en-US Wed, 02 Apr 2025 11:07:14 -0700 60 144 41 /images/layout/goodreads_logo_144.jpg 8695558 This is an alternate cover edition for ISBN 0099532816/9780099532811.

Paul Bäumer enlisted with his classmates in the German army of World War I. Youthful, enthusiastic, they become soldiers. But despite what they have learned, they break into pieces under the first bombardment in the trenches. And as horrible war plods on year after year, Paul holds fast to a single vow: to fight against the principles of hate that meaninglessly pits young men of the same generation but different uniforms against each other --- if only he can come out of the war alive.]]> 216 Erich Maria Remarque Theo 5 4.42 1928
author: Erich Maria Remarque
name: Theo
average rating: 4.42
book published: 1928
rating: 5
read at: 2025/04/02
date added: 2025/04/02
shelves: owned, endlessly-worth-re-reading
review:

]]> 10545 Ulysses has survived bowderlization, legal action and bitter controversy. An undisputed modernist classic, its ceaseless verbal inventiveness and astonishingly wide-ranging allusions confirm its standing as an imperishable monument to the human condition. Declan Kiberd says in his introduction Ulysses is 'An endlessly open book of utopian epiphanies. It holds a mirror up to the colonial capital that was Dublin on 16 June 1904, but it also offers redemptive glimpses of a future world which might be made over in terms of those utopian moments.'

This edition is the standard Random House/Bodley Head text that first appeared in 1960.

(*) New cover existing, same ISBN:
See it as ISBN13 9780141182803 / ISBN10 0141182806]]> 933 James Joyce Theo 5 endlessly-worth-re-reading
So admittedly I was in no real rush to type up my thoughts on Ulysses until I had properly come to terms with Penelope, I really had waited with bated breath for a great portion of the book to hear what Molly Bloom had to say in her own voice. At first, combined with the (admittedly prima facie) denouement of Ithaca, Penelope left me absolutely heartbroken and depressed, I’d almost say crushed (David Lynch’s passing obviously didn’t help much, and I must say that overall it made for a rather somber Friday evening).

Let’s think for a moment of what actually occurs during those last two or three rapturous pages of Penelope. Molly is reminiscing of her and Bloom on the Howth, the very apex of their relationship. She is in the revery of memory, of the what-was, that is the source of her joy. All she has, in the summation of her relationship with Bloom, are memories. When Bloom himself thinks back on their time on the Howth he too can only bring to mind the great chasm that now exists between him and his wife; the present offers forth the same indetermination as the “I AM A�� that he wrote in the sand at the end of Nausicaa. And we cannot even really speak of great joy in her remembrance - what does she do prior to grabbing Bloom and pulling him down toward her? She weighs up her past, of Lt. Gardner whose embrace elicited in her a passion that Bloom has never really managed to stir in her, of Mulvey who at any moment she would be willing to get down and do the deed with if he was ever to return, of the Gibraltar of her youth, essentially of many things that aren’t Bloom. In a sense it is a memory of resignation, not of contentment, it is her accepting her lot in life.

Now my Penguin copy of the book has the starting lines of Telemachus at the very top of the title page and then the final lines of Penelope at the bottom, and I, and I believe I am not the only one who has made this mistake and am therefore not entirely foolish in my train of thought, figured that the book would end with some kind of sexual congress in the present day, that the ten years of sexual incontinence (barring Bloom’s godawful pillow talk and arse-on ejaculations) between the couple would be resolved in one great swelling moment of intimacy. It was not to be. In fact any talk of real resolution is minimal, and when it is spoken of it concerns Molly having the tantalising power and ability to change the situation if she really wanted to. You have to give it to her, she knows the way to a man’s heart. Instead a great deal of the chapter myopically focuses on her sexual fantasies, and in a way it feels as if she is eliding the central question. I must confess I was rather angry with her, or probably it’d be fair to say frustrated, especially in light of the fact that 900 pages of text have consistently shown Bloom’s inherent goodness (aside from a few kinks and some patronising tendencies). Killeen speaks of the scandal of this chapter as being neutered or defanged (not his exact words, but you get the gist) in the modern day, but I really am not sold on this point, I still think it has a great tenacity, even if it’s not quite as outrageous as Bloom’s pocket wank in public over a partially disabled minor. As always, I can only blame my prudish English sensibilities.

But RTE’s absolutely first-rate recordings of the book changed that impression, much as the realisation that Stephen and Bloom actually carried out a farcical mass prior to pissing side by side in Ithaca made me warm up to their rather disappointing encounter. Molly is rather venomous with many of the people she knows throughout the chapter, but she almost regretfully makes frequent compliments of Bloom. She is forced to. She must admit he is a good father, that he is knowledgeable, that he is clean and respectable. She must care a great deal about him to give a shit in the first place about whether or not he has been to Nighttown with a prostitute or has been carrying on an affair with Josie Breen. She must care if she’s so determined to get Bloom away from the nationalist Sinn Féin crowd who make so many jokes about him behind his back. And Boylan is no great substitute for him, aside from his huge cock, and all the men she thinks of in a lurid manner she really just wants attention from, to be seen. She wants the medical student on the opposite side of the road at Holles Street to look at her, for Mr Cuffe to gaze at her cleavage, to be made a kind of Godhead by Stephen in his poetry. She wants to be held twenty times a day. She is no great whore, and she isn’t the Great Mother either - she is a lonely, underappreciated woman, only thirty three and already thinking (in a way) that her life is over, that her beauty will soon wane, and that when it finally does that she’ll have to deal with the terrible question of what meaning her life has without it. But she affirms it all, and upon a first reading I failed to appreciate and hear her Yes in the truly Nietzschean sense she gives it, to her assent to the great horror of the eternal recurrence. Funnily enough after hearing the RTE performance the chapter sounds a hell of a lot more like an X-rated rant from one of the dissatisfied wives in The Last of the Summer Wine than some truly vitriolic takedown of her husband’s deficiencies.

