to us. Wonder what we lost when we took our steps out of Nature. Then ask yourself the following question, much as I did: "What the fuck?"

Seriously. So Kant says there's The Knower, who does all the unconscious world-building, and there's The Empirical Self, which is you, and you can't know anything about The Knower or express anything about him. But Nietzsche says that's a load of Christian-socialist bullshit. Nietzsche knows the truth, which is that there's An Individual Self, who does all the unconscious world-building, and there's The Communal Self, which is you, and you can't know anything about The Individual Self or express anything about him.

Poor Kant!

On Taking Nietzsche Out of Context

The Walrus Man tires me, dear reader. Oh! How he exhausts me! Something like 70 years of post-Nazi reinterpretation of Nietzsche has transformed his corpus into a true FREAK of nature. Nietzsche had to be rescued from his reputation as the Nazi philosopher - but to achieve this feat, all Nietzschean negativity was transferred into his sister and driven over the edge of a cliff like that herd of pigs Jesus killed in Mark 5:1-20. Now you can't even say, "Nietzsche said some crazy shit about slavery, huh?" without some pencilneck interjecting: "Actually, all he meant was follow your dreams!"

Nietzsche didn't help matters either. Look at Aphorism 381, Book V: "We not only want to be understood when we write, but also just as surely not to be understood."

How interesting. What do you say to that, Aphorism 173, Book II? "Whoever knows that he is profound strives for clarity; whoever would like the crowd to think he is profound strives for obscurity."

A 5 year gap is a long time for anyone, let alone Nietzsche, so perhaps that accounts for the difference in opinion. But maybe, tantalisingly, this is a test! Are you intelligent enough to decode Nietzsche's real meaning? Are you a supple and sophisticated enough thinker to tell when he does and does not mean what he says? Can you handle multiplicity? Does irony scare you? Do you know when not wanting to be understood is a sign of GOOD BREEDING, and when it's a sign of THE RABBLE? Are you THE RABBLE? You wouldn't want to be THE RABBLE, would you?

Not Gay Enough, Eh?

My copy of this book is called The Joyous Science, but I've always known of this book as The Gay Science. The translator, R. Kevin Hill, figured "gay" would be a bit confusing these days, which is why I prefer to stay in the closet and use "gay" only to describe one of my rare good moods. But I digress.

Nietzsche is a bit like Mishima for me in that I imagine if I met him I'd be unable to contain my amusement at their hyper-masculine postering in spite of their obvious frailty. Occasionally, though, in the parts of this book written in 1882, something genuinely moving pokes through. From Aphorism 16, Book I:

"There was a time in our lives when we had grown so close to one another in friendship and brotherhood that nothing seemed to stand between us except this little footbridge. Just as you were about to step upon it, I asked you: ‘Do you want to cross this bridge to me?� But then you no longer wanted to, and when I asked you again, you fell silent. Since then mountains and torrents and all that divides and estranges have come between us, and even if we wanted to be reconciled with one another, it was no longer possible. However, when you think back to that little footbridge, you are at a loss for words � but filled with tears and wonder."

This punches me in the gut every time I read it. Boy, have I felt this feeling, and it was completely straight, leave me alone. But this is a remarkable passage, isn't it? This is Nietzsche, the arch-bastard of misogyny and proto-fascism, and yet � this pain, this weeping heart, this stone sinking in my throat, this slow death of hope. I see Nietzsche there on one side of the footbridge, his hand outstretched. Perhaps it is raining. A moment's passing, and Nietzsche's hand closes. The Walrus Man drops his arm. His moustache conceals the twitching corners of his mouth, but that tall, broad forehead keeps no secrets. This moment of rejection, heartbreak, devastating loss - the Walrus Man chose to immortalise this, to etch his pain into eternity, to make a graven image of his defeat in that most human of endeavours: love. And what produces the desire to immortalise? Aphorism 370, Book V: "This desire can also be the expression of the tyrannical will of someone who undergoes great suffering, struggles and torture, someone who would make what is most personal, individual and intimate, what is actually idiosyncratic about his suffering, into a binding law and constraint and thereby take his revenge upon all things, so to speak, stamping and branding them with his own image, the image of his own torment."

Spinoza said it best, didn't he? Great hatreds follow great loves.

Death, the Immobile Motor

A bone to the "all he meant was follow your dreams" crowd: I like 1882 Nietzsche (Books I through IV) a lot. I even think he and I could have been friends if he would stop scaring the hoes and referring to everything he doesn't like as Chinese/Jewish/Oriental/Indian/feminine/etc. In fact, before I get to the point of this section, I'd like to note the absurd juxtaposition of aphorisms 141 and 142.

Aphorism 141, in brief: "What? A God who loves men provided they believe in Him, and who casts terrible glances and hurls terrible threats at anyone who does not believe in this love? ...How terribly Oriental it all is!"

Got it. The problem with Christianity is it isn't European enough. Take it away, Aphorism 142! "Buddha says: ‘Do not flatter your benefactor!� Repeat this saying in a Christian church � and it immediately cleanses the air of everything Christian."

You might say this is deliberate ironic juxtaposition, but you are forgetting that (1) I am entirely without a sense of humour, and (2) I am behind you with a katana saying "Nothing personnel," and driving its perfect blade directly through your lumbar spine, automatically scoring critical damage that kills you instantly. Problem? Should have leveled vigor, kid.

Now where was I? Yes, Death, the Immobile Motor. Sick heading, right? I stole it from Deleuze. Aphorism 26 begins thus: "To live � that means: to continually slough off something of ourselves that wants to die..." This is what I came here for. An insight that I've already seen before in Spinoza and Whitman but expressed with just that extra bit of spice and beauty. Yes, there are parts of me that are exhausted, parts that have run their course, that have achieved their ambitions or been frustrated in their aims - they long to die, to cede to new forces eager to test their mettle in this world. That is life and will-to-power! I hear you Walrus Man! Oh? You had something else to say?

"...to live � that means: to be cruel and implacable to all that is old and feeble in us, and not only in us. To live � then doesn’t that mean: to be without piety towards the dying, the wretched and the old? Always being a murderer? And yet old Moses said: ‘Thou shall not kill!�"

I stay my hand, and resist the low-hanging fruit. Do you know what this could mean? Sometimes, the Walrus Man isn't just being an edgelord. To be a true friend to others, we must be ruthless towards what longs to die in them too. Their weaknesses, their failings, their delayed ambitions. And I think of the times my friends have been true to me, and when I have been true to them, and I suppose we have been murderers in a fashion, and in that fashion we did far more good than harm. And if life proceeds by way of death, spinning around that immobile motor, then perhaps we underestimate the value of negativity, perhaps we are rarely ever immoral enough. . . .

Sometimes You Can't Just Blame His Sister

So about Elizabeth Förster-Nietzsche. If you've heard anything about her, you've probably heard she's his "Nazi sister" who doctored a bunch of his writings to make them compatible with National Socialist doctrine. To be fair, Elizabeth did spend a little bit of time on a doomed PURE ARYAN COLONY and she did join a nationalist party in 1918. So that's pretty damning. In addition, she was instrumental in the publication of The Will to Power as executor of Nietzsche's estate. I've heard that the version she had published had a bunch of stuff changed to make it more amenable to German nationalist tastes, which makes sense, since Nietzsche hated German nationalism. He even has an aphorism in this book (377, Book V) where he rages against nationalism and "race-hatred" and the vanity of the German spirit. So case closed, right? Nietzsche wasn't a Nazi in 1887, therefore the only reason you'd think there's anything fascist about Nietzsche is that you're either a moron or you've been tricked by his sister.

Unfortunately, I've been reading Nietzsche for half my life and I've read him well, which means I foremost wish to be honest about him. Fervent Nietzsche apologists are like the undesireable disciples he discusses in Aphorism 32: “One cannot say no to anything, and the other wants to water everything down.� Eerily prescient: the right-wing readers of the Walrus Man know to take him seriously (and reject what they see as his nonsense about rejecting nationalism) and the left-wing readers are almost all just embarassing. For instance, why does Nietzsche reject nationalism? Is it...

A) Because nationalism is very naughty and mean and it gets people killed and stuff?
B) Because nationalism and national self-determination historically go together, and Nietzsche saw the latter as an inevitable vector of democracy, which Nietzsche despised because he believed it brought the few great men of culture down to the level of the mob and introduced "equal rights" and "modern ideas" into a society that could instead seize the opportunity to abandon Christian ethics and return to the warrior-aristocrat model of ancient civilisation?

If you choose A, well - the thing where I kill you with a katana again.

Likewise Nietzsche's dismissal of "race-hatred" is not a dismissal of racism. Nietzsche was very racist: he believed in different European races and believed they had different traits and qualities that inhered in the blood. It's just that he thought the answer was race-mixing (yes, even with "the Jews") and pan-European empire. Nietzsche thought nationalism was nothing other than resentment and slave morality: why segregate and quarantine the people of Europe just to protect the living stands of the mob? Why not, instead, bring together Europe's true elite, its would-be ruling nobility, and interbreed them to create a class that is truly superior - the warrior strength of Europe and the intelligence and cunning of the Jews - and institute "a new social order", even "a new slavery"? As he says in Beyond Good and Evil: "The time for petty politics is over."

Be honest, now. Is it really so hard to believe that a Nazi could read this man, see the shit about Jews running the European press (aphorism 361), or about the natural inequality of men and women, or how everything humane and socialist in the world is actually oriental and foreign, and think to himself: "Man, this guy was right about everything! But that European empire stuff is obviously just unrealistic." Is he really misreading anything?

Epilogue

I've spent this review shitting all over Nietzsche. Called him a proto-fascist, implied he's a plagiarist, mocked him for being hoeless, etc. So why 5 stars?

Well, you see, there are a lot of people happy to uncritically praise the Walrus Man. I think that does him a disservice. I think he wanted enemies, he wanted harsh replies and criticism. What other reason could he possibly have for being such an insufferable bastard? I think philosophy is too often bloodless and dull. It probably must be that way - but it is still too often. I think Nietzsche is perennial, but seasonal - one reads him as a gateway to philosophy, but one must also return to him later, when you can see how wrong he is about almost everything, but wrong in ways that lighten the spirit, that make thinking in opposition fun, that make opposition itself a moment of positivity and not ressentiment.

This really may be his best book.
]]> Sense and Sensibility 6147464 Alternate covers for this ISBN can be found here and here.
Marianne Dashwood wears her heart on her sleeve, and when she falls in love with the dashing but unsuitable John Willoughby she ignores her sister Elinor's warning that her impulsive behaviour leaves her open to gossip and innuendo. Meanwhile Elinor, always sensitive to social convention, is struggling to conceal her own romantic disappointment, even from those closest to her. Through their parallel experience of love - and its threatened loss - the sisters learn that sense must mix with sensibility if they are to find personal happiness in a society where status and money govern the rules of love.]]> 409 Jane Austen 0141040378 M 0 currently-reading 4.06 1811 Sense and Sensibility
author: Jane Austen
name: M
average rating: 4.06
book published: 1811
rating: 0
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date added: 2024/08/25
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]]> <![CDATA[The Ones Who Walk Away from Omelas]]> 92625 Some inhabitants of a peaceful kingdom cannot tolerate the act of cruelty that underlies its happiness.

The story 'Omelas" was first published in 'New Dimensions 3' (1973), a hard-cover science fiction anthology edited by Robert Silverberg, in October 1973, and the following year it won the prestigious Hugo Award for best short story.

The work was subsequently printed in Le Guin's short story collection 'The Wind's Twelve Quarters' (1975).

Ursula K Le Guin (1929�2018) was an American writer who published twenty-two novels, eleven volumes of short stories, four collections of essays, twelve books for children, six volumes of poetry & four of translation, and has received many awards: Hugo, Nebula, National Book Award, PEN-Malamud, and more. She was known for her treatment of gender ('The Left Hand of Darkness' (1969), 'The Matter of Seggri' (1994)), political systems ('The Telling' (2000), 'The Dispossessed' (1974)) and difference/otherness in any other form.]]> 32 Ursula K. Le Guin 0886825016 M 0
Meanwhile, outside the kid’s awesome multi-story mansion, every other living human on Earth is being tortured 24/7. They wake up in cramped conditions, commute through polluted streets to ugly offices illuminated with artificial light, or descend into the depths of the earth to extract materials they will never own, or simply expire slowly in existences of meaningless alienation. For their “entertainment� they bicker pointlessly with one another, poison themselves in great moving crowds, or simply stare into a little box until their eyes redden and sleep takes them unannounced into an empty darkness. Even when death comes, the weight of karmic debt keeps these beings tethered to the earth, chasing them through myriad rebirths, eternally perhaps, save for a chance encounter with the conditions of a possible enlightenment and escape from the whole hellish cycle.

Now THAT would be a scary story!]]> 4.38 1973 The Ones Who Walk Away from Omelas
author: Ursula K. Le Guin
name: M
average rating: 4.38
book published: 1973
rating: 0
read at: 2024/08/13
date added: 2024/08/12
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Imagine the inverse utopia: there’s a town where one little kid is just having a fucking awesome time. Bedtime? Whenever they want. Chicken nuggets? Hell yeah. School? It’s out for the summer � and summer never ends in this utopia!

Meanwhile, outside the kid’s awesome multi-story mansion, every other living human on Earth is being tortured 24/7. They wake up in cramped conditions, commute through polluted streets to ugly offices illuminated with artificial light, or descend into the depths of the earth to extract materials they will never own, or simply expire slowly in existences of meaningless alienation. For their “entertainment� they bicker pointlessly with one another, poison themselves in great moving crowds, or simply stare into a little box until their eyes redden and sleep takes them unannounced into an empty darkness. Even when death comes, the weight of karmic debt keeps these beings tethered to the earth, chasing them through myriad rebirths, eternally perhaps, save for a chance encounter with the conditions of a possible enlightenment and escape from the whole hellish cycle.

Now THAT would be a scary story!
]]> <![CDATA[Reality Switch Technologies: Psychedelics as Tools for the Discovery and Exploration of New Worlds]]> 62927799 From LSD to magic mushrooms to DMT to Salvia divinorum, psychedelics are used across the globe to stimulate the brain and change the nature of the subjective world. In sufficient doses, these molecules have the potential, not only to alter the structure of the normal waking world, but to replace it entirely - to hurl the tripper into fantastical realms of immense complexity and strangeness, bursting with extraordinary ecologies of apparently intelligent and communicative beings. Whilst these effects seem almost impossible to comprehend, let alone explain, as our understanding the brain's ability to construct our model of reality in normal waking life deepens, the mechanism by which psychedelic molecules perturb its world-building machinery such that entirely novel and unimaginably bizarre worlds emerge begins to reveal itself.
Chemical pharmacologist and neurobiologist Dr. Andrew R. Gallimore (author of Alien Information Psychedelic Drug Technologies and the Cosmic Game) explains in unprecedented depth and detail how psychedelic molecules interface with the human brain, alter the structure and dynamics of the experienced world, and rapidly and efficiently switch the brain's reality channel, opening up a vast number of alternate worlds for discovery and exploration. Ultimately, using both molecular and post-molecular technologies, humans will be able to enter countless different worlds at will, to establish communication with the beings resident therein, and to engineer reality itself.]]> 336 Andrew R Gallimore 1739110102 M 0 to-read 4.67 Reality Switch Technologies: Psychedelics as Tools for the Discovery and Exploration of New Worlds
author: Andrew R Gallimore
name: M
average rating: 4.67
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date added: 2024/03/05
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]]> <![CDATA[Drive Your Plow Over the Bones of the Dead]]> 36609308 270 Olga Tokarczuk 1910695718 M 0 currently-reading 4.15 2009 Drive Your Plow Over the Bones of the Dead
author: Olga Tokarczuk
name: M
average rating: 4.15
book published: 2009
rating: 0
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date added: 2024/02/12
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]]> <![CDATA[Emancipation After Hegel: Achieving a Contradictory Revolution]]> 42801015
In this book, Todd McGowan offers us a Hegel for the twenty-first century. Simultaneously an introduction to Hegel and a fundamental reimagining of Hegel’s project, Emancipation After Hegel presents a radical Hegel who speaks to a world overwhelmed by right-wing populism, authoritarianism, neoliberalism, and economic inequalities. McGowan argues that the revolutionary core of Hegel’s thought is contradiction. He reveals that contradiction is inexorable and that we must attempt to sustain it rather than overcoming it or dismissing it as a logical failure. McGowan contends that Hegel’s notion of contradiction, when applied to contemporary problems, challenges any assertion of unitary identity as every identity is in tension with itself and dependent on others. An accessible and compelling reinterpretation of an often-misunderstood thinker, this book shows us a way forward to a new politics of emancipation as we reconcile ourselves to the inevitability of contradiction and find solidarity in not belonging.]]> 288 Todd McGowan 0231192703 M 0 to-read 4.37 Emancipation After Hegel: Achieving a Contradictory Revolution
author: Todd McGowan
name: M
average rating: 4.37
book published:
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date added: 2024/02/12
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]]> <![CDATA[Hegel, Haiti, and Universal History (Illuminations, 74)]]> 5936134
Historicizing the thought of Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel and the actions taken in the Haitian Revolution, Buck-Morss examines the startling connections between the two and challenges us to widen the boundaries of our historical imagination. She finds that it is in the discontinuities of historical flow, the edges of human experience, and the unexpected linkages between cultures that the possibility to transcend limits is discovered. It is these flashes of clarity that open the potential for understanding in spite of cultural differences. What Buck-Morss proposes amounts to a “new humanism,� one that goes beyond the usual ideological implications of such a phrase to embrace a radical neutrality that insists on the permeability of the space between opposing sides and as it reaches for a common humanity.]]> 160 Susan Buck-Morss 082295978X M 0 to-read 3.92 2005 Hegel, Haiti, and Universal History (Illuminations, 74)
author: Susan Buck-Morss
name: M
average rating: 3.92
book published: 2005
rating: 0
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]]> The Phenomenology of Spirit 36794176 Phenomenology of Spirit, is one of the great works of philosophy. It remains, however, one of the most challenging and mysterious books ever written. Michael Inwood presents this central work to the modern reader in an intelligible and accurate new translation. This translation attempts to convey, as accurately as possible, the subtle nuances of the original German text. Inwood also provides a detailed commentary that explains what Hegel is saying at each stage of his argument and also discusses the philosophical issues it raises. This volume will therefore prove invaluable to those who want to get to grips with Hegel's thought processes and to follow his complex argument.
]]> 544 Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel 0198790627 M 0 currently-reading 4.50 1807 The Phenomenology of Spirit
author: Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel
name: M
average rating: 4.50
book published: 1807
rating: 0
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]]> The Master and Margarita 56969549
An audacious revision of the stories of Faust and Pontius Pilate, The Master and Margarita is recognized as one of the essential classics of modern Russian literature. The novel’s vision of Soviet life in the 1930s is so ferociously accurate that it could not be published during its author’s lifetime and appeared only in a censored edition in the 1960s. Its truths are so enduring that its language has become part of the common Russian speech.

One hot spring, the devil arrives in Moscow, accompanied by a retinue that includes a beautiful naked witch and an immense talking black cat with a fondness for chess and vodka. The visitors quickly wreak havoc in a city that refuses to believe in either God or Satan. But they also bring peace to two unhappy one is the Master, a writer pilloried for daring to write a novel about Christ and Pontius Pilate; the other is Margarita, who loves the Master so deeply that she is willing to literally go to hell for him.

What ensues is a novel of inexhaustible energy, humor, and philosophical depth, a work whose nuances splendidly emerge in Diana Burgin and Katherine Tiernan O’Connor’s superb English translation, with an afterword and extensive commentary by Ellendea Proffer Teasley.]]> 432 Mikhail Bulgakov 1419756508 M 0 to-read 4.19 1967 The Master and Margarita
author: Mikhail Bulgakov
name: M
average rating: 4.19
book published: 1967
rating: 0
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date added: 2024/01/23
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]]> <![CDATA[The Mercies: The Bestselling Richard and Judy Book Club Pick]]> 58511465 The storm comes in like a finger snap . . .
1617. The sea around the remote Norwegian island of Vardø is thrown into a vicious storm. A young woman, Maren, watches as the men of the island, out fishing, perish in an instant.
Vardø is now a place of women.
Eighteen months later, a sinister figure arrives. Absalom Cornet has been summoned to bring the women of the island to heel. With him travels his young wife, Ursa. In her new home, and in Maren, Ursa encounters something she has never seen before: independent women. But where Ursa finds happiness, even love, Absalom sees only a place flooded with a terrible evil, one he must root out at all costs . . .]]> 341 Kiran Millwood Hargrave 1529075076 M 0 to-read 4.01 2020 The Mercies: The Bestselling Richard and Judy Book Club Pick
author: Kiran Millwood Hargrave
name: M
average rating: 4.01
book published: 2020
rating: 0
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date added: 2024/01/23
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]]> Notes on Suicide 26845643 92 Simon Critchley 1910695068 M 3
This isn't a great work, or even a pessimistic work, and I suppose it never claims to be one. I just jumped at the title "Notes on Suicide" and bought it without really reading more than a couple pages past the introduction. But this also isn't a bad work, just shallow. Focus isn't sustained for long enough on any topic to make an impression, which is a shame, because Critchley is a good writer, and one gets the impression that we're only getting a small excerpt of thoughts he must have been ruminating on for a while as he wrote from his seclusion by the North Sea.