It really is a terrific chapter, and every chapter, each of it an organ and part of whatever you could conspire to characterise Ulysses as in its entirety, is a book in itself. I’m amazed people take up to a year to read it - how aren’t they sucked in? How don’t they give themselves up to the archivist role Joyce puts them in, burrowing down and finding out the meaning of references (no matter how arcane or ephemeral or seemingly irrelevant) with a feverish passion? I read it in two months and had to purposefully stop myself from getting through the thing too quickly, reading a book or two between each chapter. It really is a world unto itself, and I think John Hunt is truly right to say the book demands that you become a resident of Dublin yourself. I think my rather quick reading may have nudged Joyce’s jocoserious approach further toward the serious than the jovial for me. For instance, I felt each barb in The Cyclops acutely, and I was frankly surprised to see how comedically it has been interpreted by the secondary literature I have read so far. Even after listening to the RTE recording and chuckling at a few lines the overall impression of hatred and prejudice and conspiracy still generated disgust in me. The Citizen and No-man are some of the grandest, most malicious cunts in all of literature.

Ulysses is the book of compassion, the greatest statement of compassion written. It’s just mind boggling, the whole thing. I remember trying to explain/sell Oxen of the Sun to a friend in a pub (shoutout to you Pete if you got this far) and the difficulty was almost insurmountable, even with the assistance of a few beers I struggled to really communicate the brilliance of that particular chapter, although on the whole I think my enthusiasm was still fairly palpable (which I think is a good summary of this review itself, a tad incoherent and messy but with a lot of spirit). Without reading the thing itself I think the impression can be that Joyce, certainly in the second half of the book, engages with form for form’s sake - I know that Killeen certainly emphasises that shift in Joyce’s thought process in Ulysses Unbound, but I do think that denigrates it somewhat, I don’t think anything could be further away from form for form’s sake (although Killeen wouldn’t go that far, instead speaking of a movement away from the symbolism of earlier chapters to a kind of serious textual play in the later ones). You just have to read the bloody thing.

I’ll leave you with a couple of lines I scribbled to myself around a month ago, before I had gotten into the meat and potatoes of Oxen of the Sun and Circe, those real game-changing heavy hitter chapters that properly shake up the Bloomian/Dedalusian style of internal monologue. Here they are.

Joyce has justified humanity’s existence by writing this book; not by exonerating our petty history, but by fulfilling the destiny of the human project. I once thought Samuel Beckett the death knell of literature, a howling echo never to be answered, the end of the line, and yet we will, we must, return to Joyce, as we are fated to do so. He is our culmination.

Bowler hats off to the Joyce Project and Chris Reich’s engrossing series of discussions on YouTube as well, they’re indelible, essential stuff. Oh and one last thing,

The heaventree of stars hung with humid nightblue fruit.

I underlined that with such ferocity I almost ripped through the page.

����á���Գٱ�!]]> 3.88 1922
author: James Joyce
name: Theo
average rating: 3.88
book published: 1922
rating: 5
read at: 2025/01/17
date added: 2025/01/19
shelves: endlessly-worth-re-reading
review:
(Those uninterested in the blathering I’m about to clumsily type out should just know that this is the greatest book I have ever read, really bar none - Joyce has managed to diminish every other thing I’ve read and has achieved something that almost seems beyond a novel, he transcends the medium, although when pressed I don’t think I could give a particularly cogent answer as to why I think that is. It’s just a fucking tour de force, and makes Miller and Bataille, those prior favourites of mine, look like absolute amateurs in comparison.)

So admittedly I was in no real rush to type up my thoughts on Ulysses until I had properly come to terms with Penelope, I really had waited with bated breath for a great portion of the book to hear what Molly Bloom had to say in her own voice. At first, combined with the (admittedly prima facie) denouement of Ithaca, Penelope left me absolutely heartbroken and depressed, I’d almost say crushed (David Lynch’s passing obviously didn’t help much, and I must say that overall it made for a rather somber Friday evening).

Let’s think for a moment of what actually occurs during those last two or three rapturous pages of Penelope. Molly is reminiscing of her and Bloom on the Howth, the very apex of their relationship. She is in the revery of memory, of the what-was, that is the source of her joy. All she has, in the summation of her relationship with Bloom, are memories. When Bloom himself thinks back on their time on the Howth he too can only bring to mind the great chasm that now exists between him and his wife; the present offers forth the same indetermination as the “I AM A�� that he wrote in the sand at the end of Nausicaa. And we cannot even really speak of great joy in her remembrance - what does she do prior to grabbing Bloom and pulling him down toward her? She weighs up her past, of Lt. Gardner whose embrace elicited in her a passion that Bloom has never really managed to stir in her, of Mulvey who at any moment she would be willing to get down and do the deed with if he was ever to return, of the Gibraltar of her youth, essentially of many things that aren’t Bloom. In a sense it is a memory of resignation, not of contentment, it is her accepting her lot in life.

Now my Penguin copy of the book has the starting lines of Telemachus at the very top of the title page and then the final lines of Penelope at the bottom, and I, and I believe I am not the only one who has made this mistake and am therefore not entirely foolish in my train of thought, figured that the book would end with some kind of sexual congress in the present day, that the ten years of sexual incontinence (barring Bloom’s godawful pillow talk and arse-on ejaculations) between the couple would be resolved in one great swelling moment of intimacy. It was not to be. In fact any talk of real resolution is minimal, and when it is spoken of it concerns Molly having the tantalising power and ability to change the situation if she really wanted to. You have to give it to her, she knows the way to a man’s heart. Instead a great deal of the chapter myopically focuses on her sexual fantasies, and in a way it feels as if she is eliding the central question. I must confess I was rather angry with her, or probably it’d be fair to say frustrated, especially in light of the fact that 900 pages of text have consistently shown Bloom’s inherent goodness (aside from a few kinks and some patronising tendencies). Killeen speaks of the scandal of this chapter as being neutered or defanged (not his exact words, but you get the gist) in the modern day, but I really am not sold on this point, I still think it has a great tenacity, even if it’s not quite as outrageous as Bloom’s pocket wank in public over a partially disabled minor. As always, I can only blame my prudish English sensibilities.

But RTE’s absolutely first-rate recordings of the book changed that impression, much as the realisation that Stephen and Bloom actually carried out a farcical mass prior to pissing side by side in Ithaca made me warm up to their rather disappointing encounter. Molly is rather venomous with many of the people she knows throughout the chapter, but she almost regretfully makes frequent compliments of Bloom. She is forced to. She must admit he is a good father, that he is knowledgeable, that he is clean and respectable. She must care a great deal about him to give a shit in the first place about whether or not he has been to Nighttown with a prostitute or has been carrying on an affair with Josie Breen. She must care if she’s so determined to get Bloom away from the nationalist Sinn Féin crowd who make so many jokes about him behind his back. And Boylan is no great substitute for him, aside from his huge cock, and all the men she thinks of in a lurid manner she really just wants attention from, to be seen. She wants the medical student on the opposite side of the road at Holles Street to look at her, for Mr Cuffe to gaze at her cleavage, to be made a kind of Godhead by Stephen in his poetry. She wants to be held twenty times a day. She is no great whore, and she isn’t the Great Mother either - she is a lonely, underappreciated woman, only thirty three and already thinking (in a way) that her life is over, that her beauty will soon wane, and that when it finally does that she’ll have to deal with the terrible question of what meaning her life has without it. But she affirms it all, and upon a first reading I failed to appreciate and hear her Yes in the truly Nietzschean sense she gives it, to her assent to the great horror of the eternal recurrence. Funnily enough after hearing the RTE performance the chapter sounds a hell of a lot more like an X-rated rant from one of the dissatisfied wives in The Last of the Summer Wine than some truly vitriolic takedown of her husband’s deficiencies.

It really is a terrific chapter, and every chapter, each of it an organ and part of whatever you could conspire to characterise Ulysses as in its entirety, is a book in itself. I’m amazed people take up to a year to read it - how aren’t they sucked in? How don’t they give themselves up to the archivist role Joyce puts them in, burrowing down and finding out the meaning of references (no matter how arcane or ephemeral or seemingly irrelevant) with a feverish passion? I read it in two months and had to purposefully stop myself from getting through the thing too quickly, reading a book or two between each chapter. It really is a world unto itself, and I think John Hunt is truly right to say the book demands that you become a resident of Dublin yourself. I think my rather quick reading may have nudged Joyce’s jocoserious approach further toward the serious than the jovial for me. For instance, I felt each barb in The Cyclops acutely, and I was frankly surprised to see how comedically it has been interpreted by the secondary literature I have read so far. Even after listening to the RTE recording and chuckling at a few lines the overall impression of hatred and prejudice and conspiracy still generated disgust in me. The Citizen and No-man are some of the grandest, most malicious cunts in all of literature.

Ulysses is the book of compassion, the greatest statement of compassion written. It’s just mind boggling, the whole thing. I remember trying to explain/sell Oxen of the Sun to a friend in a pub (shoutout to you Pete if you got this far) and the difficulty was almost insurmountable, even with the assistance of a few beers I struggled to really communicate the brilliance of that particular chapter, although on the whole I think my enthusiasm was still fairly palpable (which I think is a good summary of this review itself, a tad incoherent and messy but with a lot of spirit). Without reading the thing itself I think the impression can be that Joyce, certainly in the second half of the book, engages with form for form’s sake - I know that Killeen certainly emphasises that shift in Joyce’s thought process in Ulysses Unbound, but I do think that denigrates it somewhat, I don’t think anything could be further away from form for form’s sake (although Killeen wouldn’t go that far, instead speaking of a movement away from the symbolism of earlier chapters to a kind of serious textual play in the later ones). You just have to read the bloody thing.

I’ll leave you with a couple of lines I scribbled to myself around a month ago, before I had gotten into the meat and potatoes of Oxen of the Sun and Circe, those real game-changing heavy hitter chapters that properly shake up the Bloomian/Dedalusian style of internal monologue. Here they are.

Joyce has justified humanity’s existence by writing this book; not by exonerating our petty history, but by fulfilling the destiny of the human project. I once thought Samuel Beckett the death knell of literature, a howling echo never to be answered, the end of the line, and yet we will, we must, return to Joyce, as we are fated to do so. He is our culmination.

Bowler hats off to the Joyce Project and Chris Reich’s engrossing series of discussions on YouTube as well, they’re indelible, essential stuff. Oh and one last thing,

The heaventree of stars hung with humid nightblue fruit.

I underlined that with such ferocity I almost ripped through the page.

����á���Գٱ�!
]]> 26197314 The Sound and the Fury
��
The Sound and the Fury is the tragedy of the Compson family, featuring some of the most memorable characters in literature: beautiful, rebellious Caddy; the manchild Benjy; haunted, neurotic Quentin; Jason, the brutal cynic; and Dilsey, their black servant. Their lives fragmented and harrowed by history and legacy, the character’s voices and actions mesh to create what is arguably Faulkner’s masterpiece and ��one of the greatest novels of the twentieth century.]]> 351 William Faulkner 0679732241 Theo 5 3.79 1929
author: William Faulkner
name: Theo
average rating: 3.79
book published: 1929
rating: 5
read at:
date added: 2024/07/08
shelves: endlessly-worth-re-reading, owned
review:

]]> 7724418 ]]> 127 T.S. Eliot Theo 5 3.93 1948
author: T.S. Eliot
name: Theo
average rating: 3.93
book published: 1948
rating: 5
read at:
date added: 2024/07/06
shelves: endlessly-worth-re-reading, owned
review:

]]> 1202734 Banned in America for almost thirty years because of its explicit sexual content, this companion volume to Miller's Tropic of Cancer chronicles his life in 1920s New York City. Famous for its frank portrayal of life in Brooklyn's ethnic neighborhoods and Miller's outrageous sexual exploits, Tropic of Capricorn is now considered a cornerstone of modern literature.