The book ends with the exhortation (paraphrased): "Don't kill yourself. Love deeply instead!" and this point is made mainly by way of reference to Virginia Woolf. (Details regarding Woolf's demise are noted but quickly brushed over.) I won't lie to you, dear reader, I wasn't going to kill myself even if the book told me to. The author himself rather sheepishly noted in his later preface that he felt he'd rushed the ending but I simply think it was unnecessary. These are "Notes on Suicide", not "Why You Shouldn't Kill Yourself", and I'd have much rather hear him expand on the various forms of suicidal consciousness as revealed by the notes that are left behind.]]> 3.78 2015 Notes on Suicide
author: Simon Critchley
name: M
average rating: 3.78
book published: 2015
rating: 3
read at: 2024/01/17
date added: 2024/01/18
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Great works of philosophical pessimism can be broadly divided into two camps: the diabolically funny (think Cioran) or the hyperbolically dark (Ligotti, Zapffe). These aren't necessarily mutually exclusive, but one drive tends to rule a pessimist: spleen in the face of a raw deal, or laughter in defiance of an unwanted existence. This is what gives the genre its therapeutic appeal to me: either way, one can let off some steam when being alive is not alright.

This isn't a great work, or even a pessimistic work, and I suppose it never claims to be one. I just jumped at the title "Notes on Suicide" and bought it without really reading more than a couple pages past the introduction. But this also isn't a bad work, just shallow. Focus isn't sustained for long enough on any topic to make an impression, which is a shame, because Critchley is a good writer, and one gets the impression that we're only getting a small excerpt of thoughts he must have been ruminating on for a while as he wrote from his seclusion by the North Sea.

The book ends with the exhortation (paraphrased): "Don't kill yourself. Love deeply instead!" and this point is made mainly by way of reference to Virginia Woolf. (Details regarding Woolf's demise are noted but quickly brushed over.) I won't lie to you, dear reader, I wasn't going to kill myself even if the book told me to. The author himself rather sheepishly noted in his later preface that he felt he'd rushed the ending but I simply think it was unnecessary. These are "Notes on Suicide", not "Why You Shouldn't Kill Yourself", and I'd have much rather hear him expand on the various forms of suicidal consciousness as revealed by the notes that are left behind.
]]> <![CDATA[Different: Gender Through the Eyes of a Primatologist]]> 58085267 New York Times best-selling author and world-renowned primatologist Frans de Waal explores sex and gender in both humans and other animals.

Though many scholars now argue that gender differences are purely a product of socialization, primatologist Frans de Waal illustrates in Different the scientific, evolutionary basis for gender differences in humans, drawing on his decades of experience working with our closest ape relatives: chimpanzees and bonobos. De Waal illuminates their behavioral and biological differences, and compares and contrasts them with human behavior: male domination and territoriality in chimpanzees and the female-led pacific society of bonobos.

In his classic conversational style and a narrative rich in anecdotes and wry observations, de Waal tackles topics including gender identity, sexuality, gender-based violence, same-sex rivalry, homosexuality, friendship, and nurturance. He reveals how evolutionary biology can inform a more nuanced—and equitable—cultural understanding of gender. Ultimately, he argues, our two nearest primate relatives are equally close to us, and equally relevant. Considering all available evidence, we can learn much about ourselves and embrace our similarities as well as our differences.]]> 408 Frans de Waal 1324007109 M 0 to-read 4.14 2022 Different: Gender Through the Eyes of a Primatologist
author: Frans de Waal
name: M
average rating: 4.14
book published: 2022
rating: 0
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]]> <![CDATA[The Waste Land and Other Writings]]> 34082 Also includes Prufrock and Other Observations, Poems (1920), and The Sacred Wood
Introduction by Mary Karr

First published in 1922, “The Waste Land,� T. S. Eliot’s masterpiece, is not only one of the key works of modernism but also one of the greatest poetic achievements of the twentieth century. A richly allusive pilgrimage of spiritual and psychological torment and redemption, Eliot’s poem exerted a revolutionary influence on his contemporaries, summoning forth a potent new poetic language. As Kenneth Rexroth wrote, Eliot “articulated the mind of an epoch in words that seemed its most natural expression.� As commanding as his verse, Eliot’s criticism also transformed twentieth-century letters, and this Modern Library edition includes a selection of Eliot’s most important essays.]]> 272 T.S. Eliot 0375759344 M 0 to-read 4.21 1922 The Waste Land and Other Writings
author: T.S. Eliot
name: M
average rating: 4.21
book published: 1922
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]]> The Will to Power 31277752 New to Penguin Classics, The Will to Power contains some of Nietzsche's most fascinating and combative writings on nihilism, metaphysics and the future of Europe.

Assembled by Nietzsche's sister after his death, The Will to Power is a collection of the philosopher's reflections and theories taken from his unpublished notebooks. Covering topics such as nihilism, Christianity, morality and the famous 'will to power', the book was controversially presented as Nietzsche's all-but-completed magnum opus containing his philosophical system. Including some of his most interesting metaphysical and epistemological thoughts, as well as some of his most disturbing ethical and political comments, the book would prove to have a significant influence on Nietzsche's contentious reception in the twentieth century.]]> 648 Friedrich Nietzsche 0141195355 M 0 currently-reading 4.09 1901 The Will to Power
author: Friedrich Nietzsche
name: M
average rating: 4.09
book published: 1901
rating: 0
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]]> <![CDATA[Dialectic of Enlightenment: Philosophical Fragments]]> 85812 Dialectic of Enlightenment is undoubtedly the most influential publication of the Frankfurt School of Critical Theory. Written during the Second World War and circulated privately, it appeared in a printed edition in Amsterdam in 1947. "What we had set out to do," the authors write in the Preface, "was nothing less than to explain why humanity, instead of entering a truly human state, is sinking into a new kind of barbarism."

Yet the work goes far beyond a mere critique of contemporary events. Historically remote developments, indeed, the birth of Western history and of subjectivity itself out of the struggle against natural forces, as represented in myths, are connected in a wide arch to the most threatening experiences of the present.

The book consists in five chapters, at first glance unconnected, together with a number of shorter notes. The various analyses concern such phenomena as the detachment of science from practical life, formalized morality, the manipulative nature of entertainment culture, and a paranoid behavioral structure, expressed in aggressive anti-Semitism, that marks the limits of enlightenment. The authors perceive a common element in these phenomena, the tendency toward self-destruction of the guiding criteria inherent in enlightenment thought from the beginning. Using historical analyses to elucidate the present, they show, against the background of a prehistory of subjectivity, why the National Socialist terror was not an aberration of modern history but was rooted deeply in the fundamental characteristics of Western civilization.

Adorno and Horkheimer see the self-destruction of Western reason as grounded in a historical and fateful dialectic between the domination of external nature and society. They trace enlightenment, which split these spheres apart, back to its mythical roots. Enlightenment and myth, therefore, are not irreconcilable opposites, but dialectically mediated qualities of both real and intellectual life. "Myth is already enlightenment, and enlightenment reverts to mythology." This paradox is the fundamental thesis of the book.

This new translation, based on the text in the complete edition of the works of Max Horkheimer, contains textual variants, commentary upon them, and an editorial discussion of the position of this work in the development of Critical Theory.]]> 304 Max Horkheimer 0804736332 M 0 to-read 4.10 1947 Dialectic of Enlightenment: Philosophical Fragments
author: Max Horkheimer
name: M
average rating: 4.10
book published: 1947
rating: 0
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date added: 2023/11/29
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]]> <![CDATA[Storytelling with Data: A Data Visualization Guide for Business Professionals]]> 26535513 Storytelling is not an inherent skill, especially when it comes to data visualization, and the tools at our disposal don't make it any easier. This book demonstrates how to go beyond conventional tools to reach the root of your data, and how to use your data to create an engaging, informative, compelling story. Specifically, you'll learn how
Together, the lessons in this book will help you turn your data into high impact visual stories that stick with your audience. Rid your world of ineffective graphs, one exploding 3D pie chart at a time. There is a story in your data � Storytelling with Data will give you the skills and power to tell it.]]> 288 Cole Nussbaumer Knaflic 1119002257 M 0 currently-reading 4.39 2015 Storytelling with Data: A Data Visualization Guide for Business Professionals
author: Cole Nussbaumer Knaflic
name: M
average rating: 4.39
book published: 2015
rating: 0
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date added: 2023/11/08
shelves: currently-reading
review:

]]> <![CDATA[Rape of the Wild: Man's Violence against Animals and the Earth]]> 2563006
"Rape of the Wild is a bold work that stress[es] the absolute necessity of kinship with nature and all forms of life." ―Animal's Agenda

"This book is constructively "radical" in that it channels the energy of anger into a probing examination of the roots of patrist violence." ―Changing Man

" . . . a welcome addition to ecofeminist literature . . . " ―Feminist for Animal Rights

"Rape of the Wild is a very moving, passionately written expose of men's subjugation and exploitation of the natural environment and of women." ―Forest History Society

This visionary and inspiring book is a cogent analysis of man's use and misuse of his environment and an impassioned plea for a feminist ecological revolution.]]> 208 Andree Collard 0253205190 M 0 to-read 4.29 1989 Rape of the Wild: Man's Violence against Animals and the Earth
author: Andree Collard
name: M
average rating: 4.29
book published: 1989
rating: 0
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date added: 2023/11/08
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]]> <![CDATA[The Molecular Switch: Signaling and Allostery]]> 48710574
Rob Phillips weaves together allostery and statistical mechanics via a series of biological vignettes, each of which showcases an important biological question and accompanying physical analysis. Beginning with the study of ligand-gated ion channels and their role in problems ranging from muscle action to vision, Phillips then undertakes increasingly sophisticated case studies, from bacterial chemotaxis and quorum sensing to hemoglobin and its role in mammalian physiology. He looks at G-protein coupled receptors as well as the role of allosteric molecules in gene regulation. Phillips concludes by surveying problems in biological fidelity and offering a speculative chapter on the relationship between allostery and biological Maxwell demons.

Appropriate for graduate students and researchers in biophysics, physics, engineering, biology, and neuroscience, The Molecular Switch presents a unified, quantitative model for describing biological signaling phenomena.]]> 440 Rob Phillips 0691200246 M 0 to-read 4.83 The Molecular Switch: Signaling and Allostery
author: Rob Phillips
name: M
average rating: 4.83
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date added: 2023/11/05
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]]> Greco-Roman Wrestling 599000 - how to regain control of a match with effective counterattack moves; and
- how to combine the techniques into powerful scoring opportunities on the mat. The book also features a training program with more than 25 weight training and flexibility exercises for conditioning and strength. Sample workout calendars are provided for 7-day intervals (excellent for progressive training and periods before competition) and 9-day, 5-month, and 1-year periods. These sample workout calendars help coaches and wrestlers put the exercises together into a program designed to maximize athletes' competitive potential. A 4-year sample calendar used in Olympic training is also included. Coaches and wrestlers at the high school, college, and club levels will find this book to be an excellent reference that will help wrestlers of any style refine, strengthen, and broaden their wrestling skills.]]> 176 William A. Martell 0873224086 M 0 3.86 1993 Greco-Roman Wrestling
author: William A. Martell
name: M
average rating: 3.86
book published: 1993
rating: 0
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date added: 2023/10/30
shelves: currently-reading, martial-arts
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]]> Nietzsche and Metaphor 1255470 288 Sarah Kofman 0804721866 M 0 to-read 4.57 1983 Nietzsche and Metaphor
author: Sarah Kofman
name: M
average rating: 4.57
book published: 1983
rating: 0
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date added: 2023/10/07
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]]> Critique of Pure Reason 18288 'The purpose of this critique of pure speculative reason consists in the attempt to change the old procedure of metaphysics and to bring about a complete revolution'

Kant's Critique of Pure Reason (1781) is the central text of modern philosophy. It presents a profound and challenging investigation into the nature of human reason, its knowledge and its illusions. Reason, Kant argues, is the seat of certain concepts that precede experience and make it possible, but we are not therefore entitled to draw conclusions about the natural world from these concepts. The Critique brings together the two opposing schools of philosophy: rationalism, which grounds all our knowledge in reason, and empiricism, which traces all our knowledge to experience. Kant's transcendental idealism indicates a third way that goes far beyond these alternatives.]]> 785 Immanuel Kant 0521657296 M 5 - Emma, Jane Austen

"Come now, let us reason together /
Sanity is found in the mountain of the Lord's house on the /
horizon of the soul that eternally recedes"
� 4.48 Psychosis, Sarah Kane

I've lived with this book for over four years. For most of that time the Critique of Pure Reason (COPR) stubbornly resisted comprehension. The first barrier to entry was the sheer intensity of the writing—its sprawling, metastasized sentences that become page-swallowing paragraphs; the labyrinthine specialization of terms; the self-reflexive, ouroboros tendency in Kant's argumentation, the subordinate clauses piling on top of each other until thoughts become concrete. That is not all. The Penguin Classics COPR is fine, but have you ever seen the Cambridge edition? The weight of the thing is absurd. Just holding it becomes challenging, a physical reminder of the breadth of topics here. Kant invites epistemology to gorge itself: ethics, aesthetics, ontology, metaphysics especially—almost everything philosophy has to offer is fed to the gaping maw of Kantian critique. Deleuze and Guattari wrote: "It is not the slumber of reason that engenders monsters, but vigilant and insomniac rationality." Well, here be dragons.

Over 200 years after the COPR, just how Kantian are we? On the one hand, who is surprised anymore to hear the idea that the world is a procedurally generated simulation in our minds? Or that we ourselves are nothing but the coded reflection of broadly unconscious cognition? Or that cognition itself is constitutive of experience? Thanks to the cultural saturation of Freudian psychoanalysis, pop neuroscience, Matrix-inspired simulation theory, and all the other memes that swam in Kant's wake, the ideas Kant presents in the Transcendental Aesthetic and the Transcendental Analytic broadly only elicit "duh" where they're intelligible and bewildered muttering where they aren't—and look, I don't want to get carried away, but the Transcendental Deduction is one of the most painful things I've ever read, and any reader of the COPR has to go through it twice because Kant figured he fucked up in the first edition and wanted to give it another shot. Even now I don't know how to explain it. Want to see me try, though?

*

On the Circuitous Exposition Concerning the Doctrine of the Transcendental Deduction: A Quandary Investigated by a Confounded Aspirant in Kantian Inquiry

The basic idea here is that we're describing what must be true for human experience to be possible. Kant says we have intuitions (sense-impressions of objects) and concepts (intellectual apprehensions of sensory input that allow us to understand what we're seeing). Famously, Kant said concepts without intuitions are empty and intuitions without concepts are blind. Note that you can't even imagine a non-conceptual intuition. The closest you can get is to look up one of those disturbing "simulated stroke" images (google it if you don't know). Anyway, for human experience to be possible Kant argues that we must posit:

1) The unity of apperception: All of my experiences belong to one unified consciousness.
2) Rule-based synthesis: Categories of the understanding like causality and necessity are structuring and universally valid laws of possible experience. Likewise, the way objects show up for us in accordance with sensory rules are universal. You don't see an apple when I see a bottle because these appearances aren't arbitrarily generated. We know this because we experience consistency and continuity in perceptions.
3) Objective validity: Because my experiences are unified in one consciousness which generates a world-model according to fixed rules, my experiences have "objective validity". I can do science, I can believe in causality, etc., because I have the kind of mind that structures reality that way.

If you say "prove it" to any of the above, Kant thinks you should have your head kicked in. You are welcome to go hungry in Simulated Stroke World, wondering whether that bowl of baked beans is actually a shoe or the soil-poisoning colour from outer space, watching your smashed glass reassemble itself on the countertop, and generally dying from exposure to the icy winds of the noumena. But since you aren't doing any of that, and are instead having a necessarily ordered, causal, spatiotemporal experience, you must accept that quadruped Aristotelian categories govern the operations of your mind, that the "I think" accompanies all your representations, and also something-something-ideal-circle, something-something-concept-of-roundness, schematism, synthesis of recognition, ooh what a nice house you have, etc.

Here marks the end of the circuitous exposition.

*

Of course, reducing the Aesthetic and the Analytic to "stuff we all know without Kant" and "unintelligible systematizing" isn't quite fair. There's a reason Kant makes you watch him build the intellectual cathedral from start to finish, which is that he wants you to form more than just a vague sense that we play a key role in generating our experience of the world. He wants you to have (and I hate to repeat such an ugly phrase) "apodictic certainty". The Aesthetic argues that space and time are not things we can talk about in-themselves, but instead are the forms of intuition we bring to the table. Our model of the world is always spatial (that is, objects of perception must be arranged relative to us and each other in space), and always temporal (that is, experiences are by definition sequenced.) Space and time, for Kant, are not something we discover—they are the preconditions of any sensory experience. Of course, space and time are not sufficient to define the human experience. For that, we also need the categories, which is the argument of the Analytic. The categories, such as the law of causality, are "transcendental": this means they are not derived from experience (as Hume would have it) but they give experience its character.

"That's nice and everything," you might say, "but where is he going with that?"

Oh, only liquidating the grounds for any possible proof of real human agency, of the origins of the universe, of an ordered and necessary material totality, that sort of thing.

*

The basic idea is that these organizing concepts of the understanding, while valid for empirical experience, produce phantasms when escorted by reason to the suprasensible realm. Take, for instance, the concept of causality. We all know that all things have a cause. Your parents were the cause of you, their parents theirs, and so on, until we're talking about the evolution of homo sapiens as a species, all the way back to the genesis of life, itself ultimately an effect of the solar flux, the sun being a consequence of the combination of elements under gravitation, etc. That's all what Kant calls empirical regress and it's just fine. But have you ever wondered what the ultimate cause is? Where it all began? How it is possible that such a causal train should have ever arisen in the first place?

Well, you know, don't. Don't do that. Because the ultimate cause of things cannot be given in a possible empirical experience (since it would necessarily precede time and space and all natural laws) and our concepts of the understanding are built only to understand empirical experience. We can fool ourselves that we have a rigorous and logical idea of a God, of a first cause, of a beginning of the universe in time, etc., but these are only illusions that prevail where reason’s reach exceeds its grasp.

*

If those topics seem airy and remote, they aren't. Rationalised, capitalised industrial society abounds with the sort of metaphysical illusions that Kant farts and shits on in the COPR. Every time some nerd tries to wow you with the so-called "simulation hypothesis", remember that reason's proper sphere is empirically possible experience, and its tendency to overextend itself beyond the bounds of any possible experience produces sophistry the moment it tries to prove its fantasies. Likewise, while Kant himself was a bourgeois moralist, the COPR argues rigorously that you and I, in so far as we appear to ourselves, are the effects (and not the causes) of a transcendental (unconscious) process, putting the lie to the Enlightenment conception of volition as a spontaneous and freely chosen faculty. This belief is the engine of our theories of "politics" and "economics", of crime and punishment, of guilt and sin, etc.

In its most potent instrumentalisation, especially if we ignore Kant's cringeworthy attempts to reassure the (presumed) Christian reader, the Kantian universe is devoid of real subjects, of real morality, of real agency, etc. It’s a shadow play, its “subjects� are puppets of an unknowable transcendental object, the effects of the world proceed in one great chain, the deeds of its actors derive from an intricate clockwork mechanism—the origins of which can never be recovered. Plato's cave could at least be escaped by philosophers; Kant discovers an epistemic event horizon that we are destined to attempt to cross but never will. We know nothing about the ultimate nature of life or the world. It must be admitted that Kant leaves plenty of room "for faith". He insists to the reader that this faith should provide them comfort despite his efforts to remove from us any certainty that this world must be the best possible. Kant was welcome to believe in the immortality of the soul and the benevolence of God (or Nature), of course, but dear Reader, do you?

*

Of course, the positive goal of the system was to ensure the validity of natural science and of the fruits of the empirical use of reason. The Kantian hypothesis: If the world is a veil of illusions, it is nonetheless real in the only way that matters: it expresses architectonic internal consistency. This rigour at the core of Kant's critique is the source of its brilliance. Even now, Kant's system lets us properly situate scientific models as models and not as metaphysical realities without falling into the irrationalist trap of saying "well they're just theories", and to set this distinction on a rigorous basis. The Kantian evil eye burns through all forms of transcendental woo, but gives the empirical eye the respect it deserves.