]]> 348 Henry Miller Theo 5
The best way to describe the work is to highlight Miller’s own self described evolution from skater to swimmer to rock. Having broken through the futility of Dante’s ice, Miller quits the skating shtick and joyfully dives in to the freshly thawed oceans, before realising that one must become immutable at the very depths of the ocean. One must paradoxically be bone dry surrounded by the sea, a lighthouse that stands strong against the ensuing waves.

So yeah, this shit was pretty fucking good. Especially loved whenever he brought up Dostoevsky, Bergson or Nietzsche, it’s fun to see what he reads into them.]]> 3.90 1939
author: Henry Miller
name: Theo
average rating: 3.90
book published: 1939
rating: 5
read at: 2021/06/05
date added: 2023/12/14
shelves: endlessly-worth-re-reading, owned
review:
In certain respects this work supersedes that of Cancer. If Cancer is a work that revolves around fluids, around the Seine, around piss, spermatozoa etc. then Capricorn is one of solids. In Brooklyn we find ourselves forced to go toward the spiritual Land of Fuck, in the Southern States we are forced to contend with arid landscapes and racial tensions so tense that they could kill a man through a mere gaze.

The best way to describe the work is to highlight Miller’s own self described evolution from skater to swimmer to rock. Having broken through the futility of Dante’s ice, Miller quits the skating shtick and joyfully dives in to the freshly thawed oceans, before realising that one must become immutable at the very depths of the ocean. One must paradoxically be bone dry surrounded by the sea, a lighthouse that stands strong against the ensuing waves.

So yeah, this shit was pretty fucking good. Especially loved whenever he brought up Dostoevsky, Bergson or Nietzsche, it’s fun to see what he reads into them.
]]> 7030725 246 Lev Shestov 111075373X Theo 5 endlessly-worth-re-reading "A belch interrupts the loftiest meditation. You may draw a conclusion if you like: if you don't like, you needn't."
]]> 4.11 1905
author: Lev Shestov
name: Theo
average rating: 4.11
book published: 1905
rating: 5
read at: 2023/11/15
date added: 2023/11/15
shelves: endlessly-worth-re-reading
review:
"A belch interrupts the loftiest meditation. You may draw a conclusion if you like: if you don't like, you needn't."

]]> 19091641 354 Jacques Lacan 1317761855 Theo 5
Really quite ridiculously good to be honest, perhaps even fundamental in a sense. This seminar was taught 63 years ago and I still don’t believe we’ve quite come to grips with the distinction between the service of goods borne out by traditional ethics and the approach toward the Sadean second death that Lacan has evoked here. Of course the issue of desire, that whole problematic, is as elusive as ever. And if Lacan was unable to integrate Das Ding, that enigmatic beyond which refracts and distorts from a distance, then we sure as shit are gonna have a hard time doing so, but that probably isn’t the most attractive of projects anyway, as we as subjects stamped by the signifier probably couldn’t withstand it, even if we try to bring it forth through an anamorphosis or through the patsy of art. Might have to reread Seminar XI now, because my god I hated that one.]]> 5.00 1986
author: Jacques Lacan
name: Theo
average rating: 5.00
book published: 1986
rating: 5
read at: 2023/08/25
date added: 2023/08/27
shelves: owned, endlessly-worth-re-reading
review:
Like literally every review I do this is a rambling stream-of-rememberances-of-random-passages-and-impressive-sounding-but-poorly-understood-jargon but all I really need to do to in order for the uninitiated to get a taste of this work is to mention one essential line Lacan delivers a little over halfway through the seminar, and because I’m lazy I’m just going to roughly paraphrase it, that there is an impatience that exists to tell the truth about the truth, but in wanting to tell it there is often not much truth left - that seems to me to be a decent summation of Lacan’s teaching method, it’s somewhat analogous to when you as a freshly pubescent and audacious young man used to spend hours upon hours, going way past your usual sleeping schedule, sending a torrential flood of excessively smutty and lewd snapchats to one or two girls you only really knew tenuously. Once the 3AM/4AM lull hits, and as soon as this sad little reciprocal gift exchange has come to its logical conclusion (a Potlatch where the aim of the game is for each player to see who can expose themselves in the most degrading way possible, and as a heady consequence find out who can be the most ashamed of themselves in the morning) you hit the pillow hard with an acute sense of dissatisfaction. But just then as now, I loved it. This book was great, and there’s no one better than Lacan to give you blue balls. Now for a few more fairly standard and milquetoast comments.

Really quite ridiculously good to be honest, perhaps even fundamental in a sense. This seminar was taught 63 years ago and I still don’t believe we’ve quite come to grips with the distinction between the service of goods borne out by traditional ethics and the approach toward the Sadean second death that Lacan has evoked here. Of course the issue of desire, that whole problematic, is as elusive as ever. And if Lacan was unable to integrate Das Ding, that enigmatic beyond which refracts and distorts from a distance, then we sure as shit are gonna have a hard time doing so, but that probably isn’t the most attractive of projects anyway, as we as subjects stamped by the signifier probably couldn’t withstand it, even if we try to bring it forth through an anamorphosis or through the patsy of art. Might have to reread Seminar XI now, because my god I hated that one.
]]> 181309 'Crime? What crime?...My killing a loathsome, harmful louse, a filthy old moneylender woman...and you call that a crime?'

Raskolnikov, a destitute and desperate former student, wanders through the slums of St Petersburg and commits a random murder without remorse or regret. He imagines himself to be a great man, a Napoleon: acting for a higher purpose beyond conventional moral law. But as he embarks on a dangerous game of cat and mouse with a suspicious police investigator, Raskolnikov is pursued by the growing voice of his conscience and finds the noose of his own guilt tightening around his neck. Only Sonya, a downtrodden prostitute, can offer the chance of redemption.