As another ŷ reviewer I'm quite fond of once said: I hate this book. Five stars.]]> 3.95 1781 Critique of Pure Reason
author: Immanuel Kant
name: M
average rating: 3.95
book published: 1781
rating: 5
read at: 2023/09/25
date added: 2023/09/25
shelves: pessimism, favorites, minds-and-brains
review:
"Upon my word, Emma, to hear you abusing the reason you have, is almost enough to make me think so too. Better be without sense, than misapply it as you do."
- Emma, Jane Austen

"Come now, let us reason together /
Sanity is found in the mountain of the Lord's house on the /
horizon of the soul that eternally recedes"
� 4.48 Psychosis, Sarah Kane

I've lived with this book for over four years. For most of that time the Critique of Pure Reason (COPR) stubbornly resisted comprehension. The first barrier to entry was the sheer intensity of the writing—its sprawling, metastasized sentences that become page-swallowing paragraphs; the labyrinthine specialization of terms; the self-reflexive, ouroboros tendency in Kant's argumentation, the subordinate clauses piling on top of each other until thoughts become concrete. That is not all. The Penguin Classics COPR is fine, but have you ever seen the Cambridge edition? The weight of the thing is absurd. Just holding it becomes challenging, a physical reminder of the breadth of topics here. Kant invites epistemology to gorge itself: ethics, aesthetics, ontology, metaphysics especially—almost everything philosophy has to offer is fed to the gaping maw of Kantian critique. Deleuze and Guattari wrote: "It is not the slumber of reason that engenders monsters, but vigilant and insomniac rationality." Well, here be dragons.

Over 200 years after the COPR, just how Kantian are we? On the one hand, who is surprised anymore to hear the idea that the world is a procedurally generated simulation in our minds? Or that we ourselves are nothing but the coded reflection of broadly unconscious cognition? Or that cognition itself is constitutive of experience? Thanks to the cultural saturation of Freudian psychoanalysis, pop neuroscience, Matrix-inspired simulation theory, and all the other memes that swam in Kant's wake, the ideas Kant presents in the Transcendental Aesthetic and the Transcendental Analytic broadly only elicit "duh" where they're intelligible and bewildered muttering where they aren't—and look, I don't want to get carried away, but the Transcendental Deduction is one of the most painful things I've ever read, and any reader of the COPR has to go through it twice because Kant figured he fucked up in the first edition and wanted to give it another shot. Even now I don't know how to explain it. Want to see me try, though?

*

On the Circuitous Exposition Concerning the Doctrine of the Transcendental Deduction: A Quandary Investigated by a Confounded Aspirant in Kantian Inquiry

The basic idea here is that we're describing what must be true for human experience to be possible. Kant says we have intuitions (sense-impressions of objects) and concepts (intellectual apprehensions of sensory input that allow us to understand what we're seeing). Famously, Kant said concepts without intuitions are empty and intuitions without concepts are blind. Note that you can't even imagine a non-conceptual intuition. The closest you can get is to look up one of those disturbing "simulated stroke" images (google it if you don't know). Anyway, for human experience to be possible Kant argues that we must posit:

1) The unity of apperception: All of my experiences belong to one unified consciousness.
2) Rule-based synthesis: Categories of the understanding like causality and necessity are structuring and universally valid laws of possible experience. Likewise, the way objects show up for us in accordance with sensory rules are universal. You don't see an apple when I see a bottle because these appearances aren't arbitrarily generated. We know this because we experience consistency and continuity in perceptions.
3) Objective validity: Because my experiences are unified in one consciousness which generates a world-model according to fixed rules, my experiences have "objective validity". I can do science, I can believe in causality, etc., because I have the kind of mind that structures reality that way.

If you say "prove it" to any of the above, Kant thinks you should have your head kicked in. You are welcome to go hungry in Simulated Stroke World, wondering whether that bowl of baked beans is actually a shoe or the soil-poisoning colour from outer space, watching your smashed glass reassemble itself on the countertop, and generally dying from exposure to the icy winds of the noumena. But since you aren't doing any of that, and are instead having a necessarily ordered, causal, spatiotemporal experience, you must accept that quadruped Aristotelian categories govern the operations of your mind, that the "I think" accompanies all your representations, and also something-something-ideal-circle, something-something-concept-of-roundness, schematism, synthesis of recognition, ooh what a nice house you have, etc.

Here marks the end of the circuitous exposition.

*

Of course, reducing the Aesthetic and the Analytic to "stuff we all know without Kant" and "unintelligible systematizing" isn't quite fair. There's a reason Kant makes you watch him build the intellectual cathedral from start to finish, which is that he wants you to form more than just a vague sense that we play a key role in generating our experience of the world. He wants you to have (and I hate to repeat such an ugly phrase) "apodictic certainty". The Aesthetic argues that space and time are not things we can talk about in-themselves, but instead are the forms of intuition we bring to the table. Our model of the world is always spatial (that is, objects of perception must be arranged relative to us and each other in space), and always temporal (that is, experiences are by definition sequenced.) Space and time, for Kant, are not something we discover—they are the preconditions of any sensory experience. Of course, space and time are not sufficient to define the human experience. For that, we also need the categories, which is the argument of the Analytic. The categories, such as the law of causality, are "transcendental": this means they are not derived from experience (as Hume would have it) but they give experience its character.

"That's nice and everything," you might say, "but where is he going with that?"

Oh, only liquidating the grounds for any possible proof of real human agency, of the origins of the universe, of an ordered and necessary material totality, that sort of thing.

*

The basic idea is that these organizing concepts of the understanding, while valid for empirical experience, produce phantasms when escorted by reason to the suprasensible realm. Take, for instance, the concept of causality. We all know that all things have a cause. Your parents were the cause of you, their parents theirs, and so on, until we're talking about the evolution of homo sapiens as a species, all the way back to the genesis of life, itself ultimately an effect of the solar flux, the sun being a consequence of the combination of elements under gravitation, etc. That's all what Kant calls empirical regress and it's just fine. But have you ever wondered what the ultimate cause is? Where it all began? How it is possible that such a causal train should have ever arisen in the first place?

Well, you know, don't. Don't do that. Because the ultimate cause of things cannot be given in a possible empirical experience (since it would necessarily precede time and space and all natural laws) and our concepts of the understanding are built only to understand empirical experience. We can fool ourselves that we have a rigorous and logical idea of a God, of a first cause, of a beginning of the universe in time, etc., but these are only illusions that prevail where reason’s reach exceeds its grasp.

*

If those topics seem airy and remote, they aren't. Rationalised, capitalised industrial society abounds with the sort of metaphysical illusions that Kant farts and shits on in the COPR. Every time some nerd tries to wow you with the so-called "simulation hypothesis", remember that reason's proper sphere is empirically possible experience, and its tendency to overextend itself beyond the bounds of any possible experience produces sophistry the moment it tries to prove its fantasies. Likewise, while Kant himself was a bourgeois moralist, the COPR argues rigorously that you and I, in so far as we appear to ourselves, are the effects (and not the causes) of a transcendental (unconscious) process, putting the lie to the Enlightenment conception of volition as a spontaneous and freely chosen faculty. This belief is the engine of our theories of "politics" and "economics", of crime and punishment, of guilt and sin, etc.

In its most potent instrumentalisation, especially if we ignore Kant's cringeworthy attempts to reassure the (presumed) Christian reader, the Kantian universe is devoid of real subjects, of real morality, of real agency, etc. It’s a shadow play, its “subjects� are puppets of an unknowable transcendental object, the effects of the world proceed in one great chain, the deeds of its actors derive from an intricate clockwork mechanism—the origins of which can never be recovered. Plato's cave could at least be escaped by philosophers; Kant discovers an epistemic event horizon that we are destined to attempt to cross but never will. We know nothing about the ultimate nature of life or the world. It must be admitted that Kant leaves plenty of room "for faith". He insists to the reader that this faith should provide them comfort despite his efforts to remove from us any certainty that this world must be the best possible. Kant was welcome to believe in the immortality of the soul and the benevolence of God (or Nature), of course, but dear Reader, do you?

*

Of course, the positive goal of the system was to ensure the validity of natural science and of the fruits of the empirical use of reason. The Kantian hypothesis: If the world is a veil of illusions, it is nonetheless real in the only way that matters: it expresses architectonic internal consistency. This rigour at the core of Kant's critique is the source of its brilliance. Even now, Kant's system lets us properly situate scientific models as models and not as metaphysical realities without falling into the irrationalist trap of saying "well they're just theories", and to set this distinction on a rigorous basis. The Kantian evil eye burns through all forms of transcendental woo, but gives the empirical eye the respect it deserves.

As another ŷ reviewer I'm quite fond of once said: I hate this book. Five stars.
]]> The Face of Imperialism 10833614 168 Michael Parenti 1594519188 M 0 to-read 4.39 2011 The Face of Imperialism
author: Michael Parenti
name: M
average rating: 4.39
book published: 2011
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2023/09/16
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> <![CDATA[Guerrilla Warfare (Penguin Modern Classics)]]> 56155146
First published in 1961, following the successful Cuban Revolution, this is Che Guevara's handbook for guerrilla war.

It covers strategy, tactics, terrain, organization of an army, logistics, field medical treatment, intelligence, propaganda and training, and focuses on seven 'golden rules' of guerrilla warfare. Widely studied both by insurrectionist movements and those who have tried to suppress them, this is the key text to understand how revolutions can be fought and won by ordinary people.]]> 133 Ernesto Che Guevara 0241465087 M 3
- - -

A treatise on the importance of discipline and moral rigour (to the point of asceticism) in establishing a relationship of trust and security between the guerilla band and the rural population on which they depend (and whom they aspire to liberate). This is the sine qua non of guerilla warfare and that makes this work primarily a book of practical ethics, down to its (briefly outlined) dictums around romantic relationships, paying one’s debts, economy in the use of resources (ammunition, energy, people), etc. Combat is glorious but not ecstatic, and violence is regarded with highly tempered enthusiasm: terrorism is proscribed, the enemy is to be treated with humanity (often allowed to escape after a lecture), and the wealthier classes are to be given “bonds of hope�, not merely expropriated. In short, this is a cool-headed and somewhat boring read, which made me enjoy it all the more.

Might elaborate later but that’s about all I have to say for now.]]> 4.05 1961 Guerrilla Warfare (Penguin Modern Classics)
author: Ernesto Che Guevara
name: M
average rating: 4.05
book published: 1961
rating: 3
read at: 2023/08/22
date added: 2023/08/22
shelves:
review:
Came for the portrait of life in a guerilla band, stayed for the cool molotov shotgun diagram.

- - -

A treatise on the importance of discipline and moral rigour (to the point of asceticism) in establishing a relationship of trust and security between the guerilla band and the rural population on which they depend (and whom they aspire to liberate). This is the sine qua non of guerilla warfare and that makes this work primarily a book of practical ethics, down to its (briefly outlined) dictums around romantic relationships, paying one’s debts, economy in the use of resources (ammunition, energy, people), etc. Combat is glorious but not ecstatic, and violence is regarded with highly tempered enthusiasm: terrorism is proscribed, the enemy is to be treated with humanity (often allowed to escape after a lecture), and the wealthier classes are to be given “bonds of hope�, not merely expropriated. In short, this is a cool-headed and somewhat boring read, which made me enjoy it all the more.

Might elaborate later but that’s about all I have to say for now.
]]> <![CDATA[Blackshirts and Reds: Rational Fascism and the Overthrow of Communism]]> 404273 Blackshirts & Reds explores some of the big issues of our time: fascism, capitalism, communism, revolution, democracy, and ecology—terms often bandied about but seldom explored in the original and exciting way that has become Michael Parenti’s trademark.

Parenti shows how “rational fascism� renders service to capitalism, how corporate power undermines democracy, and how revolutions are a mass empowerment against the forces of exploitative privilege. He also maps out the external and internal forces that destroyed communism, and the disastrous impact of the “free-market� victory on eastern Europe and the former Soviet Union. He affirms the relevance of taboo ideologies like Marxism, demonstrating the importance of class analysis in understanding political realities and dealing with the ongoing collision between ecology and global corporatism.

Written with lucid and compelling style, this book goes beyond truncated modes of thought, inviting us to entertain iconoclastic views, and to ask why things are as they are. It is a bold and entertaining exploration of the epic struggles of yesterday and today.

"A penetrating and persuasive writer with an astonishing array of documentation to implement his attacks."�The Catholic Journalist

"Blackshirts & Reds discusses the great combat between fascism and socialism that is the defining feature of the Twentieth Century, and takes every official version to task for its substitution of moral analysis for critical analysis, for its selectivity, and for its errata. By portraying the struggle between fascism and Communism in this century as a single conflict, and not a series of discrete encounters, between the insatiable need for new capital on the one hand and the survival of a system under siege on the other, Parenti defines fascism as the weapon of capitalism, not simply an extreme form of it. Fascism is not an aberration, he points out, but a "rational" and integral component of the system."—Stan Goff, The Prism

Michael Parenti, PhD Yale, is an internationally known author and lecturer. He is one of the nation's leading progressive political analysts. He is the author of over 275 published articles and twenty books. His writings are published in popular periodicals, scholarly journals, and his op-ed pieces have been in leading newspapers such as The New York Times and The Los Angeles Times. His informative and entertaining books and talks have reached a wide range of audiences in North America and abroad.

]]> 166 Michael Parenti 0872863298 M 0 to-read 4.41 1997 Blackshirts and Reds: Rational Fascism and the Overthrow of Communism
author: Michael Parenti
name: M
average rating: 4.41
book published: 1997
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2023/08/20
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> Dictatorship 8353093
Written shortly after the Russian Revolution and the First World War, Schmitt analyses the problem of the state of emergency and the power of the Reichspräsident in declaring it. Dictatorship, Schmitt argues, is a necessary legal institution in constitutional law and has been wrongly portrayed as just the arbitrary rule of a so-called dictator.

Dictatorship is an essential book for understanding the work of Carl Schmitt and a major contribution to the modern theory of a democratic, constitutional state. And despite being written in the early part of the twentieth century, it speaks with remarkable prescience to our contemporary political concerns.]]> 288 Carl Schmitt 0745646484 M 4 Deus sive Natura, wielding constituting power over the entire field of the state. You might be tempted to think of this as mere absolutism, L'État, c'est moi, but this temptation must be resisted. Sovereign dictatorship is by nature democratic, not in the sense of a plebiscite, but in the sense that its legitimacy supposedly derives from its popular character. A sovereign dictator is an assemblage of the people's will, and derives its sovereignty from the people. The sovereign dictatorship always assumes a Volksgeist that it simultaneously constructs. When we say "dictator" today, this is what we mean, though often without much cognizance of the philosophical content. This content, however, is not nothing, and while Schmitt's historical exegesis of the development of the dictator concept begins dry, in drawing out its historical and philosophical logic much food for thought is supplied.

The spread, in brief:

1) Fuse entirely with the real power that constitutes the state, in full knowledge of your responsibility to direct it. This power derives entirely from the will of the people, though - as rabble - they are incapable of expressing themselves except through you.

2) Understand that the will of the people is not the mean or sum of the opinions held by the individual people within a territory. The people is a supernatural category, a spirit expressive of the true inner tendency of a people and under no circumstances must it be confused with the liberal-democratic (numerical, majoritarian) will. To that end, the people can fail to understand their own will, and it is the responsibility of the dictator to oppose to the people their true will.

3) Identify with the highest severity the true enemy and define the security of the state against this enemy, constituting the true people and the true state in one vicious movement.

4) Eliminate the legislature and suspend the autonomy of the judiciary branch. The organs of the state, as constituted powers, hold no legitimacy except as vectors of the people's will, and therefore need no independence, which can mean only insurrection in a sovereign dictatorship.

It's a liberal truism that dictatorship is always a threat, but if dictatorship haunts democracy, it haunts it as its nightmare, its parodic hell, deriving its power from the same principles that democracy does. In a democracy, all right derives from the nation - the people - all state organs are conceived as modes through the substance of popular sovereignty. To that end it is always legitimate (though it's historically simple enough to see that it is also never desirable) for the inhibiting institutions to be dissolved to make way for a direct expression of popular will. Like the Spinozist substance or a gravitational singularity, the popular will can never appear naked, but must be mediated. The argument between liberal democracy and dictatorship concerns the legitimate form that mediation takes.]]> 4.10 2000 Dictatorship
author: Carl Schmitt
name: M
average rating: 4.10
book published: 2000
rating: 4
read at: 2023/08/05
date added: 2023/08/19
shelves:
review:
An important contribution to the theory of dictatorship, and - given the role Carl Schmitt was to play in the decades after this work was published - a fateful one too. A technical distinction is drawn between a commissary dictatorship - one in which dictatorial powers are temporarily given to an agent of the state, a state that nonetheless retains supremacy with respect to the dictator - and a sovereign dictatorship, a perfectly Spinozist coincidence of right and power in which the dictator appears as Deus sive Natura, wielding constituting power over the entire field of the state. You might be tempted to think of this as mere absolutism, L'État, c'est moi, but this temptation must be resisted. Sovereign dictatorship is by nature democratic, not in the sense of a plebiscite, but in the sense that its legitimacy supposedly derives from its popular character. A sovereign dictator is an assemblage of the people's will, and derives its sovereignty from the people. The sovereign dictatorship always assumes a Volksgeist that it simultaneously constructs. When we say "dictator" today, this is what we mean, though often without much cognizance of the philosophical content. This content, however, is not nothing, and while Schmitt's historical exegesis of the development of the dictator concept begins dry, in drawing out its historical and philosophical logic much food for thought is supplied.

The spread, in brief:

1) Fuse entirely with the real power that constitutes the state, in full knowledge of your responsibility to direct it. This power derives entirely from the will of the people, though - as rabble - they are incapable of expressing themselves except through you.

2) Understand that the will of the people is not the mean or sum of the opinions held by the individual people within a territory. The people is a supernatural category, a spirit expressive of the true inner tendency of a people and under no circumstances must it be confused with the liberal-democratic (numerical, majoritarian) will. To that end, the people can fail to understand their own will, and it is the responsibility of the dictator to oppose to the people their true will.

3) Identify with the highest severity the true enemy and define the security of the state against this enemy, constituting the true people and the true state in one vicious movement.

4) Eliminate the legislature and suspend the autonomy of the judiciary branch. The organs of the state, as constituted powers, hold no legitimacy except as vectors of the people's will, and therefore need no independence, which can mean only insurrection in a sovereign dictatorship.

It's a liberal truism that dictatorship is always a threat, but if dictatorship haunts democracy, it haunts it as its nightmare, its parodic hell, deriving its power from the same principles that democracy does. In a democracy, all right derives from the nation - the people - all state organs are conceived as modes through the substance of popular sovereignty. To that end it is always legitimate (though it's historically simple enough to see that it is also never desirable) for the inhibiting institutions to be dissolved to make way for a direct expression of popular will. Like the Spinozist substance or a gravitational singularity, the popular will can never appear naked, but must be mediated. The argument between liberal democracy and dictatorship concerns the legitimate form that mediation takes.
]]> <![CDATA[Sovereignty: The Origin and Future of a Political and Legal Concept (Columbia Studies in Political Thought / Political History)]]> 27310409 192 Dieter Grimm 0231164254 M 0 to-read 3.91 2009 Sovereignty: The Origin and Future of a Political and Legal Concept (Columbia Studies in Political Thought / Political History)
author: Dieter Grimm
name: M
average rating: 3.91
book published: 2009
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2023/08/19
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> <![CDATA[Europe and Ethnicity: World War I and Contemporary Ethnic Conflict]]> 5655370 * An introductory chapter analyzes the context of the war with particular reference to regions and states where the national and ethnic questions were particularly complex and intransigent
* Subsequent chapters present case studies from arenas of Ireland to Yugoslavia; the Middle East to the Baltic states; Austria, Hungary and Czechoslovakia.
Europe and Ethnicity confirms the mixed legacy of the period for the ethnic stability of the areas examined, while taking into account the impact of the Second World War and the ending of the Cold War.]]> 232 Seamus Dunn 0415119952 M 3
In brief, the principle of self-determination for all nationalities was not - of course - pursued with terminal rigour. Europe's borders were to be redrawn along ethnic lines, yes, but not at the expense of the interests of the victors, nor in any way that would mean a triumph of the vanquished, nor was the logic of nationalism to be allowed to splinter Europe along every conceivable national claim (that, of course, would and will come later...). The process of national self-determination would not only be arrested by the realities of the international system, but (of course) the Second World War would also counteract the centrifugal forces disintegrating the existing empires and nation-states. In the absence of countervailing forces, the tendency is towards national divorce. The authors of this text expected the trend to continue, if not accelerate, with the collapse of Communism. History since 1996 has undeniably borne this out, though the disintegrative tendency that deterritorializes must compete with the imperial tendency that reterritorializes, as in the contemporary war in Ukraine. That the principle of self-determination has ambiguous validity can be noted through comparison with the far less spectacular suppression of the secession attempt in Catalonia circa 2017.

As a framework for understanding the long history of much of these proceedings, this book is highly stimulating, and easy to recommend.]]> 4.00 1996 Europe and Ethnicity: World War I and Contemporary Ethnic Conflict
author: Seamus Dunn
name: M
average rating: 4.00
book published: 1996
rating: 3
read at: 2023/08/19
date added: 2023/08/19
shelves:
review:
Written in 1996, we begin with the partition of Europe's old empires into new nation-states after the First World War and chase the dialectic of ethnic conflict through the rest of the 20th century. The essays on Yugoslavia, Ireland, Ukraine, and the Middle East (or rather the territories that once belonged to the Ottoman Empire) gripped me most thoroughly, though it's worth reading the essay on Hungary for some eyebrow-raising comments from that essay's author that I can only assume were meant to spark some ethnic conflict of their own.