This vivid translation by David McDuff has been acclaimed as the most accessible version of Dostoyevsky's great novel, rendering its dialogue with a unique force and naturalism. This edition also includes a new chronology of Dostoyevsky's life and work.]]> 656 Fyodor Dostoevsky Theo 5 4.32 1866
author: Fyodor Dostoevsky
name: Theo
average rating: 4.32
book published: 1866
rating: 5
read at: 2022/09/12
date added: 2023/08/11
shelves: owned, endlessly-worth-re-reading
review:

]]> 36304803 Zupancic argues that sexuality is at the point of a "short circuit" between ontology and epistemology. Sexuality and knowledge are structured around a fundamental negativity, which unites them at the point of the unconscious. The unconscious (as linked to sexuality) is the concept of an inherent link between being and knowledge in their very negativity.

]]> 164 Alenka Zupančič Theo 5 4.33
author: Alenka Zupančič
name: Theo
average rating: 4.33
book published:
rating: 5
read at: 2023/07/15
date added: 2023/07/15
shelves: owned, endlessly-worth-re-reading
review:

]]> 1068674 200 Marcus Aurelius 0753820161 Theo 5 4.34 180
author: Marcus Aurelius
name: Theo
average rating: 4.34
book published: 180
rating: 5
read at:
date added: 2023/02/25
shelves: endlessly-worth-re-reading, owned
review:

]]> 17188217 When it first appeared in France, "Anti-Oedipus" was hailed as a masterpiece by some and "a work of heretical madness" by others. In it, Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari set forth the following theory: Western society's innate herd instinct has allowed the government, the media, and even the principles of economics to take advantage of each person's unwillingness to be cut off from the group. What's more, those who suffer from mental disorders may not be insane, but could be individuals in the purest sense, because they are by nature isolated from society. More than twenty-five years after its original publication, "Anti-Oedipus" still stands as a controversial contribution to a much-needed dialogue on the nature of free thinking.
]]> 454 Gilles Deleuze Theo 5 4.21 1972
author: Gilles Deleuze
name: Theo
average rating: 4.21
book published: 1972
rating: 5
read at: 2022/11/11
date added: 2023/01/06
shelves: owned, endlessly-worth-re-reading
review:
This took me four years of on and off reading to finish.... I still don’t know what a fucking BwO is.
]]> 1058259 214 Martin Heidegger 0300017405 Theo 5 4.02 1929
author: Martin Heidegger
name: Theo
average rating: 4.02
book published: 1929
rating: 5
read at: 2022/06/14
date added: 2023/01/06
shelves: owned, endlessly-worth-re-reading
review:
Remarkably clear writing even in spite of Heidegger having the gall to write a 90 odd page long chapter without any breaks. The unabashed discussions of the inner greatness of National Socialism and the determination of a people are quite rightfully toe curling but aside from the slapdash quibbles randomly strewn about in these lectures criticising the West and Russia etc. they’re thankfully mostly ignorable. Is Heidegger’s fundamental ontology fascist? I’m not in a good enough position to say, but I think his tenacious examination of the Presocratics as well as Plato and Aristotle are so bloody good (even if his etymologies and translations are spotty in parts - so I’ve heard at least) that I’m willing to throw up my hands and be a nonpartisan in the whole thing. I can now gladly admit to the ŷ������ community at large that my cringeworthy Deleuzean sensibilities at 17 have been replaced by Heidegger’s investigation into Being. Brace yourselves folks, it’s gonna be a bumpy ride!!
]]> 7767978 320 Jean-François Lyotard 0485120836 Theo 5 4.33 1974
author: Jean-François Lyotard
name: Theo
average rating: 4.33
book published: 1974
rating: 5
read at: 2022/07/29
date added: 2023/01/06
shelves: owned, endlessly-worth-re-reading
review:

]]> 15790264 Librarian's note: Alternative cover edition here.

William Stoner enters the University of Missouri at nineteen to study agriculture. A seminar on English literature changes his life, and he never returns to work on his father's farm. Stoner becomes a teacher. He marries the wrong woman. His life is quiet, and after his death his colleagues remember him rarely.

Yet with truthfulness, compassion and intense power, this novel uncovers a story of universal value.

Stoner tells of the conflicts, defeats and victories of the human race that pass unrecorded by history, and reclaims the significance of an individual life. A reading experience like no other, itself a paean to the power of literature, it is a novel to be savoured.]]> 306 John Williams Theo 5 4.32 1965
author: John Williams
name: Theo
average rating: 4.32
book published: 1965
rating: 5
read at: 2021/09/06
date added: 2023/01/06
shelves: endlessly-worth-re-reading, owned
review:
Beautifully devastating, as if someone with the psychological insight of a Dostoevsky attempted to reproduce Lucky Jim. Believe the hype people, it’s one of those books you’ll put off reading because of its popularity... but trust me, you really shouldn’t.
]]> 49648498 544 Klaus Theweleit 0745603823 Theo 5 4.50 1979
author: Klaus Theweleit
name: Theo
average rating: 4.50
book published: 1979
rating: 5
read at: 2022/09/27
date added: 2023/01/06
shelves: owned, endlessly-worth-re-reading
review:
Certainly a slog at parts but you’d be hard pressed to find a better concretisation of deleuzoguattarian analysis anywhere. The Freikorps and the historical determinations behind them are fascinating, with the collusion of the conditions of their inception and ours being really quite unnerving. Theweleit’s solutions concerning body-armour and the nature of desiring-production do strike me as somewhat adolescent at times, a bit too new agey and utopian and ooohh ahh embrace your body and skin and the determinations of your feminine unconscious and ooohh this is a discourse written by a man so don’t listen to me pal! but the analysis is so bloody incisive when he isn’t busy trying to derive some generalised prescriptive/normative conclusions from what he’s writing about that I’d consider this a necessary tool in the fight against the fascist tendency - which keeps on rearing it’s godforsaken head (even in writers like Brecht with their implicit misogyny, placing empirical women below the iconography of a great infinite flood/big wet menstruating fanny etc.) - so yeah go out and snatch this piece up sharpish you goddamn fools.
]]> 41058907
Written in longhand in notebooks that Lewis found in his home, A Grief Observed probes the "mad midnight moments" of Lewis's mourning and loss, moments in which he questioned what he had previously believed about life and death, marriage, and even God. Indecision and self-pity assailed Lewis. "We are under the harrow and can't escape," he writes. "I know that the thing I want is exactly the thing I can never get. The old life, the jokes, the drinks, the arguments, the lovemaking, the tiny, heartbreaking commonplace." Writing A Grief Observed as "a defense against total collapse, a safety valve," he came to recognize that "bereavement is a universal and integral part of our experience of love."