In brief, the principle of self-determination for all nationalities was not - of course - pursued with terminal rigour. Europe's borders were to be redrawn along ethnic lines, yes, but not at the expense of the interests of the victors, nor in any way that would mean a triumph of the vanquished, nor was the logic of nationalism to be allowed to splinter Europe along every conceivable national claim (that, of course, would and will come later...). The process of national self-determination would not only be arrested by the realities of the international system, but (of course) the Second World War would also counteract the centrifugal forces disintegrating the existing empires and nation-states. In the absence of countervailing forces, the tendency is towards national divorce. The authors of this text expected the trend to continue, if not accelerate, with the collapse of Communism. History since 1996 has undeniably borne this out, though the disintegrative tendency that deterritorializes must compete with the imperial tendency that reterritorializes, as in the contemporary war in Ukraine. That the principle of self-determination has ambiguous validity can be noted through comparison with the far less spectacular suppression of the secession attempt in Catalonia circa 2017.

As a framework for understanding the long history of much of these proceedings, this book is highly stimulating, and easy to recommend.
]]> <![CDATA[بحثاً عن الزمن المفقود - جانب منازل سوان]]> 201497 623 Marcel Proust M 0 to-read 4.10 1913 بحثاً عن الزمن المفقود - جانب منازل سوان
author: Marcel Proust
name: M
average rating: 4.10
book published: 1913
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2023/08/06
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> <![CDATA[The Anarchy: The East India Company, Corporate Violence, and the Pillage of an Empire]]> 42972023
In August 1765, the East India Company defeated the young Mughal emperor and set up, in his place, a government run by English traders who collected taxes through means of a private army.

The creation of this new government marked the moment that the East India Company ceased to be a conventional company and became something much more unusual: an international corporation transformed into an aggressive colonial power. Over the course of the next 47 years, the company's reach grew until almost all of India south of Delhi was effectively ruled from a boardroom in the city of London.]]> 544 William Dalrymple 1635573955 M 0 to-read 4.18 2019 The Anarchy: The East India Company, Corporate Violence, and the Pillage of an Empire
author: William Dalrymple
name: M
average rating: 4.18
book published: 2019
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2023/08/04
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> <![CDATA[Devil-Land: England Under Siege, 1588-1688]]> 56567211
As an unmarried heretic with no heir, Elizabeth I was regarded with a horror by Catholic Europe, while her Stuart successors, James VI & I and Charles I, were seen as impecunious and incompetent: unable to manage their three kingdoms of England, Scotland and Ireland. The traumatic civil wars, regicide and a republican Commonwealth were followed by the floundering, foreign-leaning rule of Charles II and his brother, James VII & II, before William of Orange invaded England with a Dutch army, and a new order was imposed.

Devil-Land reveals England as, in many ways, a 'failed state': endemically unstable and constantly rocked by devastating events from the Gunpowder Plot to the Great Fire of London. Catastrophe nevertheless bred creativity, and Jackson makes brilliant use of eyewitness accounts - many penned by stupefied foreigners - to dramatize her great story. Starting on the eve of the Spanish Armada's descent in 1588 and concluding with a not-so 'Glorious Revolution' a hundred years later, Devil-Land is a spectacular reinterpretation of England's vexed and enthralling past.]]> 684 Clare Jackson 024128581X M 0 to-read 3.77 2021 Devil-Land: England Under Siege, 1588-1688
author: Clare Jackson
name: M
average rating: 3.77
book published: 2021
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2023/08/04
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> <![CDATA[Revolutionary Spring: Europe Aflame and the Fight for a New World, 1848-1849]]> 75697206 An epic history of the 1848 revolutions that swept Europe and the charismatic figureswho propelled them forward, with deep resonance and frightening parallels to today—from a renowned Cambridge historian.

Historically, 1848 has long been overshadowed by the French Revolution of 1789, the Paris Commune of 1870, and the Russian revolutions of the early twentieth century. And yet in 1848, nearly all of Europe was aflame with conflict. Parallel political tumults spread like brush fire across the entire continent, leading to more significant and lasting change than earlier upheavals. And they brought with them a new awareness of the concept of history; the men and women of 1848 saw and shaped what was happening around them through the lens of previous revolutions.

Celebrated Cambridge historian Christopher Clark describes this continental uprising as “the particle collision chamber at the center of the European nineteenth century,� a place where political movements and ideas—from socialism and democratic radicalism to liberalism, nationalism, corporatism, and conservatism—were tested and transformed. The insurgents asked questions that sound modern to our What happens when demands for political or economic liberty conflict with demands for social rights? How do we reconcile representative and direct forms of democracy? How is capitalism connected to social inequality? As a result of the events of 1848, the papacy of Pius IX and even the Catholic Church changed profoundly; Denmark, Piedmont and Prussia issued constitutions; Sicily founded its own all-Sicilian parliament; the Austrian Chancellor Metternich fled from Vienna. The revolutions were short-lived, but their impact was profound. Public life, administrative cultures and political thought were all transformed by this mid-century convulsion. Those who lived through them were marked for life by what they had seen and experienced.

Elegantly written, meticulously researched, and filled with a fascinating cast of charismatic figures, including the social theorist de Tochqueville and the troubled Priest de Lamennais, who struggled to reconcile his faith with politics, Revolutionary Spring is a new understanding of 1848 that offers chilling parallels to our present moment. “Looking back at the revolutions from the end of the first quarter of the twenty-first century, it is impossible not to be struck by the resonances,� Clark writes. “If a revolution is coming for us, it may look something like 1848.”]]> 891 Christopher Clark 0525575227 M 0 to-read 4.24 2023 Revolutionary Spring: Europe Aflame and the Fight for a New World, 1848-1849
author: Christopher Clark
name: M
average rating: 4.24
book published: 2023
rating: 0
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date added: 2023/08/04
shelves: to-read
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]]> <![CDATA[Belly of the Beast: The Politics of Anti-Fatness as Anti-Blackness]]> 55887785
To live in a body both fat and Black is to intersect at the margins of a society that normalizes anti-fatness as anti-Blackness: hyper-policed by state and society, passed over for housing and jobs, and derided and misdiagnosed by medical professionals, fat Black people in the United States are subject to culturally sanctioned discrimination, abuse, and trauma.

In Belly of the Beast, author Da’Shaun Harrison–a fat, Black, disabled, and non-binary writer AMAB (assigned male at birth)–offers an incisive, fresh, and precise exploration of anti-fatness as anti-Blackness. Foregrounding the state-sanctioned murder of Eric Garner in a historical analysis of the policing, disenfranchisement, and invisibilizing of fat Black men and trans and nonbinary AMAB people, Harrison discusses the pervasive, insidious ways that anti-fat anti-Blackness shows up in everyday life. Fat people can be legally fired in 49 states for being fat; they’re more likely to be houseless. Fat people die at higher rates from misdiagnosis or non-treatment; fat women are more likely to be sexually assaulted. And at the intersections of fatness, race, disability, and gender identity, these abuses are exacerbated.

Taking on desirability politics, f*ckability, healthism, hyper-sexualization, invisibility, and the connections between anti-fatness and police violence, Harrison viscerally and vividly illustrates the myriad harms of anti-fat anti-Blackness–and offers strategies for dismantling denial, unlearning the cultural programming that says “fat is bad,� and moving beyond the world we have now toward one that makes space for the fat and Black.]]> 256 Da’Shaun Harrison 1623175976 M 1 un petit air français. However, a friend of mine recently recommended me a that intrigued me. The premise, briefly, is that anti-fatness and anti-blackness are the same thing: "If you are anti-black you are also anti-fat, and if you are anti-fat you are also anti-black." This is a striking claim, and the video fails to support it. Wondering if perhaps going to the sources would be more enlightening, I decided to go to the source of the above quote - Da'Shaun Harrison - and read their text on the subject.

As an exercise in the art of highly-targeted rhetoric (this will only work on a particular strain of leftist and repel just about anyone else) it is impressive. As an argument from premises to conclusions, it is embarrassing. Rightists tend to accuse critical theorists of deliberate obfuscation but I don't think this is correct. I believe Harrison is arguing, more or less, in good faith, it's just that when your intellectual diet consists almost entirely of Derrideans and Foucauldians*, you run a high risk of allowing "if", "perhaps", "always already" and other genre phrases to do all the arguing for you without even noticing.

Take, for example, the absurd statement:

"...for the Black to exist so too must the fat. If we agree that this is the case, then what also makes the Black "criminal" is the fat(ness) assigned to the Black."


I actually don't agree that if we agree that "for the Black to exist so too must the fat" we must therefore agree that " what also makes the Black "criminal" is the fat(ness) assigned to the Black". And Harrison must not think this is entirely self-evident either, because they quickly give the example of "the Two-Ton Contest". The Two-Ton Contest was a courtroom "game" prosecutors in Cook County, Illnois played in the 1970s. (Harrison claims it was played as recently as the 2000s but I've seen no evidence to support this.*) They played the game by tallying up the weights of defendants when they pled guilty or were found guilty, and the first prosecutor to total two-tons (or 4000 pounds) won. This is, obviously, obscenely cruel and dehumanising, but Harrison mentions it to further cement the idea that fat Black people specifically are under further threat because of their fatness. The irony here is that the direct quote Harrison takes from Nicole Gonzalez Van Cleve's Crook County: Racism and Injustice in America's Largest Criminal Court contradicts this:

Defendants potentially “deserving� of longer sentences received short ones. Conversely, other defendants received harsher sentences not on the basis of their crime or the evidence against them, but according to their weight.


I'd contend the most we can say based on this quote is that innocent fat Black people will have been incentivised to accept "generous" plea deals that were pushed on them only because of their weight and because of this disgusting "game", which is terrible, but what's left out of this account is that non-fat Black people weren't getting a free pass, and when it came to actual sentencing will have been treated far harsher. Here's a direct quote from Courtroom 302: A Year Behind the Scenes in an American Criminal Courthouse, Van Cleve's own source for discussion of the Two-Ton Contest:

From what he’d heard, “a lot of fat guys [defendants] were getting great deals,� he says with a laugh. “Let’s say a prosecutor’s got a guy who’s 350 pounds. Where the guy normally would have gotten ten years, the prosecutor might offer him a year”—to get a quick and certain conviction. “Skinny guys wouldn’t get offered anything,� Locallo says.


Harrison's theoretical "style" operates through implication, through selective citation and through the inadvertent (I'm sure) use of silence on matters that contradict. Harrison doesn't even think to address this counterpoint either because they aren't aware of it (this wouldn't surprise me) or because they don't think anyone is likely to point this out.

I've spent a while dissecting a claim that takes up about a page in the book, by the way. There's a rhetorical technique called the Gish Gallop: it works by overwhelming your interlocutor with an excessive number of arguments regardless of how good those arguments are (or indeed how relevant they are to the discussion). In its original form the Gallop is essentially used to run down the timer on a formal debate and leave a number of arguments "unanswered" before the end. Obviously you have all the time you want to read a book, but bookish critical theory types are prone to doing this in their texts because it demonstrates their scholarly chops and because they can exploit the tendency most of us have to say "lots of examples therefore true". Checking any one claim can take literally hours, and they come thick and fast. For a few more declarations that are prima facie absurd or require justification that never comes, see also:

"What does it look like to talk about health not as something the Black fat body has been removed from but rather as something created precisely for fat Black people, or the Black fat, to never have access to?"


(A depressing thought!)

"As such, people who are Black, fat, disabled, and/or trans more generally do not have access to Beauty."


(Where Beauty with a capital B refers to the possession of "Desire Capital", which grants one "access, power, and resources." If you cannot think of a single Black/fat/disabled/trans person with "possession" of this sort of "capital" you have been living under a very secluded rock.)

"Health is a framework in which no Black person can ever fit."


(I'm less certain that the sun will rise tomorrow than Harrison is that NO BLACK PERSON CAN EVER BE HEALTHY.)

Sucker punches and curveballs like this fly off the page line after line. There's an acidic nihilism on display here that obviously stems from the traumatic experience of having grown up fat, Black, poor, etc. in the United States. This is an experience I can't relate to, and I'm weary of conducting this review in a stigmatising way (merely disagreeing with the premises of this book is sufficient to be anti-fat and anti-black by Harrison's standards but that's not the standard I'm trying to meet). There needs to be room for discussion of how the way we speak about fatness does harm to fat people, without ceding to claims such as "anyone who still has a vested interest in intentional weight loss... is making the active decision to invest in systemic anti-fatness, anti-Blackness, ableism, misogyny/-noir, and capitalism". I think it's worth being open-minded to the historical "origins" of the way we talk and think about fatness, and certainly if there is a racial inflection to this (within or outside of the US) that's worth investigating too.

But that's not being successfully argued here. This shit just sucks.

--
NOTES:

1) "consists almost entirely of Derrideans and Foucauldians": To be fair, #NotAllDerrideans #NotAllFoucauldians but for every Judith Butler (who is not themselves immune to bullshitting) there are thousands of dreadful imitators.

2) "The Two-Ton Contest was a courtroom "game" prosecutors in Cook County, Illnois played in the 1970s and 1980s." Harrison claims this happened in the late 1990s and early 2000s. It's not clear where they get this date from. The book they cite, Crook County: Racism and Injustice in America's Largest Criminal Court, gives the time period as "the 1980s and 1990s", and if you check the book cited in that book, Courtroom 302: A Year Behind the Scenes in an American Criminal Courthouse, the source who describes the game says it was no longer played when he joined the trial courts as an attorney in 1978, and that he heard about it from "veteran prosecutors". Even assuming he's lying, that still doesn't date the practice to the 1990s, let alone the 2000s.]]> 4.52 2021 Belly of the Beast: The Politics of Anti-Fatness as Anti-Blackness
author: Da’Shaun Harrison
name: M
average rating: 4.52
book published: 2021
rating: 1
read at: 2023/07/15
date added: 2023/07/15
shelves:
review:
I wouldn't normally finish this sort of book. I've read a lot of critical theory, and I have a good nose for bullshit with un petit air français. However, a friend of mine recently recommended me a that intrigued me. The premise, briefly, is that anti-fatness and anti-blackness are the same thing: "If you are anti-black you are also anti-fat, and if you are anti-fat you are also anti-black." This is a striking claim, and the video fails to support it. Wondering if perhaps going to the sources would be more enlightening, I decided to go to the source of the above quote - Da'Shaun Harrison - and read their text on the subject.

As an exercise in the art of highly-targeted rhetoric (this will only work on a particular strain of leftist and repel just about anyone else) it is impressive. As an argument from premises to conclusions, it is embarrassing. Rightists tend to accuse critical theorists of deliberate obfuscation but I don't think this is correct. I believe Harrison is arguing, more or less, in good faith, it's just that when your intellectual diet consists almost entirely of Derrideans and Foucauldians*, you run a high risk of allowing "if", "perhaps", "always already" and other genre phrases to do all the arguing for you without even noticing.

Take, for example, the absurd statement:

"...for the Black to exist so too must the fat. If we agree that this is the case, then what also makes the Black "criminal" is the fat(ness) assigned to the Black."


I actually don't agree that if we agree that "for the Black to exist so too must the fat" we must therefore agree that " what also makes the Black "criminal" is the fat(ness) assigned to the Black". And Harrison must not think this is entirely self-evident either, because they quickly give the example of "the Two-Ton Contest". The Two-Ton Contest was a courtroom "game" prosecutors in Cook County, Illnois played in the 1970s. (Harrison claims it was played as recently as the 2000s but I've seen no evidence to support this.*) They played the game by tallying up the weights of defendants when they pled guilty or were found guilty, and the first prosecutor to total two-tons (or 4000 pounds) won. This is, obviously, obscenely cruel and dehumanising, but Harrison mentions it to further cement the idea that fat Black people specifically are under further threat because of their fatness. The irony here is that the direct quote Harrison takes from Nicole Gonzalez Van Cleve's Crook County: Racism and Injustice in America's Largest Criminal Court contradicts this:

Defendants potentially “deserving� of longer sentences received short ones. Conversely, other defendants received harsher sentences not on the basis of their crime or the evidence against them, but according to their weight.


I'd contend the most we can say based on this quote is that innocent fat Black people will have been incentivised to accept "generous" plea deals that were pushed on them only because of their weight and because of this disgusting "game", which is terrible, but what's left out of this account is that non-fat Black people weren't getting a free pass, and when it came to actual sentencing will have been treated far harsher. Here's a direct quote from Courtroom 302: A Year Behind the Scenes in an American Criminal Courthouse, Van Cleve's own source for discussion of the Two-Ton Contest:

From what he’d heard, “a lot of fat guys [defendants] were getting great deals,� he says with a laugh. “Let’s say a prosecutor’s got a guy who’s 350 pounds. Where the guy normally would have gotten ten years, the prosecutor might offer him a year”—to get a quick and certain conviction. “Skinny guys wouldn’t get offered anything,� Locallo says.


Harrison's theoretical "style" operates through implication, through selective citation and through the inadvertent (I'm sure) use of silence on matters that contradict. Harrison doesn't even think to address this counterpoint either because they aren't aware of it (this wouldn't surprise me) or because they don't think anyone is likely to point this out.

I've spent a while dissecting a claim that takes up about a page in the book, by the way. There's a rhetorical technique called the Gish Gallop: it works by overwhelming your interlocutor with an excessive number of arguments regardless of how good those arguments are (or indeed how relevant they are to the discussion). In its original form the Gallop is essentially used to run down the timer on a formal debate and leave a number of arguments "unanswered" before the end. Obviously you have all the time you want to read a book, but bookish critical theory types are prone to doing this in their texts because it demonstrates their scholarly chops and because they can exploit the tendency most of us have to say "lots of examples therefore true". Checking any one claim can take literally hours, and they come thick and fast. For a few more declarations that are prima facie absurd or require justification that never comes, see also:

"What does it look like to talk about health not as something the Black fat body has been removed from but rather as something created precisely for fat Black people, or the Black fat, to never have access to?"


(A depressing thought!)

"As such, people who are Black, fat, disabled, and/or trans more generally do not have access to Beauty."


(Where Beauty with a capital B refers to the possession of "Desire Capital", which grants one "access, power, and resources." If you cannot think of a single Black/fat/disabled/trans person with "possession" of this sort of "capital" you have been living under a very secluded rock.)

"Health is a framework in which no Black person can ever fit."


(I'm less certain that the sun will rise tomorrow than Harrison is that NO BLACK PERSON CAN EVER BE HEALTHY.)

Sucker punches and curveballs like this fly off the page line after line. There's an acidic nihilism on display here that obviously stems from the traumatic experience of having grown up fat, Black, poor, etc. in the United States. This is an experience I can't relate to, and I'm weary of conducting this review in a stigmatising way (merely disagreeing with the premises of this book is sufficient to be anti-fat and anti-black by Harrison's standards but that's not the standard I'm trying to meet). There needs to be room for discussion of how the way we speak about fatness does harm to fat people, without ceding to claims such as "anyone who still has a vested interest in intentional weight loss... is making the active decision to invest in systemic anti-fatness, anti-Blackness, ableism, misogyny/-noir, and capitalism". I think it's worth being open-minded to the historical "origins" of the way we talk and think about fatness, and certainly if there is a racial inflection to this (within or outside of the US) that's worth investigating too.

But that's not being successfully argued here. This shit just sucks.

--
NOTES:

1) "consists almost entirely of Derrideans and Foucauldians": To be fair, #NotAllDerrideans #NotAllFoucauldians but for every Judith Butler (who is not themselves immune to bullshitting) there are thousands of dreadful imitators.

2) "The Two-Ton Contest was a courtroom "game" prosecutors in Cook County, Illnois played in the 1970s and 1980s." Harrison claims this happened in the late 1990s and early 2000s. It's not clear where they get this date from. The book they cite, Crook County: Racism and Injustice in America's Largest Criminal Court, gives the time period as "the 1980s and 1990s", and if you check the book cited in that book, Courtroom 302: A Year Behind the Scenes in an American Criminal Courthouse, the source who describes the game says it was no longer played when he joined the trial courts as an attorney in 1978, and that he heard about it from "veteran prosecutors". Even assuming he's lying, that still doesn't date the practice to the 1990s, let alone the 2000s.
]]> Bronze Age Mindset 40388177
The pricing, he insisted on against all advice. It refers to the lucky 969 Movement of Burma, led by the noble monk Wirathu.

Praise be to the Pervert. Praise be to his teaching of peace.

Be careful.]]> 198 Bronze Age Pervert M 1
Nietzsche’s aphoristic style and avowed will-to-spontaneity concealed a surprising degree of rigour. This isn’t to say every part of his corpus displays a unity of thought, just that within a given one of Nietzsche’s polemics, it is difficult to pull out meaningful internal contradictions. The same cannot be said for imitators of his style, who seem to feel it gives them license to self-contradict and gesture vaguely to some idea of dialectical intrigue or artistic exuberance as an excuse. BAP exemplifies this. One example that amused me early on was the claim that the leftist metaphysics of the soul states that “matter can somehow be corruptly configured, and that we all have disembodied souls with male or female essences”—in other words, that transgender people can actually exist. Not long after, however, BAP claims “there are women who were great scientists, but, like women who were great chess players, or poets, they are probably spiritual lesbians,� and later—more explicitly: “Saddam Hussein was like this: he was a transsexual in his soul.� Trans people are a recurring object of scorn in fascist thought because they represent a remainder that cannot be fully incorporated into the system: in so far as transgender identity can be deployed rhetorically to prop up misogynist binaries (the idea of a spiritual lesbian, of a trans Saddam Hussein) they are legitimate objects of discussion, but in the limit their refusal of supposedly natural laws of the body and their existence as malleable social and physical beings renders them as pure anathema to the fascist. Hence the incoherence, which goes all the way down.