Lewis writes his statement of faith with precision, humor, and grace. Yet neither is Lewis reluctant to confess his continuing doubts and his awareness of his own human frailty. This is precisely the quality which suggests that A Grief Observed may become "among the great devotional books of our age."

alternative cover for the edition with
isbn: 0571066240
isbn 13: 978-0571066247]]> 64 C.S. Lewis Theo 5 3.86 1961
author: C.S. Lewis
name: Theo
average rating: 3.86
book published: 1961
rating: 5
read at: 2021/12/09
date added: 2023/01/06
shelves: owned, endlessly-worth-re-reading
review:
Got a strong feeling I’m gonna be re-reading this every couple of years for the rest of my life.
]]> 94578 "[This book] mirrors all of Nietzsche's thought and could be related in hundreds of ways to his other books, his notes, and his letters. And yet it is complete in itself. For it is a work of art." —Walter Kaufmann in the Introduction

Nietzsche called The Gay Science "the most personal of all my books." It was here that he first proclaimed the death of God—to which a large part of the book is devoted—and his doctrine of the eternal recurrence.

Walter Kaufmann's commentary, with its many quotations from previously untranslated letters, brings to life Nietzsche as a human being and illuminates his philosophy. The book contains some of Nietzsche's most sustained discussions of art and morality, knowledge and truth, the intellectual conscience and the origin of logic.

Most of the book was written just before Thus Spoke Zarathustra, the last part five years later, after Beyond Good and Evil. We encounter Zarathustra in these pages as well as many of Nietzsche's most interesting philosophical ideas and the largest collection of his own poetry that he himself ever published.

Walter Kaufmann's English versions of Nietzsche represent one of the major translation enterprises of our time. He is the first philosopher to have translated Nietzsche's major works, and never before has a single translator given us so much of Nietzsche.]]> 396 Friedrich Nietzsche 0394719859 Theo 5 4.29 1882
author: Friedrich Nietzsche
name: Theo
average rating: 4.29
book published: 1882
rating: 5
read at: 2023/01/04
date added: 2023/01/04
shelves: owned, endlessly-worth-re-reading
review:

]]> 15931668 In making his case for the expansion of the practice zone for individuals and for society as a whole, Sloterdijk develops a fundamental and fundamentally new anthropology. The core of his science of the human being is an insight into the self-formation of all things human. The activity of both individuals and collectives constantly comes back to affect them: work affects the worker, communication the communicator, feelings the feeler.

It is those humans who engage expressly in practice that embody this mode of existence most clearly: farmers, workers, warriors, writers, yogis, rhetoricians, musicians or models. By examining their training plans and peak performances, this book offers a panorama of exercises that are necessary to be, and remain, a human being]]> 500 Peter Sloterdijk 0745649211 Theo 5
Sloterdijk has firmly established himself, in my mind at the very least (which really counts for nil), as the preeminent philosopher of our times. As much as I hate brown nosing I can’t see any other way of describing this book, it seriously is that good. His conception of anthropotechnics, usurped from a rather curt usage circulating around the time of the Russian Revolution, is the summation of all prior technical/practical processes and arduous tasks carried out by the ascetics of history. Ascetics broach a far greater range than just religious mystics or hermits, instead including every individual who attempts to bring about the impossible and somehow make it look easy (athletes, musicians, generals and military leaders, actors, writers, teachers, priests and religious authorities - the list is truly endless). They maintain a vertical tension on ‘Mount Improbable��, paradoxically moving both forwards and upwards simultaneously. Ever since the re-secularisation of the subject from the Enlightenment onwards we have faced an easing and slackening of this vertical tension that is causing mankind to become mere cannon fodder, numerically ordained into various programmes (the forced remoulding dreamed of by Trotsky, the Biocosmists, capitalist globalisation etc.) The question is how we can reappropriate the resources of the past, with their edifices on which they stand effectively laid waste to by now, and be able to go forth without succumbing to ecological disaster and a complete disintegration of the symbolic order.

There’s way too much to discuss in a review here, Sloterdijk practically comes out of the gate like a carnivorous, malignant cancer eschewing ever figure there ever was. His intellectual eye is all-encompassing and intensely scrutinising, picking up on subtle sociological, pedagogical, aesthetic, commercial, religious etc. trends that have shaped the disarray we have to contend with today. This book begs for multiple re-reads and I am more than happy to oblige, a quick summation is simply impossible. Read it, and then re-read it, my review really doesn’t stand up to the colossal project Sloterdijk has only just begun to explicate in outline. I agree, his anthropotechnics stands at the base of a new discourse that will take decades of research before it even begins to cover any considerable ground. But my god, what a start!]]> 4.18 2009
author: Peter Sloterdijk
name: Theo
average rating: 4.18
book published: 2009
rating: 5
read at: 2022/12/08
date added: 2022/12/08
shelves: owned, endlessly-worth-re-reading
review:
The only word I can truly summon for this work that would do it any kind of justice is simply this �� magisterial.