This isn’t a trivial nitpick, either—rather a call to be aware of what is happening here, what is always happening here: to be effective, fascist literature must attempt to be artistically compelling because it cannot be intellectually compelling. It must tap into the primordial purpose of reason: to communicate in compelling language what is first grasped intuitively. (Only Kantians believe reason has any implicit relationship to transcendent truth.) This is also why BAP idolises the instinct, insists upon the intuitive (or demonic) spontaneity of genius, and disparages syllogistic reasoning. Much of this text is self-refuting at the level of reasoned argument, which BAP concludes means only that reason is faulty.

I don’t tend to disagree on that point at least. Reason is an instrument of social conformity and not a tool designed to promote the triumph of truth, except occasionally under conditions of great discipline (in scientific endeavour, in some corporate or governmental planning, etc.)—and even then, reason aims at a historically-contingent, utility-determined truth. But in typical fascist style, this premise is the excuse for BAP to just make shit up until his energy is spent. It would be exhausting to examine every lie in this work, and unnecessary. I’m no fan of Sartre, but his analysis of the antisemitic type remains true: “Never believe that anti-Semites are completely unaware of the absurdity of their replies. They know that their remarks are frivolous, open to challenge� They even like to play with discourse for, by giving ridiculous reasons, they discredit the seriousness of their interlocutors. They delight in acting in bad faith, since they seek not to persuade by sound argument but to intimidate and disconcert.�

*

I first tried to read Bronze Age Mindset a few years ago and bounced off within the first few pages. It bored me; it still does. One unfortunate consequence of BAP’s constant callbacks to Nietzsche, Heidegger, Schmitt, Schopenhauer, et al. is that you’re never able to stop comparing him to them, and the comparison is not favourable. BAP’s writing is well-suited to the puffed-up dorks who dream of exalted positions within the new fascist vanguard: shallow, ahistorical, botched “might is right� sloganeering for edgelords. You can imagine what a government run by people like this looks like: not a revival of a “heroic� Bronze Age culture, but a sad continuation of the Leviathan state as it is, perhaps more protectionist, certainly more racist, but nonetheless corporatist, litigious, cramped—with war still won with drones and logistics, with wealth still secured by the abstract transmutation of commodities into money and back again. Capitalism exerts its irresistible force of gravity: BAP’s insistence that a “manly�, piratical age would put an end to the suffocation of industrial society is pure cope. You only need to look at the historical record.

Or you can do it, so to speak, “a priori�. Fascism takes the form of a diseased total state because what it seeks to do is impossible by its own sociology: organise a supposed undifferentiated mass of rabble (i.e. people who broadly just want to be left alone) under the will of an aristocratic band or dictator (i.e. pillagers with delusions of grandeur), instituting military discipline across the social field and securing this order through the use of myth. Perhaps the natural order of the world is slave societies with elites propped up by agricultural surplus (though much archaeological evidence suggests this is not the case); nonetheless, that is not the world we live in. Hence, also, the invocation of a “purgative function� in nature—what BAP calls “Nemesis�, and the rest of us call genocide. There is much fantasising about mass slaughter in this work, and certainly you won’t get anywhere near BAP’s ideal society without killing a lot of people. But since such a task requires mechanisation, mass industry—hence capital—and a fully alienated labour force, it hardly qualifies as “Bronze Age�, just capitalism for sociopaths.

*

In case it’s not clear, I think this book is bad. I think it’s delusional. Its posturing is tiresome, its politics are rancid. It is a shame, then, that this is no impediment to its power. In the end, a critical review of a text like this is pointless because arguments like BAPs operate at the level of desire, and desire is part of the infrastructure: community, social context, day-to-day relationships and habits. On the other hand, there is very little organised resistance to fascism in liberal countries, where the assumption seems to be that changing demographics or the mere automatic march of moral reason will solve the problem for us. Perhaps it will, but I have my doubts.]]> 3.83 2018 Bronze Age Mindset
author: Bronze Age Pervert
name: M
average rating: 3.83
book published: 2018
rating: 1
read at: 2023/05/24
date added: 2023/05/24
shelves:
review:
BAP’s primary intellectual reference is, as he proudly wears on his sleeve, Nietzsche; though I found myself occasionally thinking “this is a bit like Heidegger if he was even more racist and an eighth as clever.� I’m not going to bother criticising this text on the basis that it is racist, misogynistic, etc., since these elements of the text are so immediate and unconcealed that its target audience would take this as a compliment. This book isn’t written to persuade an ultra-leftist like me, and it didn’t. We understand each other well enough, then, and I can criticise only where I think it’s interesting to do so.

Nietzsche’s aphoristic style and avowed will-to-spontaneity concealed a surprising degree of rigour. This isn’t to say every part of his corpus displays a unity of thought, just that within a given one of Nietzsche’s polemics, it is difficult to pull out meaningful internal contradictions. The same cannot be said for imitators of his style, who seem to feel it gives them license to self-contradict and gesture vaguely to some idea of dialectical intrigue or artistic exuberance as an excuse. BAP exemplifies this. One example that amused me early on was the claim that the leftist metaphysics of the soul states that “matter can somehow be corruptly configured, and that we all have disembodied souls with male or female essences”—in other words, that transgender people can actually exist. Not long after, however, BAP claims “there are women who were great scientists, but, like women who were great chess players, or poets, they are probably spiritual lesbians,� and later—more explicitly: “Saddam Hussein was like this: he was a transsexual in his soul.� Trans people are a recurring object of scorn in fascist thought because they represent a remainder that cannot be fully incorporated into the system: in so far as transgender identity can be deployed rhetorically to prop up misogynist binaries (the idea of a spiritual lesbian, of a trans Saddam Hussein) they are legitimate objects of discussion, but in the limit their refusal of supposedly natural laws of the body and their existence as malleable social and physical beings renders them as pure anathema to the fascist. Hence the incoherence, which goes all the way down.

This isn’t a trivial nitpick, either—rather a call to be aware of what is happening here, what is always happening here: to be effective, fascist literature must attempt to be artistically compelling because it cannot be intellectually compelling. It must tap into the primordial purpose of reason: to communicate in compelling language what is first grasped intuitively. (Only Kantians believe reason has any implicit relationship to transcendent truth.) This is also why BAP idolises the instinct, insists upon the intuitive (or demonic) spontaneity of genius, and disparages syllogistic reasoning. Much of this text is self-refuting at the level of reasoned argument, which BAP concludes means only that reason is faulty.

I don’t tend to disagree on that point at least. Reason is an instrument of social conformity and not a tool designed to promote the triumph of truth, except occasionally under conditions of great discipline (in scientific endeavour, in some corporate or governmental planning, etc.)—and even then, reason aims at a historically-contingent, utility-determined truth. But in typical fascist style, this premise is the excuse for BAP to just make shit up until his energy is spent. It would be exhausting to examine every lie in this work, and unnecessary. I’m no fan of Sartre, but his analysis of the antisemitic type remains true: “Never believe that anti-Semites are completely unaware of the absurdity of their replies. They know that their remarks are frivolous, open to challenge� They even like to play with discourse for, by giving ridiculous reasons, they discredit the seriousness of their interlocutors. They delight in acting in bad faith, since they seek not to persuade by sound argument but to intimidate and disconcert.�

*

I first tried to read Bronze Age Mindset a few years ago and bounced off within the first few pages. It bored me; it still does. One unfortunate consequence of BAP’s constant callbacks to Nietzsche, Heidegger, Schmitt, Schopenhauer, et al. is that you’re never able to stop comparing him to them, and the comparison is not favourable. BAP’s writing is well-suited to the puffed-up dorks who dream of exalted positions within the new fascist vanguard: shallow, ahistorical, botched “might is right� sloganeering for edgelords. You can imagine what a government run by people like this looks like: not a revival of a “heroic� Bronze Age culture, but a sad continuation of the Leviathan state as it is, perhaps more protectionist, certainly more racist, but nonetheless corporatist, litigious, cramped—with war still won with drones and logistics, with wealth still secured by the abstract transmutation of commodities into money and back again. Capitalism exerts its irresistible force of gravity: BAP’s insistence that a “manly�, piratical age would put an end to the suffocation of industrial society is pure cope. You only need to look at the historical record.

Or you can do it, so to speak, “a priori�. Fascism takes the form of a diseased total state because what it seeks to do is impossible by its own sociology: organise a supposed undifferentiated mass of rabble (i.e. people who broadly just want to be left alone) under the will of an aristocratic band or dictator (i.e. pillagers with delusions of grandeur), instituting military discipline across the social field and securing this order through the use of myth. Perhaps the natural order of the world is slave societies with elites propped up by agricultural surplus (though much archaeological evidence suggests this is not the case); nonetheless, that is not the world we live in. Hence, also, the invocation of a “purgative function� in nature—what BAP calls “Nemesis�, and the rest of us call genocide. There is much fantasising about mass slaughter in this work, and certainly you won’t get anywhere near BAP’s ideal society without killing a lot of people. But since such a task requires mechanisation, mass industry—hence capital—and a fully alienated labour force, it hardly qualifies as “Bronze Age�, just capitalism for sociopaths.

*

In case it’s not clear, I think this book is bad. I think it’s delusional. Its posturing is tiresome, its politics are rancid. It is a shame, then, that this is no impediment to its power. In the end, a critical review of a text like this is pointless because arguments like BAPs operate at the level of desire, and desire is part of the infrastructure: community, social context, day-to-day relationships and habits. On the other hand, there is very little organised resistance to fascism in liberal countries, where the assumption seems to be that changing demographics or the mere automatic march of moral reason will solve the problem for us. Perhaps it will, but I have my doubts.
]]> The Anti-Christ 10774013 86 Friedrich Nietzsche 1936594269 M 0
*

Now let’s talk about antisemitism: while Nietzsche claimed to be an “anti-anti-Semite�, and wrote many amusing quips that can be decontextualised and held up as “proof� that there can be no question of communion between Nietzsche’s thought and antisemitism, The Antichrist is an antisemitic text in the fullest sense of the phrase—and not even subtly. The story of the decadence of modern Europe, as Nietzsche tells it, goes like this: “the Jews� were once a noble race, their god an expression of the strength and supremacy of their people. But when the winds of fortune blew the other way, and as “the Jews� faced extinction as a ruling people, they committed a heinous crime against life itself: they transvaluated all values so that weakness, poverty, and all that was once considered evil was now held up as the true good. And with the “genius of hatred� of Paul, this “illsmelling Jewish poison� took the form of universalising Christianity, which in its spread amongst the “barbarians� and “chandala races� of Europe, completed the final victory of slave values over noble values. Hence the restless modern world of democracy and ahistorical rights claims, of low time-preference and petty politics, of masculinised women and weak, submissive men. If you’ve heard this story before, I’d like you to know that I also spent a lot of time browsing 4chan as a teenager.

I don’t bring this up to argue (obviously) you shouldn’t read Nietzsche or anything like that. But I have always found it strange just how much left-wing Nietzscheans want to deny the antisemitism at work in Nietzsche’s historical-moral analysis. Even if you choose to read his myth of explicitly Jewish revenge as an allegory in some way, there’s no ignoring comments like these: “Really there should not be any choice between Islam and Christianity, any more than between an Arab and a Jew. The decision is given; nobody is free to make any further choice. Either one is a chandala, or one is not.� Googling “chandala� makes for some rewarding reading re: Nietzsche’s reading habits, by the way. But I digress.

*

Nietzsche has to believe in essences (races, heritages, destinies) for his study of genetics to become a practice of diagnostics: “the Jews are…�, “Christians are…�, etc. Except, as I’ve said above, really he doesn’t have to *believe* in such things at all. Like all good opponents of leftism, Nietzsche has only to be adept in the use of signs, in the sophistry of language, in the profession of belief. What matters here is not Christianity, but socialism (or the annihilation of all exclusive privileges), feminism (or the repudiation of the masculine ideal of mastery), and anarchism (or the closing of all distance between noble and slave). To read this as genealogy is to miss the point. Here we are dealing with a snake charmer of the affects, one of the most mendacious there ever was—and watch how he dissimulates! To reduce Christianity and its legacy to a mere reversal of values is necessary for so weak a procedure as a mere counter-reversal to succeed. The proof of the fallacy? It’s resolute failure. Christiandom endures, as an embodiment of the “nobility� Nietzsche holds up as its antithesis. And yet cast your eye over any territory where this mastery prevails today. Doesn’t it wrinkle the nose? Just think of it! Think of the smell!

*

“But that’s not what master morality really means!� says one.

“Nietzsche wanted to overcome both master and slave morality!� says the other.

“remove leftoid remove leftoid woke reviewer shut up globalist judeo bolshevism turn man into woman and kill baby in womb aged 1 day old WITH USURA lib lives in his own bubble and refuses to debate or entertain opposing views but real this fascist the real fascist LEFT WING peasant they want us to apologise for being white but even then� it is too late� you have been cancelled and sent to live in cave iphone 3g radio tower beam communist propogana in to your brain make you think children as young as 4 eligible to vote demonRATS we will find you we will read two lines out of context from judith butler gender trouble hahaha liberal haha globalist when we are when it is over you will be the one who is cancelled� INTO THE GRAVE hahaha, 1000 years liberal read protocols of zion malware read more to find out hahaha leftoid yes you may come our contry�. you may live IN THE ZOO FUCKk ashol communists no good i spit� in the mouth eye of ur flag and contry. 2pac aliv and real strong wizard kill all the communist farm aminal with rap magic now we the conservative rule .ape of the zoo presidant stalin fukc the great satan and lay egg this egg hatch and communism wa;s born. stupid baby form the eggn give bak our clay we will crush u lik a skull of pig. rightism greattst politics� says the third.

*

For my fellow admirers of Deleuze:

THESIS: More than any other of Nietzsche’s texts, the Antichrist reveals why schizoanalysis is such shit therapeutics. Importing almost wholesale Nietzsche’s psychological analysis of resentment, stripped of its antileftist and antidemocratic character, and attempting to reterritorialise it as a critique of psychoanalysis, is bound to result in stupidity. The “priest� is a concept that makes sense in Nietzsche’s genealogy of morals. In Anti-Oedipus, it is an embarrassment, since—generally speaking—leftist models of political economy, not to mention psychology, don’t need to posit the existence of anemic, rabble rousing vampires who “invented� the politics of resentment and envy.

ANTITHESIS: For Deleuze, resentment is not the anger of the oppressed against their oppressors. Revolutionary energy becomes resentment under the conditions of liberal-democratic castration. Priests here are psychologists, politicians, all the petty organisers of the affects under liberalism who agree above all that only a great “No!� can answer even the smallest attempt to combat the suffocation of capital and state. They, the priests, placate anger—they redirect the anger of the oppressed into the spheres of Freudian humanist psychology, of liberal-democratic party politics, etc., draining the power, vampire-like, of the oppressed. Nietzsche’s concept of the priest has been appropriated and turned on its head, weaponised as a critique of the universal slavery that capitalism has unleashed.

SYNTHESIS: Wait, so you’re telling me “The Anti-Oedipus� would have been the superior English translation of the title?

*

I don’t know what else to say about this book. Nietzsche really knows how to construct an insult, how to tell a story, how to produce disgust towards his opponents. This book is worth reading purely as an amusing masterclass in the art of polemic alone: “In the church, finally, diseased barbarism itself gains power—the church, this embodiment of mortal hostility against all integrity, against all elevation of the soul, against all discipline of the spirit, against all frank and gracious humanity.�

But other than that, you will learn very little about Christianity (or, indeed, Judaism) and you will—if you are me, at least—be glad that Nietzsche wrote other things that are much more interesting to think about than the Antichrist.]]> 3.75 1895 The Anti-Christ
author: Friedrich Nietzsche
name: M
average rating: 3.75
book published: 1895
rating: 0
read at: 2023/04/03
date added: 2023/04/07
shelves:
review:
This text is a system of lies. That’s not a rebuttal or an accusation—it’s just a statement of fact. Nietzsche reserves for himself the right to lie, to tell holy lies, to lie to the right ends. So let’s begin with correcting a misunderstanding: strictly speaking, this text isn’t about Christianity at all—Christian language, Christian semiotics, Christian stories are all employed in the service of political metaphor. Nothing is said here about Christianity, which today rules everywhere in service of values Nietzsche would call noble, everywhere against the expansion of rights, against the recognition of ahistorical claims to dignity and property, against democracy, against socialism, against—in short—everything Nietzsche claims Christianity is isomorphic with. Troublesome as the ascendency of reactionary authoritarianism is, you’ve got to laugh at the irony.

*

Now let’s talk about antisemitism: while Nietzsche claimed to be an “anti-anti-Semite�, and wrote many amusing quips that can be decontextualised and held up as “proof� that there can be no question of communion between Nietzsche’s thought and antisemitism, The Antichrist is an antisemitic text in the fullest sense of the phrase—and not even subtly. The story of the decadence of modern Europe, as Nietzsche tells it, goes like this: “the Jews� were once a noble race, their god an expression of the strength and supremacy of their people. But when the winds of fortune blew the other way, and as “the Jews� faced extinction as a ruling people, they committed a heinous crime against life itself: they transvaluated all values so that weakness, poverty, and all that was once considered evil was now held up as the true good. And with the “genius of hatred� of Paul, this “illsmelling Jewish poison� took the form of universalising Christianity, which in its spread amongst the “barbarians� and “chandala races� of Europe, completed the final victory of slave values over noble values. Hence the restless modern world of democracy and ahistorical rights claims, of low time-preference and petty politics, of masculinised women and weak, submissive men. If you’ve heard this story before, I’d like you to know that I also spent a lot of time browsing 4chan as a teenager.

I don’t bring this up to argue (obviously) you shouldn’t read Nietzsche or anything like that. But I have always found it strange just how much left-wing Nietzscheans want to deny the antisemitism at work in Nietzsche’s historical-moral analysis. Even if you choose to read his myth of explicitly Jewish revenge as an allegory in some way, there’s no ignoring comments like these: “Really there should not be any choice between Islam and Christianity, any more than between an Arab and a Jew. The decision is given; nobody is free to make any further choice. Either one is a chandala, or one is not.� Googling “chandala� makes for some rewarding reading re: Nietzsche’s reading habits, by the way. But I digress.

*

Nietzsche has to believe in essences (races, heritages, destinies) for his study of genetics to become a practice of diagnostics: “the Jews are…�, “Christians are…�, etc. Except, as I’ve said above, really he doesn’t have to *believe* in such things at all. Like all good opponents of leftism, Nietzsche has only to be adept in the use of signs, in the sophistry of language, in the profession of belief. What matters here is not Christianity, but socialism (or the annihilation of all exclusive privileges), feminism (or the repudiation of the masculine ideal of mastery), and anarchism (or the closing of all distance between noble and slave). To read this as genealogy is to miss the point. Here we are dealing with a snake charmer of the affects, one of the most mendacious there ever was—and watch how he dissimulates! To reduce Christianity and its legacy to a mere reversal of values is necessary for so weak a procedure as a mere counter-reversal to succeed. The proof of the fallacy? It’s resolute failure. Christiandom endures, as an embodiment of the “nobility� Nietzsche holds up as its antithesis. And yet cast your eye over any territory where this mastery prevails today. Doesn’t it wrinkle the nose? Just think of it! Think of the smell!

*

“But that’s not what master morality really means!� says one.

“Nietzsche wanted to overcome both master and slave morality!� says the other.

“remove leftoid remove leftoid woke reviewer shut up globalist judeo bolshevism turn man into woman and kill baby in womb aged 1 day old WITH USURA lib lives in his own bubble and refuses to debate or entertain opposing views but real this fascist the real fascist LEFT WING peasant they want us to apologise for being white but even then� it is too late� you have been cancelled and sent to live in cave iphone 3g radio tower beam communist propogana in to your brain make you think children as young as 4 eligible to vote demonRATS we will find you we will read two lines out of context from judith butler gender trouble hahaha liberal haha globalist when we are when it is over you will be the one who is cancelled� INTO THE GRAVE hahaha, 1000 years liberal read protocols of zion malware read more to find out hahaha leftoid yes you may come our contry�. you may live IN THE ZOO FUCKk ashol communists no good i spit� in the mouth eye of ur flag and contry. 2pac aliv and real strong wizard kill all the communist farm aminal with rap magic now we the conservative rule .ape of the zoo presidant stalin fukc the great satan and lay egg this egg hatch and communism wa;s born. stupid baby form the eggn give bak our clay we will crush u lik a skull of pig. rightism greattst politics� says the third.