Sloterdijk has firmly established himself, in my mind at the very least (which really counts for nil), as the preeminent philosopher of our times. As much as I hate brown nosing I can’t see any other way of describing this book, it seriously is that good. His conception of anthropotechnics, usurped from a rather curt usage circulating around the time of the Russian Revolution, is the summation of all prior technical/practical processes and arduous tasks carried out by the ascetics of history. Ascetics broach a far greater range than just religious mystics or hermits, instead including every individual who attempts to bring about the impossible and somehow make it look easy (athletes, musicians, generals and military leaders, actors, writers, teachers, priests and religious authorities - the list is truly endless). They maintain a vertical tension on ‘Mount Improbable��, paradoxically moving both forwards and upwards simultaneously. Ever since the re-secularisation of the subject from the Enlightenment onwards we have faced an easing and slackening of this vertical tension that is causing mankind to become mere cannon fodder, numerically ordained into various programmes (the forced remoulding dreamed of by Trotsky, the Biocosmists, capitalist globalisation etc.) The question is how we can reappropriate the resources of the past, with their edifices on which they stand effectively laid waste to by now, and be able to go forth without succumbing to ecological disaster and a complete disintegration of the symbolic order.

There’s way too much to discuss in a review here, Sloterdijk practically comes out of the gate like a carnivorous, malignant cancer eschewing ever figure there ever was. His intellectual eye is all-encompassing and intensely scrutinising, picking up on subtle sociological, pedagogical, aesthetic, commercial, religious etc. trends that have shaped the disarray we have to contend with today. This book begs for multiple re-reads and I am more than happy to oblige, a quick summation is simply impossible. Read it, and then re-read it, my review really doesn’t stand up to the colossal project Sloterdijk has only just begun to explicate in outline. I agree, his anthropotechnics stands at the base of a new discourse that will take decades of research before it even begins to cover any considerable ground. But my god, what a start!
]]> 117565
"A sort of final philosopher of the Western world. His statements have the compression of poetry and the audacity of cosmic clowning."��Washington Post

"An intellectual bombshell that blasts away at all kinds of cant, sham and conventionality. . . . [Cioran's] language is so erotic, his handling of words so seductive, that the act of reading becomes an encounter in the erogenous zone."—Jonah Raskin, L.A. Weekly]]> 224 Emil M. Cioran 0226106756 Theo 5 4.20 1956
author: Emil M. Cioran
name: Theo
average rating: 4.20
book published: 1956
rating: 5
read at: 2022/08/23
date added: 2022/08/23
shelves: owned, endlessly-worth-re-reading
review:

]]> 57193101 103 Ernst Jünger Theo 5 4.27 1922
author: Ernst Jünger
name: Theo
average rating: 4.27
book published: 1922
rating: 5
read at: 2022/07/31
date added: 2022/07/31
shelves: owned, endlessly-worth-re-reading
review:
A condensed elucidation of the philosophy of one of the most affable fascist writers around, if that isn’t a too unpalatable turn of phrase, here espousing a gentlemanly Heraclitean ‘war is the father of all things�� mentality concerning WWI where one is able to lap up the horror and bloodlust of battle. Walter Benjamin’s distanced enjoyment of his own alienation is here twisted into an exhilaration before the spectacle of one’s own utter annihilation in a far more brutal setting than just your old stereotypical plain Jane petit-bourgeois concrete jungle. This work is the account of a true heir of Nietzsche, with all the warts and chancres and tasteless asides that entails. Definite must-read for fans of Mishima’s Sun and Steel and, like some kind of acrid Europa-endorsing fine wine, I’d pair this book with the discography of Death in June - my go to would be ‘Oh How we Laughed�� but ‘But, What Ends when the Symbols Shatter?�� would probably do just as well.
]]> 32532 On Becoming a Novelist contains the wisdom accumulated during John Gardner's distinguished twenty-year career as a fiction writer and creative writing teacher. With elegance, humor, and sophistication, Gardner describes the life of a working novelist; warns what needs to be guarded against, both from within the writer and from without; and predicts what the writer can reasonably expect and what, in general, he or she cannot. "For a certain kind of person," Gardner writes, "nothing is more joyful or satisfying than the life of a novelist." But no other vocation, he is quick to add, is so fraught with professional and spiritual difficulties. Whether discussing the supposed value of writer's workshops, explaining the role of the novelist's agent and editor, or railing against the seductive fruits of literary elitism, On Becoming a Novelist is an indispensable, life-affirming handbook for anyone authentically called to the profession. "A miraculously detailed account of the creative process."—Anne Tyler, Baltimore Sun]]> 150 John Gardner 0393320030 Theo 5 4.10 1983
author: John Gardner
name: Theo
average rating: 4.10
book published: 1983
rating: 5
read at: 2022/06/01
date added: 2022/06/01
shelves: owned, endlessly-worth-re-reading
review:
Foundational. Absolutely foundational. The friendly kick in the arse I needed to finally convince myself to get my head down and write something which is completely trite, derivative and without merit.
]]> 257145 589 Martin Heidegger 0631197702 Theo 5 4.07 1927
author: Martin Heidegger
name: Theo
average rating: 4.07
book published: 1927
rating: 5
read at: 2022/05/22
date added: 2022/05/22
shelves: owned, endlessly-worth-re-reading
review:
An obvious work of genius and I think Bourdieu is more than right to describe it as polyvocal in being able to be read both in the context of Heidegger’s Nazism and in spite of/abstracted from it. I’ve gotta say though that I only comprehended about a third of it (if that) and the temporality stuff from the second half has really got me in a bind. Another book to be read for the rest of my life though and it is one of the bigguns in the field.
]]> 249 Tropic of Cancer, Henry Miller’s masterpiece, was banned as obscene in this country for twenty-seven years after its first publication in Paris in 1934. Only a historic court ruling that changed American censorship standards, ushering in a new era of freedom and frankness in modern literature, permitted the publication of this first volume of Miller’s famed mixture of memoir and fiction, which chronicles with unapologetic gusto the bawdy adventures of a young expatriate writer, his friends, and the characters they meet in Paris in the 1930s. Tropic of Cancer is now considered, as Norman Mailer said, "one of the ten or twenty great novels of our century."]]> 318 Henry Miller 0802131786 Theo 5
Second time reading and still remains my favourite work, does writing get any better than this?