*

For my fellow admirers of Deleuze:

THESIS: More than any other of Nietzsche’s texts, the Antichrist reveals why schizoanalysis is such shit therapeutics. Importing almost wholesale Nietzsche’s psychological analysis of resentment, stripped of its antileftist and antidemocratic character, and attempting to reterritorialise it as a critique of psychoanalysis, is bound to result in stupidity. The “priest� is a concept that makes sense in Nietzsche’s genealogy of morals. In Anti-Oedipus, it is an embarrassment, since—generally speaking—leftist models of political economy, not to mention psychology, don’t need to posit the existence of anemic, rabble rousing vampires who “invented� the politics of resentment and envy.

ANTITHESIS: For Deleuze, resentment is not the anger of the oppressed against their oppressors. Revolutionary energy becomes resentment under the conditions of liberal-democratic castration. Priests here are psychologists, politicians, all the petty organisers of the affects under liberalism who agree above all that only a great “No!� can answer even the smallest attempt to combat the suffocation of capital and state. They, the priests, placate anger—they redirect the anger of the oppressed into the spheres of Freudian humanist psychology, of liberal-democratic party politics, etc., draining the power, vampire-like, of the oppressed. Nietzsche’s concept of the priest has been appropriated and turned on its head, weaponised as a critique of the universal slavery that capitalism has unleashed.

SYNTHESIS: Wait, so you’re telling me “The Anti-Oedipus� would have been the superior English translation of the title?

*

I don’t know what else to say about this book. Nietzsche really knows how to construct an insult, how to tell a story, how to produce disgust towards his opponents. This book is worth reading purely as an amusing masterclass in the art of polemic alone: “In the church, finally, diseased barbarism itself gains power—the church, this embodiment of mortal hostility against all integrity, against all elevation of the soul, against all discipline of the spirit, against all frank and gracious humanity.�

But other than that, you will learn very little about Christianity (or, indeed, Judaism) and you will—if you are me, at least—be glad that Nietzsche wrote other things that are much more interesting to think about than the Antichrist.
]]> <![CDATA[The Mediterranean and the Mediterranean World in the Age of Philip II]]> 945720 690 Fernand Braudel 0060159588 M 0 to-read 4.21 1949 The Mediterranean and the Mediterranean World in the Age of Philip II
author: Fernand Braudel
name: M
average rating: 4.21
book published: 1949
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2023/04/01
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> <![CDATA[Setting Up & Running a Limited Company: 4th edition]]> 915584 Robert Browning 1857038665 M 0 2.33 2003 Setting Up & Running a Limited Company: 4th edition
author: Robert Browning
name: M
average rating: 2.33
book published: 2003
rating: 0
read at: 2023/03/14
date added: 2023/03/14
shelves:
review:

]]> <![CDATA[Annihilation (Southern Reach, #1)]]> 17934530 Annihilation, the first volume of Jeff VanderMeer's Southern Reach Trilogy, we join the twelfth expedition.

The group is made up of four women: an anthropologist; a surveyor; a psychologist, the de facto leader; and our narrator, a biologist. Their mission is to map the terrain, record all observations of their surroundings and of one another, and, above all, avoid being contaminated by Area X itself.

They arrive expecting the unexpected, and Area X delivers—but it’s the surprises that came across the border with them and the secrets the expedition members are keeping from one another that change everything.]]> 195 Jeff VanderMeer 0374104093 M 4 3.79 2014 Annihilation (Southern Reach, #1)
author: Jeff VanderMeer
name: M
average rating: 3.79
book published: 2014
rating: 4
read at: 2023/02/10
date added: 2023/02/10
shelves:
review:

]]> Cosmic Pessimism (Univocal) 25362752 Cosmic Pessimism explores the varieties of pessimism and its often-conflicted relation to philosophy. “Crying, laughing, sleeping—what other responses are adequate to a life that is so indifferent?�


]]> 76 Eugene Thacker 193756147X M 3
A book of aphorisms is always risky because the nature of the format encourages the publishing of some eye roll-worthy shitters, which this book definitely contains. Luckily, Thacker also has some bangers like the above to make up for it.

Entertaining and brief read. Recommended for the 2am bouts of insomnia you have no choice but to sink into.]]> 3.70 2015 Cosmic Pessimism (Univocal)
author: Eugene Thacker
name: M
average rating: 3.70
book published: 2015
rating: 3
read at: 2023/02/05
date added: 2023/02/05
shelves:
review:
“Philosophers are often book lovers, though not all book lovers are alike. The distance that separates the bibliophile from the bibliomaniac is the same distance that separates the optimist from the pessimist.�

A book of aphorisms is always risky because the nature of the format encourages the publishing of some eye roll-worthy shitters, which this book definitely contains. Luckily, Thacker also has some bangers like the above to make up for it.

Entertaining and brief read. Recommended for the 2am bouts of insomnia you have no choice but to sink into.
]]> No Longer Human 194746 No Longer Human, this leading postwar Japanese writer's second novel, tells the poignant and fascinating story of a young man who is caught between the breakup of the traditions of a northern Japanese aristocratic family and the impact of Western ideas. In consequence, he feels himself "disqualified from being human" (a literal translation of the Japanese title).

Donald Keene, who translated this and Dazai's first novel, The Setting Sun, has said of the author's work: "His world � suggests Chekhov or possibly postwar France, � but there is a Japanese sensibility in the choice and presentation of the material. A Dazai novel is at once immediately intelligible in Western terms and quite unlike any Western book." His writing is in some ways reminiscent of Rimbaud, while he himself has often been called a forerunner of Yukio Mishima.

Cover painting by Noe Nojechowiz, from the collection of John and Barbara Duncan; design by Gertrude Huston]]> 176 Osamu Dazai M 3
[review to follow upon emotional recovery]]]> 3.99 1948 No Longer Human
author: Osamu Dazai
name: M
average rating: 3.99
book published: 1948
rating: 3
read at: 2023/02/05
date added: 2023/02/05
shelves:
review:
oh boy

[review to follow upon emotional recovery]
]]> <![CDATA[The Marriage of Cadmus and Harmony (Penguin Modern Classics)]]> 43201749 The Marriage of Cadmus and Harmony is a masterful retelling of the ancient myths and fables we may only think we know. From the tale of Europa and the bull to the fall of Troy, Roberto Calasso weaves his way through the entire world of Greek mythology with a captivating sense of curiosity and intrigue that casts these classical stories in a whole new light for a modern reader.]]> 416 Roberto Calasso 0241399203 M 0 to-read 4.20 1988 The Marriage of Cadmus and Harmony (Penguin Modern Classics)
author: Roberto Calasso
name: M
average rating: 4.20
book published: 1988
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2022/11/28
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> <![CDATA[Europe and the People Without History]]> 40625 534 Eric R. Wolf 0520048989 M 0 to-read 4.13 1982 Europe and the People Without History
author: Eric R. Wolf
name: M
average rating: 4.13
book published: 1982
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2022/05/29
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> Dialogues on Power and Space 26533598 120 Carl Schmitt 0745688691 M 0 to-read 3.70 1954 Dialogues on Power and Space
author: Carl Schmitt
name: M
average rating: 3.70
book published: 1954
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2022/05/24
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> <![CDATA[Time, Labor, and Social Domination: A Reinterpretation of Marx's Critical Theory]]> 336123 440 Moishe Postone 0521565405 M 0 currently-reading 4.26 1993 Time, Labor, and Social Domination: A Reinterpretation of Marx's Critical Theory
author: Moishe Postone
name: M
average rating: 4.26
book published: 1993
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2022/05/20
shelves: currently-reading
review:

]]> <![CDATA[The Formation of a Persecuting Society: Authority and Deviance in Western Europe 950-1250]]> 712197 In this new edition, R. I. Moore updates and extends his original argument with a new, final chapter, “A Persecuting Society�. Here and in a new preface and critical bibliography, he considers the impact of a generation’s research and refines his conception of the “persecuting society� accordingly, addressing criticisms of the first edition.]]> 240 R.I. Moore 1405129646 M 4 3.95 1988 The Formation of a Persecuting Society: Authority and Deviance in Western Europe 950-1250
author: R.I. Moore
name: M
average rating: 3.95
book published: 1988
rating: 4
read at: 2022/05/18
date added: 2022/05/18
shelves:
review:

]]> <![CDATA[Capitalism: Competition, Conflict, Crises]]> 26401204
In Capitalism, Anwar Shaikh takes a different approach. He demonstrates that most of the central propositions of economic analysis can be derived without any reference to standard devices such as hyperrationality, optimization, perfect competition, perfect information, representative agents, or so-called rational expectations. This perspective allows him to look afresh at virtually all the elements of economic analysis: the laws of demand and supply, the determination of wage and profit rates, technological change, relative prices, interest rates, bond and equity prices, exchange rates, terms and balance of trade, growth, unemployment, inflation, and long booms culminating in recurrent general crises.

In every case, Shaikh's innovative theory is applied to modern empirical patterns and contrasted with neoclassical, Keynesian, and Post-Keynesian approaches to the same issues. Shaikh's object of analysis is the economics of capitalism, and he explores the subject in this expansive light. This is how the classical economists, as well as Keynes and Kalecki, approached the issue. Anyone interested in capitalism and economics in general can gain a wealth of knowledge from this ground-breaking text.
]]> 1024 Anwar Shaikh 0199390630 M 0 to-read 4.52 2016 Capitalism: Competition, Conflict, Crises
author: Anwar Shaikh
name: M
average rating: 4.52
book published: 2016
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2022/05/16
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> <![CDATA[Essays on Marx's Theory Of Value (Trans from Russian)]]> 185278 275 Isaak Illich Rubin 0919618189 M 0 to-read 4.44 1923 Essays on Marx's Theory Of Value (Trans from Russian)
author: Isaak Illich Rubin
name: M
average rating: 4.44
book published: 1923
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2022/05/14
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> <![CDATA[There's No Such Thing as "The Economy": Essays on Capitalist Value]]> 42436940 166 Samuel A. Chambers 1947447890 M 4 political-economy 4.12 There's No Such Thing as "The Economy": Essays on Capitalist Value
author: Samuel A. Chambers
name: M
average rating: 4.12
book published:
rating: 4
read at: 2022/05/14
date added: 2022/05/14
shelves: political-economy
review:

]]> The Mirror of Production 290936 167 Jean Baudrillard 0914386069 M 0 to-read 3.86 1973 The Mirror of Production
author: Jean Baudrillard
name: M
average rating: 3.86
book published: 1973
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2022/04/19
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> <![CDATA[The Philosophy of Mathematics: An Introductory Essay (Hutchinson University Library. Philosophy.)]]> 1638944 The Review of Metaphysics praised this volume as "a lucid and stimulating essay which combines accuracy and sophistication with a minimum of technical language." Compact but comprehensive, this nontechnical introduction will appeal to professionals, students, and other readers interested in the intersection of philosophical problems with pure and applied mathematics.]]> 198 Stephan Körner 0486250482 M 0 to-read 3.53 1960 The Philosophy of Mathematics: An Introductory Essay (Hutchinson University Library. Philosophy.)
author: Stephan Körner
name: M
average rating: 3.53
book published: 1960
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2022/04/12
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> Job: A New Translation 44174554 This revelatory new translation of Job by one of the world’s leading biblical scholars will reshape the way we read this canonical text

The book of Job has often been called the greatest poem ever written. The book, in Edward Greenstein’s characterization, is “a Wunderkind, a genius emerging out of the confluence of two literary streams� which “dazzles like Shakespeare with unrivaled vocabulary and a penchant for linguistic innovation.� Despite the text’s literary prestige and cultural prominence, no English translation has come close to conveying the proper sense of the original. The book has consequently been misunderstood in innumerable details and in its main themes.

Edward Greenstein’s new translation of Job is the culmination of decades of intensive research and painstaking philological and literary analysis, offering a major reinterpretation of this canonical text. Through his beautifully rendered translation and insightful introduction and commentary, Greenstein presents a new perspective: Job, he shows, was defiant of God until the end. The book is more about speaking truth to power than the problem of unjust suffering.]]> 248 Edward L. Greenstein 0300162340 M 5 I stand, and you just look at me.
You have turned cruel against me;
With your brute power you obstruct me.
You lift me to be carried off by the wind,
And you sweep me away in a tempest."
� Job 30:20-22

"I'm announcing loudly: 'I don't know what's going wrong!'
I've tried turning it off and then turning it back on!"
� Cheekface, No Connection

It was on the way to meet a friend in the city that I was intercepted by a street evangelist. "Are you a believer?" he asked, and before my brain could tell my mouth to shut up, I answered: "No." As a policy I don't debate religion with free-roaming theists, so instead I resigned myself to responding vaguely for however long it took for him to decide he'd started me on a conversion journey. This world, he instructed me, could not have come about by chance. It is too beautiful, too functional, too remarkable to be an accident—gravity, he said, was fine-tuned to one in a billion (whatever that means). He handed me a leaflet for his church and, with one last warning that I would burn in Hell forever if I didn't let the Christian deity into my heart, he said a cheerful goodbye.

At times like that, I think of the Book of Job.

In case you're not familiar, Job is the story of a man "whole in heart and straight of path", a servant of God who (it seems) is uniquely sinless. In the prologue, the heavenly accuser, the Satan, gets permission from God to kill Job's children and destroy his estate as a test of faith. When Job responds to this with superhuman equanimity ("YHWH has given, and YHWH has taken. May the name of YHWH be blessed."), the Satan attacks him personally. Job is plagued with rotting skin and festering boils. His corrupted flesh marks him as an outcast: once a man who lived in honour and affection, Job becomes a social pariah, repellant even to his wife. "Can we accept the good from Elohim and not accept the bad?" says Job, but his patience will not last long. His friends visit him but cannot find anything comforting to say and, after a week of silence, Job throws down the gauntlet. He knows he is innocent, and he knows his suffering is an arbitrary attack from a capricious and amoral God. No less than a meeting with the deity will convince him otherwise. Job's friends try by various means to talk Job down, insisting that God only punishes the wicked, and that there must be some sin Job has committed to earn His ire. The reader knows this is not true, of course, and when God does appear, He neither tells Job about the Satan's test, nor does He offer a consoling explanation of divine justice. Instead He says, more or less, that the strong owe no explanations to the weak, and this whole world is His property to play with as He likes. In the typical reading, this is where Job "repents" (for what exactly?)* and God restores him to twice his previous glory—ten new children and a whole lot of cattle. Job receives this reward for speaking the "truth" about God, while Job’s friends narrowly escape punishment for lying about God’s nature. Bear that in mind; we'll return to it.

Typical Christian readings of this tale cast Job as a man of faith* and patience, or they argue he is correctly put in his place for demanding God explain His unprovoked attack on Job's life and honour. God's plan is unknowable, these readings say, and His boastful, contemptuous ranting at the close of the book demonstrates just how beyond our understanding He is. We can rest assured, however, that His designs are ultimately benevolent: the wicked will not prosper in the next life, and the just will repose in unending happiness with well-formed souls. In so far as this reading can be ascribed to the text, it can only be done by somebody who has never truly read Job. You see, Job's friends offer the "God is good" boilerplate and are consequently threatened with an unseemly fate. That’s rather funny, but this moment troubles me, and it has for a long time. If God valued only meek obedience, Job's honesty would earn him no quarter, let alone a reward. His friends, in the meantime, would not have their lives threatened, despite their mistaken grasp of God's motivations. On the other hand, Job's honesty seems to offend God—how many people does He feel the need to explain himself to? How many people who preach his benevolence does He feel the need to punish? If Job is so insignificant, why does God regard him with such pride in the prologue? I don't have answers here, only questions.

*

If Job is a theodicy, it is a remarkably honest one. "Theodicy" means justification, or vindication, of God. Theodicies address the so-called "problem" of evil, and seek to explain why a just God would set this globe spinning and populate it only to let its inhabitants suffer. A typically facile theodicy is the rationalism of Leibniz, who took as his starting point the view that God is all-powerful, all-knowing and infinitely good, so by definition this world must be the best of all possible worlds. This presupposes a human conception of "good" that is nowhere in Job, which instead presents a God who is not concerned with an abstract "good", but personal right, a mastery that will not recognize the moral claims of "dust and ashes"—human beings. In a certain sense, Job is really an anti-theodicy: God needs no vindication from us. To understand where God is coming from, you need only imagine what would happen if an ant submitted a letter of complaint to a construction company for destroying its nest. Morality does not meaningfully operate when such disparities of power, right, and interest are present. What theodicies would the non-human inhabitants of the natural world write? And how miserable would they make us to read?

This brings me back to the street evangelist. He, like many other (but by no means all) religious people, believes in a version of God whose contradictions amount to impossibility. This benevolent being manufactured a world so complicated that its very existence attests to His goodness. He will forgive any sin, pardon any transgression. But in His infinite moral wisdom, He sees no problem in subjecting his creations to infinite torment if they simply fail to believe in Him. This doesn't sound like a relationship of respect or care; it sounds like a relationship of despotic power. One that Job—because of, and not in spite of, his fundamental moral and intellectual decency—was happy to denounce to the face of the deity.

All relationships of despotic power have rationalisations, vindications, dogmatic defenses. But Job is ultimately rewarded for fighting* even as he correctly grasped the futility of his case. I wonder if there is some lesson that can be taken from this.

-- NOTES --

(1) A quick note on Job's "repentance"—Greenstein, the translator, renders Job's final lines as: "That is why I am fed up; I take pity on "dust and ashes!" (emphasis mine). After hearing God belittle him as an insignificant nothing from a species of dubious value and little interest, Job—far from repenting�expresses defiance. God is pitiless; Job knows this from hard experience. He will not be cowed into expressing a view of God that is at odds with His behaviour. It seems that this may be what earns Job his reward.

(2) Certainly it is interesting that Job does not abandon a belief in God. What he does is far more radical, denouncing God as being uninterested in human standards of justice, if not an actual sadist (see some of Job’s more impassioned rants about the injustice of being born).

(3) There's something troubling in this reading in that it’s the deity he challenges who rewards him. Hard to imagine an oil company rewarding you for [REDACTED], for example.]]> 4.34 -700 Job: A New Translation
author: Edward L. Greenstein
name: M
average rating: 4.34
book published: -700
rating: 5
read at: 2022/03/21
date added: 2022/03/21
shelves:
review:
"I cry out to you, but you do not answer;
I stand, and you just look at me.
You have turned cruel against me;
With your brute power you obstruct me.
You lift me to be carried off by the wind,
And you sweep me away in a tempest."
� Job 30:20-22

"I'm announcing loudly: 'I don't know what's going wrong!'
I've tried turning it off and then turning it back on!"
� Cheekface, No Connection

It was on the way to meet a friend in the city that I was intercepted by a street evangelist. "Are you a believer?" he asked, and before my brain could tell my mouth to shut up, I answered: "No." As a policy I don't debate religion with free-roaming theists, so instead I resigned myself to responding vaguely for however long it took for him to decide he'd started me on a conversion journey. This world, he instructed me, could not have come about by chance. It is too beautiful, too functional, too remarkable to be an accident—gravity, he said, was fine-tuned to one in a billion (whatever that means). He handed me a leaflet for his church and, with one last warning that I would burn in Hell forever if I didn't let the Christian deity into my heart, he said a cheerful goodbye.

At times like that, I think of the Book of Job.

In case you're not familiar, Job is the story of a man "whole in heart and straight of path", a servant of God who (it seems) is uniquely sinless. In the prologue, the heavenly accuser, the Satan, gets permission from God to kill Job's children and destroy his estate as a test of faith. When Job responds to this with superhuman equanimity ("YHWH has given, and YHWH has taken. May the name of YHWH be blessed."), the Satan attacks him personally. Job is plagued with rotting skin and festering boils. His corrupted flesh marks him as an outcast: once a man who lived in honour and affection, Job becomes a social pariah, repellant even to his wife. "Can we accept the good from Elohim and not accept the bad?" says Job, but his patience will not last long. His friends visit him but cannot find anything comforting to say and, after a week of silence, Job throws down the gauntlet. He knows he is innocent, and he knows his suffering is an arbitrary attack from a capricious and amoral God. No less than a meeting with the deity will convince him otherwise. Job's friends try by various means to talk Job down, insisting that God only punishes the wicked, and that there must be some sin Job has committed to earn His ire. The reader knows this is not true, of course, and when God does appear, He neither tells Job about the Satan's test, nor does He offer a consoling explanation of divine justice. Instead He says, more or less, that the strong owe no explanations to the weak, and this whole world is His property to play with as He likes. In the typical reading, this is where Job "repents" (for what exactly?)* and God restores him to twice his previous glory—ten new children and a whole lot of cattle. Job receives this reward for speaking the "truth" about God, while Job’s friends narrowly escape punishment for lying about God’s nature. Bear that in mind; we'll return to it.

Typical Christian readings of this tale cast Job as a man of faith* and patience, or they argue he is correctly put in his place for demanding God explain His unprovoked attack on Job's life and honour. God's plan is unknowable, these readings say, and His boastful, contemptuous ranting at the close of the book demonstrates just how beyond our understanding He is. We can rest assured, however, that His designs are ultimately benevolent: the wicked will not prosper in the next life, and the just will repose in unending happiness with well-formed souls. In so far as this reading can be ascribed to the text, it can only be done by somebody who has never truly read Job. You see, Job's friends offer the "God is good" boilerplate and are consequently threatened with an unseemly fate. That’s rather funny, but this moment troubles me, and it has for a long time. If God valued only meek obedience, Job's honesty would earn him no quarter, let alone a reward. His friends, in the meantime, would not have their lives threatened, despite their mistaken grasp of God's motivations. On the other hand, Job's honesty seems to offend God—how many people does He feel the need to explain himself to? How many people who preach his benevolence does He feel the need to punish? If Job is so insignificant, why does God regard him with such pride in the prologue? I don't have answers here, only questions.

*

If Job is a theodicy, it is a remarkably honest one. "Theodicy" means justification, or vindication, of God. Theodicies address the so-called "problem" of evil, and seek to explain why a just God would set this globe spinning and populate it only to let its inhabitants suffer. A typically facile theodicy is the rationalism of Leibniz, who took as his starting point the view that God is all-powerful, all-knowing and infinitely good, so by definition this world must be the best of all possible worlds. This presupposes a human conception of "good" that is nowhere in Job, which instead presents a God who is not concerned with an abstract "good", but personal right, a mastery that will not recognize the moral claims of "dust and ashes"—human beings. In a certain sense, Job is really an anti-theodicy: God needs no vindication from us. To understand where God is coming from, you need only imagine what would happen if an ant submitted a letter of complaint to a construction company for destroying its nest. Morality does not meaningfully operate when such disparities of power, right, and interest are present. What theodicies would the non-human inhabitants of the natural world write? And how miserable would they make us to read?

This brings me back to the street evangelist. He, like many other (but by no means all) religious people, believes in a version of God whose contradictions amount to impossibility. This benevolent being manufactured a world so complicated that its very existence attests to His goodness. He will forgive any sin, pardon any transgression. But in His infinite moral wisdom, He sees no problem in subjecting his creations to infinite torment if they simply fail to believe in Him. This doesn't sound like a relationship of respect or care; it sounds like a relationship of despotic power. One that Job—because of, and not in spite of, his fundamental moral and intellectual decency—was happy to denounce to the face of the deity.

All relationships of despotic power have rationalisations, vindications, dogmatic defenses. But Job is ultimately rewarded for fighting* even as he correctly grasped the futility of his case. I wonder if there is some lesson that can be taken from this.

-- NOTES --

(1) A quick note on Job's "repentance"—Greenstein, the translator, renders Job's final lines as: "That is why I am fed up; I take pity on "dust and ashes!" (emphasis mine). After hearing God belittle him as an insignificant nothing from a species of dubious value and little interest, Job—far from repenting�expresses defiance. God is pitiless; Job knows this from hard experience. He will not be cowed into expressing a view of God that is at odds with His behaviour. It seems that this may be what earns Job his reward.

(2) Certainly it is interesting that Job does not abandon a belief in God. What he does is far more radical, denouncing God as being uninterested in human standards of justice, if not an actual sadist (see some of Job’s more impassioned rants about the injustice of being born).

(3) There's something troubling in this reading in that it’s the deity he challenges who rewards him. Hard to imagine an oil company rewarding you for [REDACTED], for example.
]]> <![CDATA[Open Veins of Latin America: Five Centuries of the Pillage of a Continent]]> 187149
Rather than chronology, geography, or political successions, Eduardo Galeano has organized the various facets of Latin American history according to the patterns of five centuries of exploitation. Thus he is concerned with gold and silver, cacao and cotton, rubber and coffee, fruit, hides and wool, petroleum, iron, nickel, manganese, copper, aluminum ore, nitrates, and tin. These are the veins which he traces through the body of the entire continent, up to the Rio Grande and throughout the Caribbean, and all the way to their open ends where they empty into the coffers of wealth in the United States and Europe.

Weaving fact and imagery into a rich tapestry, Galeano fuses scientific analysis with the passions of a plundered and suffering people. An immense gathering of materials is framed with a vigorous style that never falters in its command of themes. All readers interested in great historical, economic, political, and social writing will find a singular analytical achievement, and an overwhelming narrative that makes history speak, unforgettably.

This classic is now further honored by Isabel Allende’s inspiring introduction. Universally recognized as one of the most important writers of our time, Allende once again contributes her talents to literature, to political principles, and to enlightenment.]]> 317 Eduardo Galeano 0853459916 M 0 to-read 4.31 1971 Open Veins of Latin America: Five Centuries of the Pillage of a Continent
author: Eduardo Galeano
name: M
average rating: 4.31
book published: 1971
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2022/03/10
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> The Symposium 81779
In the course of a lively drinking party, a group of Athenian intellectuals exchange views on eros, or desire. From their conversation emerges a series of subtle reflections on gender roles, sex in society and the sublimation of basic human instincts. The discussion culminates in a radical challenge to conventional views by Plato's mentor, Socrates, who advocates transcendence through spiritual love. The Symposium is a deft interweaving of different viewpoints and ideas about the nature of love--as a response to beauty, a cosmic force, a motive for social action and as a means of ethical education.

For more than seventy years, Penguin has been the leading publisher of classic literature in the English-speaking world. With more than 1,700 titles, Penguin Classics represents a global bookshelf of the best works throughout history and across genres and disciplines. Readers trust the series to provide authoritative texts enhanced by introductions and notes by distinguished scholars and contemporary authors, as well as up-to-date translations by award-winning translators.]]> 90 Plato 0140449272 M 3 � Plato, Symposium

“Love is a process of the incomprehensible human soul: love also incomprehensible, but still only a process. The process should work to a completion, not to some horror of intensification and extremity wherein the soul and body ultimately perish.�
� D. H. Lawrence, Aaron's Rod

“because I prayed
this word:
I want�
� Sappho, If Not, Winter: Fragments of Sappho

If there is something the Platonic eye cannot petrify, a process it cannot transform into a monstrous reflection of crystalline “reason�, then I haven’t found it. Love, to Plato, is nothing more than the narcissistic flower of mortality: “Why is reproduction the object of love?� Diotima asks Socrates. “Because reproduction is the closest mortals can come to being permanently alive and immortal.� There are several bones to pick with this claim, but what vexed me most was the suggestion that value attends only to that which can participate in the eternal, and that this calculation is the motor of one of the most fundamental human drives. I prefer the formulation of Deleuze and Guattari: “We always make love with worlds. And our love addresses itself to this libidinal property of our lover, to either close himself off or open up to more spacious worlds, to masses and large aggregates.�* The “object� of love is not the “Good�, the “Beautiful�, infinity, eternity, or any of the other lifeless Platonic phantasms. Love knows nothing of eternity. Only now, and now, and now. And the experience of love is not that of gazing into some abstract structure, one that just so happens to have articulated itself in this person or this text. In love, one is set in motion; one explores a world.

I’d argue the only person in this dialogue who represents a genuine experience of love is Alcibiades, who drunkenly crashes the party and finds Socrates there. Eschewing the demand to talk about love in the abstract, Alcibiades elects instead to discuss Socrates. In the speech that follows, Alcibiades reveals that he has an unrequited romantic and sexual attraction to Socrates, who is not at all interested in using this to “gratify� himself. Instead, he wishes to give Alcibiades moral instruction. For Plato, this section serves a political as well as a didactic function: Socrates was condemned to death (sort of*) for corrupting the youth of Athens. Plato, through Alcibiades, instead casts Socrates as a chaste and selfless teacher, someone whose moral influence on young men could only be positive. The speech is also an attempt to prove the truth of Socrates� perspective on love. Socrates–who understands love essentially as reproductive and utilitarian–is composed and always sober. Alcibiades, meanwhile, is drunk, passionate. He embarasses himself in front of everybody. You are meant to admire Socrates and feel his example is worth following, but I felt that Alcibiades is the only remotely human person to feature in this story. This is appropriate, since ethical Platonism is fit only for machines. Nietzsche: “The most blinding light of day: reason at any price; life made clear, cold, cautious, conscious, without instincts, opposed to the instincts, was in itself only a disease, another kind of disease—and by no means a return to "virtue," to "health," and to happiness.�*

The other speeches and myths that feature in the Symposium exist, essentially, so that Socrates can dismiss them all as aesthetic lies. Love, to Plato, is not revealed by stories about divided humans searching for their other halves, or speculation about an unstoppable army composed entirely of lovers. Certainly the speech givers are sophists, and their idealised visions of love grate. The critical issue is the ignorance of transience: those lovers in that fantastical army may find their successes disappear when relationships fray; those humans who long to be reattached to their other halves may find the humans they later become long only for distance. To her credit, Diotima notes that a person is reborn many times over a supposedly single life: “Although he is called the same person, he never has the same constituents� This applies not only to the body but also to the mind.� But then what, exactly, participates in immortality in the act of reproduction? Plato’s immortal lover is a fleeting thing, a moment trying to become an eternity. This dialogue reeks of the fear of impermanence. “It reeks of the great death and the little ego.�*

Nevertheless, this text is sometimes beautiful, entertaining, funny, and brief enough to be worth reading to see whether any of Plato’s characters strike a chord with you. Still, love is better understood by participating in it than by imprisoning it in a fixed idea. Better to be Alcibiades than Socrates.

- - - - -
NOTES:

(1) Deleuze and Guattari, Anti-Oedipus

(2) Robin Wakefield, Why Socrates Died: Dispelling the Myths. Wakefield argues that Socrates� trial and execution was actually linked to his antidemocratic politics and his actions during the Peloponnesian War. “Corrupting the youth� seems to be a common, sufficiently vague accusation for the prosecution to use to secure Socrates� condemnation–not, indeed, the actual reason this ancient Ben Shapiro was forced to drink hemlock.

(3) Friedrich Nietzsche, Twilight of the Idols / The Anti-Christ

(4) Deleuze and Guattari, Anti-Oedipus]]> 4.11 -380 The Symposium
author: Plato
name: M
average rating: 4.11
book published: -380
rating: 3
read at: 2022/03/09
date added: 2022/03/09
shelves:
review:
““‘To sum up then,� she said, “love is the desire to have the good forever.’”�
� Plato, Symposium

“Love is a process of the incomprehensible human soul: love also incomprehensible, but still only a process. The process should work to a completion, not to some horror of intensification and extremity wherein the soul and body ultimately perish.�
� D. H. Lawrence, Aaron's Rod

“because I prayed
this word:
I want�
� Sappho, If Not, Winter: Fragments of Sappho

If there is something the Platonic eye cannot petrify, a process it cannot transform into a monstrous reflection of crystalline “reason�, then I haven’t found it. Love, to Plato, is nothing more than the narcissistic flower of mortality: “Why is reproduction the object of love?� Diotima asks Socrates. “Because reproduction is the closest mortals can come to being permanently alive and immortal.� There are several bones to pick with this claim, but what vexed me most was the suggestion that value attends only to that which can participate in the eternal, and that this calculation is the motor of one of the most fundamental human drives. I prefer the formulation of Deleuze and Guattari: “We always make love with worlds. And our love addresses itself to this libidinal property of our lover, to either close himself off or open up to more spacious worlds, to masses and large aggregates.�* The “object� of love is not the “Good�, the “Beautiful�, infinity, eternity, or any of the other lifeless Platonic phantasms. Love knows nothing of eternity. Only now, and now, and now. And the experience of love is not that of gazing into some abstract structure, one that just so happens to have articulated itself in this person or this text. In love, one is set in motion; one explores a world.

I’d argue the only person in this dialogue who represents a genuine experience of love is Alcibiades, who drunkenly crashes the party and finds Socrates there. Eschewing the demand to talk about love in the abstract, Alcibiades elects instead to discuss Socrates. In the speech that follows, Alcibiades reveals that he has an unrequited romantic and sexual attraction to Socrates, who is not at all interested in using this to “gratify� himself. Instead, he wishes to give Alcibiades moral instruction. For Plato, this section serves a political as well as a didactic function: Socrates was condemned to death (sort of*) for corrupting the youth of Athens. Plato, through Alcibiades, instead casts Socrates as a chaste and selfless teacher, someone whose moral influence on young men could only be positive. The speech is also an attempt to prove the truth of Socrates� perspective on love. Socrates–who understands love essentially as reproductive and utilitarian–is composed and always sober. Alcibiades, meanwhile, is drunk, passionate. He embarasses himself in front of everybody. You are meant to admire Socrates and feel his example is worth following, but I felt that Alcibiades is the only remotely human person to feature in this story. This is appropriate, since ethical Platonism is fit only for machines. Nietzsche: “The most blinding light of day: reason at any price; life made clear, cold, cautious, conscious, without instincts, opposed to the instincts, was in itself only a disease, another kind of disease—and by no means a return to "virtue," to "health," and to happiness.�*

The other speeches and myths that feature in the Symposium exist, essentially, so that Socrates can dismiss them all as aesthetic lies. Love, to Plato, is not revealed by stories about divided humans searching for their other halves, or speculation about an unstoppable army composed entirely of lovers. Certainly the speech givers are sophists, and their idealised visions of love grate. The critical issue is the ignorance of transience: those lovers in that fantastical army may find their successes disappear when relationships fray; those humans who long to be reattached to their other halves may find the humans they later become long only for distance. To her credit, Diotima notes that a person is reborn many times over a supposedly single life: “Although he is called the same person, he never has the same constituents� This applies not only to the body but also to the mind.� But then what, exactly, participates in immortality in the act of reproduction? Plato’s immortal lover is a fleeting thing, a moment trying to become an eternity. This dialogue reeks of the fear of impermanence. “It reeks of the great death and the little ego.�*

Nevertheless, this text is sometimes beautiful, entertaining, funny, and brief enough to be worth reading to see whether any of Plato’s characters strike a chord with you. Still, love is better understood by participating in it than by imprisoning it in a fixed idea. Better to be Alcibiades than Socrates.

- - - - -
NOTES:

(1) Deleuze and Guattari, Anti-Oedipus

(2) Robin Wakefield, Why Socrates Died: Dispelling the Myths. Wakefield argues that Socrates� trial and execution was actually linked to his antidemocratic politics and his actions during the Peloponnesian War. “Corrupting the youth� seems to be a common, sufficiently vague accusation for the prosecution to use to secure Socrates� condemnation–not, indeed, the actual reason this ancient Ben Shapiro was forced to drink hemlock.

(3) Friedrich Nietzsche, Twilight of the Idols / The Anti-Christ

(4) Deleuze and Guattari, Anti-Oedipus
]]> The Cancer Journals 52692569
The Cancer Journals is an intimate, poetic and invigorating account of the experience of breast cancer, from biopsy to mastectomy, told by the great feminist and activist Audre Lorde.

Moving between journal entry, memoir, and essay, Lorde fuses the personal and political to reflect on the many questions breast cancer questions of survival, sexuality, prosthesis and self-care. It is a journey of survival, friendship, and self-acceptance.

'Grief, terror, courage, the passion for survival and for more than survival, are here in the searchings of a great poet' Adrienne Rich

'This book teaches me that with one breast or none, I am still me' Alice Walker]]> 71 Audre Lorde 024145350X M 5 4.50 1980 The Cancer Journals
author: Audre Lorde
name: M
average rating: 4.50
book published: 1980
rating: 5
read at: 2022/02/23
date added: 2022/02/23
shelves:
review:

]]> The Anatomy of Melancholy 557658 1392 Robert Burton 0940322668 M 3 4.17 1621 The Anatomy of Melancholy
author: Robert Burton
name: M
average rating: 4.17
book published: 1621
rating: 3
read at: 2022/02/22
date added: 2022/02/23
shelves:
review:

]]> Capitalism & Slavery 178651
Eric Williams advanced these powerful ideas in Capitalism and Slavery, published in 1944. Years ahead of its time, his profound critique became the foundation for studies of imperialism and economic development.

Binding an economic view of history with strong moral argument, Williams's study of the role of slavery in financing the Industrial Revolution refuted traditional ideas of economic and moral progress and firmly established the centrality of the African slave trade in European economic development. He also showed that mature industrial capitalism in turn helped destroy the slave system. Establishing the exploitation of commercial capitalism and its link to racial attitudes, Williams employed a historicist vision that set the tone for future studies.

In a new introduction, Colin Palmer assesses the lasting impact of Williams's groundbreaking work and analyzes the heated scholarly debates it generated when it first appeared.]]> 307 Eric Williams 0807844888 M 0 currently-reading 4.25 1944 Capitalism & Slavery
author: Eric Williams
name: M
average rating: 4.25
book published: 1944
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2022/02/22
shelves: currently-reading
review:

]]> <![CDATA[Imperialism: The Highest Stage of Capitalism]]> 179609 Imperialism: The Highest Stage of Capitalism was one of the first attempts to account for the increasing importance of the world market in the twentieth century. Originally published in 1916, Imperialism explains how colonialism and the First World War were inherent features of the global development of the capitalist economy.

In a new introduction, Norman Lewis and James Malone contrast Lenin's approach with that adopted by contemporary theories of globalisation. They argue that, while much has changed since Lenin wrote, his theoretical framework remains the best method for understanding recent global developments.]]> 192 Vladimir Lenin 0745310354 M 4 4.26 1917 Imperialism: The Highest Stage of Capitalism
author: Vladimir Lenin
name: M
average rating: 4.26
book published: 1917
rating: 4
read at: 2022/02/21
date added: 2022/02/21
shelves:
review:

]]> <![CDATA[Black Marxism: The Making of the Black Radical Tradition (Penguin Modern Classics)]]> 55600879 'A towering achievement. There is simply nothing like it in the history of Black radical thought' - Cornel West.

'Cedric Robinson's brilliant analyses revealed new ways of thinking and acting' - Angela Davis.

'This work is about our people's struggle, the historical Black struggle'.

Any struggle must be fought on a people's own terms, argues Cedric Robinson's landmark account of Black radicalism. Marxism is a western construction, and therefore inadequate to describe the significance of Black communities as agents of change against 'racial capitalism'. Tracing the emergence of European radicalism, the history of Black African resistance and the influence of these on such key thinkers as W. E. B. Du Bois, C. L. R. James and Richard Wright, Black Marxism reclaims the story of a movement.]]> 496 Cedric J. Robinson 0241514177 M 0 currently-reading 4.50 1983 Black Marxism: The Making of the Black Radical Tradition (Penguin Modern Classics)
author: Cedric J. Robinson
name: M
average rating: 4.50
book published: 1983
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2022/02/19
shelves: currently-reading
review:

]]> <![CDATA[The Intellectual Life of the British Working Classes]]> 549385 544 Jonathan Rose 0300098081 M 0 to-read 4.30 2001 The Intellectual Life of the British Working Classes
author: Jonathan Rose
name: M
average rating: 4.30
book published: 2001
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2022/02/19
shelves: to-read
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]]> Emma 6969 The newest edition is here. Another alternate cover can be found here.

Emma Woodhouse is one of Austen's most captivating and vivid characters. Beautiful, spoilt, vain and irrepressibly witty, Emma organizes the lives of the inhabitants of her sleepy little village and plays matchmaker with devastating effect.]]> 474 Jane Austen 0141439580 M 4 4.05 1815 Emma
author: Jane Austen
name: M
average rating: 4.05
book published: 1815
rating: 4
read at: 2022/02/18
date added: 2022/02/18
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]]> <![CDATA[An Afro-Indigenous History of the United States (ReVisioning History)]]> 57570731 The first intersectional history of the Black and Native American struggle for freedom in our country that also reframes our understanding of who was Indigenous in early America

Beginning with pre-Revolutionary America and moving into the movement for Black lives and contemporary Indigenous activism, Afro-Indigenous historian, Kyle T. Mays argues that the foundations of the US are rooted in antiblackness and settler colonialism, and that these parallel oppressions continue into the present. He explores how Black and Indigenous peoples have always resisted and struggled for freedom, sometimes together, and sometimes apart. Whether to end African enslavement and Indigenous removal or eradicate capitalism and colonialism, Mays show how the fervor of Black and Indigenous peoples calls for justice have consistently sought to uproot white supremacy.

Mays uses a wide-array of historical activists and pop culture icons, "sacred" texts, and foundational texts like the Declaration of Independence and Democracy in America. He covers the civil rights movement and freedom struggles of the 1960s and 1970s, and explores current debates around the use of Native American imagery and the cultural appropriation of Black culture. Mays compels us to rethink both our history as well as contemporary debates and to imagine the powerful possibilities of Afro-Indigenous solidarity.]]> 265 Kyle T. Mays 0807011681 M 0 to-read 4.09 2021 An Afro-Indigenous History of the United States (ReVisioning History)
author: Kyle T. Mays
name: M
average rating: 4.09
book published: 2021
rating: 0
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date added: 2022/02/01
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]]> Faith and Fratricide 155307 304 Rosemary Radford Ruether 0965351750 M 0 to-read 4.03 Faith and Fratricide
author: Rosemary Radford Ruether
name: M
average rating: 4.03
book published:
rating: 0
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date added: 2022/01/15
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]]> <![CDATA[The Friars and the Jews: The Evolution of Medieval Anti-Judaism]]> 8076471 304 Jeremy Cohen 0801492661 M 0 to-read 4.06 1982 The Friars and the Jews: The Evolution of Medieval Anti-Judaism
author: Jeremy Cohen
name: M
average rating: 4.06
book published: 1982
rating: 0
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date added: 2022/01/15
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]]> <![CDATA[Witches, Midwives and Nurses: A History of Women Healers]]> 24453 48 Barbara Ehrenreich 0912670134 M 0 to-read 4.03 1972 Witches, Midwives and Nurses: A History of Women Healers
author: Barbara Ehrenreich
name: M
average rating: 4.03
book published: 1972
rating: 0
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]]> <![CDATA[Reading the Women of the Bible: A New Interpretation of Their Stories]]> 340675
“Frymer-Kensky addresses both modern hypotheses and traditional beliefs, and acknowledges which arguments can be supported and which questions remain unanswered. [A] very approachable text.”� Houston Chronicle]]> 480 Tikva Frymer-Kensky 0805211829 M 0 to-read 4.16 2002 Reading the Women of the Bible: A New Interpretation of Their Stories
author: Tikva Frymer-Kensky
name: M
average rating: 4.16
book published: 2002
rating: 0
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]]> <![CDATA[Dis-Enclosure: The Deconstruction of Christianity]]> 1334595


The "religion that provided the exit from religion," as he terms Christianity, consists in the announcement of an end. It is the announcement that counts, however, rather than any finality. In this announcement there is a proximity to others and to what was once called parousia. But parousia is no longer presence; it is no longer the return of the Messiah. Rather, it is what is near us and does not cease to open and to close, a presence deferred yet imminent.

In a demystified age where we are left with a vision of a self-enclosed world--in which humans are no longer mortals facing an immortal being, but entities whose lives are accompanied by the time of their own decline--parousia stands as a question. Can we venture the risk of a decentered perspective, such that the meaning of the world can be found both inside and outside, within and without our so-immanent world?

The deconstruction of Christianity that Nancy proposes is neither a game nor a strategy. It is an invitation to imagine a strange faith that enacts the inadequation of life to itself. Our lives overflow the self-contained boundaries of their biological and sociological interpretations. Out of this excess, wells up a fragile, overlooked meaning that is beyond both confessionalism and humanism.]]> 200 Jean-Luc Nancy 0823228363 M 0 to-read 3.82 2005 Dis-Enclosure: The Deconstruction of Christianity
author: Jean-Luc Nancy
name: M
average rating: 3.82
book published: 2005
rating: 0
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]]> <![CDATA[All That Is Solid Melts Into Air: The Experience of Modernity]]> 126985 All That Is Solid Melts into Air is a dazzling exploration of modern consciousness. In this unparalleled book, Marshall Berman takes account of the social changes that swept millions of people into the capitalist world and the impact of modernism on art, literature and architecture. This new edition contains an updated preface addressing the critical role the onset of modernism played in popular democratic upheavals in the late 1920s.]]> 400 Marshall Berman M 0 to-read 4.30 1982 All That Is Solid Melts Into Air: The Experience of Modernity
author: Marshall Berman
name: M
average rating: 4.30
book published: 1982
rating: 0
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date added: 2022/01/12
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]]> Giving an Account of Oneself 171254
In her first extended study of moral philosophy, Judith Butler offers a provocative outline for a new ethical practice―one responsive to the need for critical autonomy and grounded in a new sense of the human subject.

Butler takes as her starting point one’s ability to answer the questions “What have I done?� and “What ought I to do?� She shows that these question can be answered only by asking a prior question, “Who is this ‘I� who is under an obligation to give an account of itself and to act in certain ways?� Because I find that I cannot give an account of myself without accounting for the social conditions under which I emerge, ethical reflection requires a turn to social theory.

In three powerfully crafted and lucidly written chapters, Butler demonstrates how difficult it is to give an account of oneself, and how this lack of self-transparency and narratibility is crucial to an ethical understanding of the human. In brilliant dialogue with Adorno, Levinas, Foucault, and other thinkers, she eloquently argues the limits, possibilities, and dangers of contemporary ethical thought.

Butler offers a critique of the moral self, arguing that the transparent, rational, and continuous ethical subject is an impossible construct that seeks to deny the specificity of what it is to be human. We can know ourselves only incompletely, and only in relation to a broader social world that has always preceded us and already shaped us in ways we cannot grasp. If inevitably we are partially opaque to ourselves, how can giving an account of ourselves define the ethical act? And doesn’t an ethical system that holds us impossibly accountable for full self-knowledge and self-consistency inflict a kind of psychic violence, leading to a culture of self-beratement and cruelty? How does the turn to social theory offer us a chance to understand the specifically social character of our own unknowingness about ourselves?

In this invaluable book, by recasting ethics as a project in which being ethical means becoming critical of norms under which we are asked to act, but which we can never fully choose, Butler illuminates what it means for us as “fallible creatures� to create and share an ethics of vulnerability, humility, and ethical responsiveness.]]> 160 Judith Butler 0823225046 M 0 to-read 4.20 2003 Giving an Account of Oneself
author: Judith Butler
name: M
average rating: 4.20
book published: 2003
rating: 0
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]]> Mental Actions 6542307 422 Lucy O'Brien 0199225982 M 0 to-read 4.00 2009 Mental Actions
author: Lucy O'Brien
name: M
average rating: 4.00
book published: 2009
rating: 0
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date added: 2022/01/10
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]]> <![CDATA[Why Love Hurts: A Sociological Explanation]]> 13763042
Despite the widespread and almost collective character of these experiences, our culture insists they are the result of faulty or insufficiently mature psyches. For many, the Freudian idea that the family designs the pattern of an individual's erotic career has been the main explanation for why and how we fail to find or sustain love. Psychoanalysis and popular psychology have succeeded spectacularly in convincing us that individuals bear responsibility for the misery of their romantic and erotic lives. The purpose of this book is to change our way of thinking about what is wrong in modern relationships. The problem is not dysfunctional childhoods or insufficiently self-aware psyches, but rather the institutional forces shaping how we love.

The argument of this book is that the modern romantic experience is shaped by a fundamental transformation in the ecology and architecture of romantic choice. The samples from which men and women choose a partner, the modes of evaluating prospective partners, the very importance of choice and autonomy and what people imagine to be the spectrum of their choices: all these aspects of choice have transformed the very core of the will, how we want a partner, the sense of worth bestowed by relationships, and the organization of desire.

This book does to love what Marx did to commodities: it shows that it is shaped by social relations and institutions and that it circulates in a marketplace of unequal actors.]]> 293 Eva Illouz 0745661521 M 0 to-read 4.07 2011 Why Love Hurts: A Sociological Explanation
author: Eva Illouz
name: M
average rating: 4.07
book published: 2011
rating: 0
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date added: 2022/01/02
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]]> Combat Liberalism 25431690 8 Mao Zedong M 2
So far, so “…sure.� But where Schmitt throughout his writings—but most notably in Concept of the Political—is able to explain and then maul the assumptions and delusions of liberal-neutralists,* Mao seems content to list “eleven types of liberalism�, declare them bad, and end the piece. (For the record, Mao actually only lists eight types of liberalism. Points 2 and 5 are the same. Points 3, 6 and 8 are the same. One could argue 9 and 10 are the same too, but let’s not get distracted throwing popcorn at the screen.) We don’t come away from this with a deeper understanding of why anyone would commit themselves to liberalism (other than to just have an easy life), or what stakes are involved either in its perpetuation or its collapse. After a decade of civil war, I’m sure Mao could have had more to say about it than “it’s bad�.

Since liberals aren’t taken to be psychologically interesting at all, we are left with the total negative of the communist revolutionary: “We must use Marxism, which is positive in spirit, to overcome liberalism, which is negative.� Indeed, there can be no noble or humane reasons whatsoever for deciding not to rat out a family member for making a counter-revolutionary remark: “Liberalism is a manifestation of opportunism—� And only that! “—and conflicts fundamentally with Marxism.�

What a fascinating insight.

See, Mao’s liberal is ultimately just someone who doesn’t really care about politics, or is only in it for a bit of clout or an excuse to gossip. I know a couple people like that, and they’ve never done me any harm. Perhaps the main issue I have with this pamphlet is in the way it encourages no curiosity about understanding the enemy whatsoever, or really understanding anything at all.

Go read the Concept of the Political instead if you can stomach reading a fascist. It’s much better.

- - - - -
NOTES:

[1] See: Ryan Mitchell, “Chinese Receptions of Carl Schmitt Since 1929� (2020)

[2] See: Carl Schmitt, “The Theory of the Partisan� (1963)

[3] “Just as liberalism discusses and negotiates every political detail, so it also wants to dissolve metaphysical truth in a discussion. The essence of liberalism is negotiation, a cautious half measure, in the hope that the definitive dispute, the decisive bloody battle, can be transformed into a parliamentary debate and permit the decision to be suspended forever in an everlasting discussion.� Carl Schmitt, “Political Theology� (2005)]]> 4.15 1937 Combat Liberalism
author: Mao Zedong
name: M
average rating: 4.15
book published: 1937
rating: 2
read at: 2021/12/29
date added: 2021/12/29
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Now as far as I know, Mao never read the legal theorist and unrepentant Nazi, Carl Schmitt. But Schmitt’s thoughts on state, executive, law, and liberalism were known and discussed in academic circles for several years before 1949, with him being cited often by legal theorists of various sympathies.* It isn’t difficult to imagine, therefore, a sort of general diffusion of his rhetoric and definitions over time. I say all this because Mao’s Combat Liberalism offers a blunt taxonomy of liberalism which feels quite Schmittian, one that sees liberalism not as a political-economic philosophy, but instead as the moral and intellectual pathology of “weaklings and illusionists�* who will not or cannot face the fundamental distinction of politics: that between friend and enemy.

So far, so “…sure.� But where Schmitt throughout his writings—but most notably in Concept of the Political—is able to explain and then maul the assumptions and delusions of liberal-neutralists,* Mao seems content to list “eleven types of liberalism�, declare them bad, and end the piece. (For the record, Mao actually only lists eight types of liberalism. Points 2 and 5 are the same. Points 3, 6 and 8 are the same. One could argue 9 and 10 are the same too, but let’s not get distracted throwing popcorn at the screen.) We don’t come away from this with a deeper understanding of why anyone would commit themselves to liberalism (other than to just have an easy life), or what stakes are involved either in its perpetuation or its collapse. After a decade of civil war, I’m sure Mao could have had more to say about it than “it’s bad�.

Since liberals aren’t taken to be psychologically interesting at all, we are left with the total negative of the communist revolutionary: “We must use Marxism, which is positive in spirit, to overcome liberalism, which is negative.� Indeed, there can be no noble or humane reasons whatsoever for deciding not to rat out a family member for making a counter-revolutionary remark: “Liberalism is a manifestation of opportunism—� And only that! “—and conflicts fundamentally with Marxism.�

What a fascinating insight.

See, Mao’s liberal is ultimately just someone who doesn’t really care about politics, or is only in it for a bit of clout or an excuse to gossip. I know a couple people like that, and they’ve never done me any harm. Perhaps the main issue I have with this pamphlet is in the way it encourages no curiosity about understanding the enemy whatsoever, or really understanding anything at all.

Go read the Concept of the Political instead if you can stomach reading a fascist. It’s much better.

- - - - -
NOTES:

[1] See: Ryan Mitchell, “Chinese Receptions of Carl Schmitt Since 1929� (2020)

[2] See: Carl Schmitt, “The Theory of the Partisan� (1963)

[3] “Just as liberalism discusses and negotiates every political detail, so it also wants to dissolve metaphysical truth in a discussion. The essence of liberalism is negotiation, a cautious half measure, in the hope that the definitive dispute, the decisive bloody battle, can be transformed into a parliamentary debate and permit the decision to be suspended forever in an everlasting discussion.� Carl Schmitt, “Political Theology� (2005)
]]> <![CDATA[Cryptocommunism (Theory Redux)]]> 49358639 135 Mark Alizart 1509538577 M 2
"Evolution is a struggle for life punctuated by episodes of mass extinction. We may even wonder whether it’s worth trying to fight it. After all, if we talk about ‘creative destruction�, it is because after each destruction a better world emerges."

Yeah.

So anyway, I have an extremely low tolerance for teleology, and by the time the author is explaining that Bitcoin will lead humanity into a renewed relationship with nature, you may find your tolerance has disappeared too. Still, 2 stars for giving me another reason to believe life's "function" is best understood to be the invention of increasingly absurd forms of torture.]]> 3.20 Cryptocommunism (Theory Redux)
author: Mark Alizart
name: M
average rating: 3.20
book published:
rating: 2
read at: 2021/12/20
date added: 2021/12/20
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What starts as an interesting (rather surface-level) text on the relationship between Marxism, finance, and technology dives headfirst into a lofty thermodynamic line of argument that doesn't really carry the weight of the author's proclamations, before descending into utter lunacy in the last four chapters. For instance:

"Evolution is a struggle for life punctuated by episodes of mass extinction. We may even wonder whether it’s worth trying to fight it. After all, if we talk about ‘creative destruction�, it is because after each destruction a better world emerges."

Yeah.

So anyway, I have an extremely low tolerance for teleology, and by the time the author is explaining that Bitcoin will lead humanity into a renewed relationship with nature, you may find your tolerance has disappeared too. Still, 2 stars for giving me another reason to believe life's "function" is best understood to be the invention of increasingly absurd forms of torture.
]]> <![CDATA[Non-Violence: A History Beyond the Myth]]> 26093866 237 Domenico Losurdo 1498502199 M 0 to-read 4.48 2010 Non-Violence: A History Beyond the Myth
author: Domenico Losurdo
name: M
average rating: 4.48
book published: 2010
rating: 0
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]]> <![CDATA[Excursions in Number Theory (Dover Books on Mathematics)]]> 3578341 The theory of numbers is an ancient and fascinating branch of mathematics that plays an important role in modern computer theory. It is also a popular topic among amateur mathematicians (who have made many contributions to the field) because of its it does not require advanced knowledge of higher mathematics.
This delightful volume, by two well-known mathematicians, invited readers to join a challenging expedition into the mystery and magic of number theory. No special training is needed � just high school mathematics, a fondness for figures, and an inquisitive mind. Such a person will soon be absorbed and intrigued by the ideas and problems presented here.
Beginning with familiar notions, the authors skillfully yet painlessly transport the reader to higher realms of mathematics, developing the necessary concepts along the way, so that complex subjects can be more easily understood. Included are thorough discussions of prime numbers, number patterns, irrationals and iterations, and calculating prodigies, among other topics.
Much of the material presented is not to be found in other popular treatments of number theory. Moreover, there are many important proofs (presented with simple and elegant explanations) often lacking in similar volumes. In sum, Excursions in Number Theory offers a splendid compromise between highly technical treatments inaccessible to lay readers and popular books with too little substance. Its stimulating and challenging presentation of significant aspects of number theory may be read lightly for enjoyment or studied closely for an exhilarating mental challenge.]]> 192 C. Stanley Ogilvy 0486257789 M 0 to-read 3.99 1966 Excursions in Number Theory (Dover Books on Mathematics)
author: C. Stanley Ogilvy
name: M
average rating: 3.99
book published: 1966
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]]> <![CDATA[The Animal That Therefore I Am]]> 2461524 The Animal That Therefore I Am is the long-awaited translation of the complete text of Jacques Derrida's ten-hour address to the 1997 Cérisy conference entitled "The Autobiographical Animal," the third of four such colloquia on his work. The book was assembled posthumously on the basis of two published sections, one written and recorded session, and one informal recorded session.The book is at once an affectionate look back over the multiple roles played by animals in Derrida's work and a profound philosophical investigation and critique of the relegation of animal life that takes place as a result of the distinction—dating from Descartes—between man as thinking animal and every other living species. That starts with the very fact of the line of separation drawn between the human and the millions of other species that are reduced to a single "the animal." Derrida finds that distinction, or versions of it, surfacing in thinkers as far apart as Descartes, Kant, Heidegger, Lacan, and Lévinas, and he dedicates extended analyses to the question in the work of each of them.The book's autobiographical theme intersects with its philosophical analysis through the figures of looking and nakedness, staged in terms of Derrida's experience when his cat follows him into the bathroom in the morning. In a classic deconstructive reversal, Derrida asks what this animal sees and thinks when it sees this naked man. Yet the experiences of nakedness and shame also lead all the way back into the mythologies of "man's dominion over the beasts" and trace a history of how man has systematically displaced onto the animal his own failings or bêtises. The Animal That Therefore I Am is at times a militant plea and indictment regarding, especially, the modern industrialized treatment of animals. However, Derrida cannot subscribe to a simplistic version of animal rights that fails to follow through, in all its implications, the questions and definitions of "life" to which he returned in much of his later work.

Collection: Perspectives in Continental Philosophy]]> 192 Jacques Derrida 082322791X M 0 to-read 4.11 2006 The Animal That Therefore I Am
author: Jacques Derrida
name: M
average rating: 4.11
book published: 2006
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]]> <![CDATA[Leviathan 2.0: Inventing Modern Statehood]]> 18770203 Leviathan, his tough-minded treatise of 1651. Leviathan 2.0 updates this classic account to explain how modern statehood took shape between the mid-nineteenth and mid-twentieth centuries, before it unraveled into the political uncertainty that persists today.

Modern states were far from immune to the modernizing forces of war, technology, and ideology. From 1845 to 1880, the United States, Canada, Mexico, and Argentina were all reconstituted through territorial violence. Europe witnessed the unification of Germany and Italy, while Asian nations such as Japan tried to mitigate foreign incursions through state-building reforms. A global wave of revolution at the turn of the century pushed the modernization process further in China, Russia, Iran, and Ottoman Turkey. By the late 1930s, with the rise of the Soviet Union and Nazi Germany, the momentum of history seemed to shift toward war-glorifying totalitarian states. But several variants of the modern state survived World War II: the welfare states of Western democracies; single-party socialist governments; and governments dominated by the military, especially prevalent in Latin America, Asia, and the Middle East.

Toward the end of the twentieth century, all of these forms stood in growing tension with the transformative influences of globalized capitalism. Modern statehood recreated itself in many ways, Maier concludes, but finally had to adopt a precarious equilibrium with ever more powerful economic forces.]]> 384 Charles S. Maier 0674281322 M 0 to-read 3.58 2014 Leviathan 2.0: Inventing Modern Statehood
author: Charles S. Maier
name: M
average rating: 3.58
book published: 2014
rating: 0
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]]> <![CDATA[Seven Complex Lessons in Education for the Future]]> 598029 English, French (translation) 95 Edgar Morin 9231037781 M 0 to-read 4.17 1999 Seven Complex Lessons in Education for the Future
author: Edgar Morin
name: M
average rating: 4.17
book published: 1999
rating: 0
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date added: 2021/11/30
shelves: to-read
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]]> The Tibetan Book of the Dead 6328137 550 Padmasambhava 0140455264 M 0 to-read 3.87 1350 The Tibetan Book of the Dead
author: Padmasambhava
name: M
average rating: 3.87
book published: 1350
rating: 0
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date added: 2021/11/27
shelves: to-read
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]]> <![CDATA[The Jakarta Method: Washington's Anticommunist Crusade and the Mass Murder Program that Shaped Our World]]> 53054943 The hidden story of the wanton slaughter -- in Indonesia, Latin America, and around the world -- backed by the United States.

In 1965, the U.S. government helped the Indonesian military kill approximately one million innocent civilians. This was one of the most important turning points of the twentieth century, eliminating the largest communist party outside China and the Soviet Union and inspiring copycat terror programs in faraway countries like Brazil and Chile. But these events remain widely overlooked, precisely because the CIA's secret interventions were so successful.

In this bold and comprehensive new history, Vincent Bevins builds on his incisive reporting for the Washington Post, using recently declassified documents, archival research and eye-witness testimony collected across twelve countries to reveal a shocking legacy that spans the globe. For decades, it's been believed that parts of the developing world passed peacefully into the U.S.-led capitalist system. The Jakarta Method demonstrates that the brutal extermination of unarmed leftists was a fundamental part of Washington's final triumph in the Cold War.]]> 320 Vincent Bevins 1541742400 M 0 to-read 4.62 2020 The Jakarta Method: Washington's Anticommunist Crusade and the Mass Murder Program that Shaped Our World
author: Vincent Bevins
name: M
average rating: 4.62
book published: 2020
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]]> <![CDATA[Friends: Understanding the Power of our Most Important Relationships]]> 56883977
Robin Dunbar is the world-renowned psychologist and author who famously discovered Dunbar's number: how our capacity for friendship is limited to around 150 people. In Friends, he looks at friendship in the round, at the way different types of friendship and family relationships intersect, or at the complex of psychological and behavioural mechanisms that underpin friendships and make them possible - and just how complicated the business of making and keeping friends actually is.

Mixing insights from scientific research with first person experiences and culture, Friends explores and integrates knowledge from disciplines ranging from psychology and anthropology to neuroscience and genetics in a single magical weave that allows us to peer into the incredible complexity of the social world in which we are all so deeply embedded.

Working at the coalface of the subject at both research and personal levels, Robin Dunbar has written the definitive book on how and why we are friends.v]]> 432 Robin I.M. Dunbar 1408711745 M 0 to-read 3.55 Friends: Understanding the Power of our Most Important Relationships
author: Robin I.M. Dunbar
name: M
average rating: 3.55
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]]>