‘Things are happening elsewhere. Things are always happening. It seems wherever I go there is drama. People are like lice - they get under your skin and bury themselves there. You scratch and scratch until the blood comes, but you can't get permanently deloused. Everywhere I go people are making a mess of their lives. Everyone has his private tragedy. It's in the blood now - misfortune, ennui, grief, suicide. The atmosphere is saturated with disaster, frustration, futility. Scratch and scratch, until there's no skin left. However, the effect upon me is exhilarating. Instead of being discouraged or depressed, I enjoy it. I am crying for more and more disasters, for bigger calamities, grander failures. I want the whole world to be out of whack, I want every one to scratch himself to death.’]]> 3.69 1934
author: Henry Miller
name: Theo
average rating: 3.69
book published: 1934
rating: 5
read at: 2023/06/13
date added: 2022/03/13
shelves: endlessly-worth-re-reading, owned
review:
Third time through, caved in and finally listened to my first audiobook. Ian McShane does a tremendous job bringing out the humour and lyricism of Miller that my Beckett-esque mental voice tends to miss. Has this ruined my personal relationship with the book? Maybe.... but a literary ménage à trois doesn’t seem like the worst thing in the world.

Second time reading and still remains my favourite work, does writing get any better than this?


‘Things are happening elsewhere. Things are always happening. It seems wherever I go there is drama. People are like lice - they get under your skin and bury themselves there. You scratch and scratch until the blood comes, but you can't get permanently deloused. Everywhere I go people are making a mess of their lives. Everyone has his private tragedy. It's in the blood now - misfortune, ennui, grief, suicide. The atmosphere is saturated with disaster, frustration, futility. Scratch and scratch, until there's no skin left. However, the effect upon me is exhilarating. Instead of being discouraged or depressed, I enjoy it. I am crying for more and more disasters, for bigger calamities, grander failures. I want the whole world to be out of whack, I want every one to scratch himself to death.��
]]> 15905006 The English-language debut of one of Brazil’s leading writers of the twentieth century

The Obscene Madame D is the first work by acclaimed Brazilian author Hilda Hilst to be published in English. Radically irreverent and formally impious, this novel portrays an unyielding radical intelligence, a sixty-year-old woman who decides to live in the recess under the stairs. In her diminutive space, Madame D—for dereliction—relives the perplexity of her recently deceased lover who cannot comprehend her rejection of common sense, sex, and a simple life, in favor of metaphysical speculations that he supposes to be delusional and vain.

"If Lispector's psychotic heroines careen towards Mars, Hilst's Madame D, in her flight from the body's 'unparalleled glimmer', implodes. Her god is too small, too obscene to halt her descent into Hell. This brief, lyrical and scalding account of a mind unhinged recalls the passionate urgency of Artaud and de Sade's waking dreams in which sex and death are forever conjoined and love's 'vivid time' irretrievably lost." --Rikki Ducornet

"Like her friend and admirer Clarice Lispector, Hilda Hilst was a passionate explorer of the sacred and the profane, the pure and the obscene, and shows, in this discomfiting, hypnotic work, just how rarely those categories are what they seem. The translation is excellent - what a rare relief." --Benjamin Moser]]> 74 Hilda Hilst 1937658066 Theo 5 4.11 1982
author: Hilda Hilst
name: Theo
average rating: 4.11
book published: 1982
rating: 5
read at: 2021/11/30
date added: 2021/11/30
shelves: owned, endlessly-worth-re-reading
review:
Just goes to show that there is a real art in re-reading; one that may surpass that of the initial reading itself.
]]> 60080 120 Immanuel Kant 0521626951 Theo 5 3.85 1785
author: Immanuel Kant
name: Theo
average rating: 3.85
book published: 1785
rating: 5
read at: 2021/11/24
date added: 2021/11/24
shelves: owned, endlessly-worth-re-reading
review:

]]> 437780
In his book, On Nietzsche , as translated by Bruce Boone, Bataille comes as close as he would ever come to formulating his own unique system of philosophy. One could say that reading Nietzsche was something of a revelation to Bataille, and profoundly affected his life. In 1915, in a crisis of guilt after leaving his blind father in the hands of the Germans, Bataille converted to Catholicism. It was Nietzsche's work that lead him to abandon traditional religion for an idiosyncratic form of godless mysticism.

In this volume, Bataille becomes, and goes beyond, Nietzsche, assuming Nietzsche's thought where he left off--with God's death. At the heart of this work is Bataille's exploration of how one can have a spiritual life outside religion. On Nietzsche is essentially a journal that brilliantly mixes observations with ruminations in fragments, aphorisms, poems, myths, quotations, and images against the background of World War II and the German occupation. Bataille has a unique way of moving breezily from abstraction to confession, and from theology to eroticism. He skillfully weaves together his own internal experience of anguish with the war and destruction raging outside with arguments against fascist interpretations of Nietzsche and praise for the philosopher as a prophet foretelling "the crude German fate."

With an introduction, "Furiously Nietzschean," by Sylvere Lotringer, an Appendix in which Bataille defends himself against Sartre, and an Index, this volume reconfirms Michel Foucault's assertion that Bataille, "broke with traditional narrative to tell us what has never been told before."]]> 256 Georges Bataille 1557786445 Theo 5
“So he’s a whore?��

“_��������������������������������������

This work is turgid with concepts structured like thicket bushes, with terms such as ‘summit��, ‘chance��, ‘risk��, ‘impalement��, ‘laughter�� and ‘theopathy�� bristling with contradictory value judgements. We have here limit concepts that induce a pendulum to continually swing between anguish and unbridled joy, clinging on to a minute prospect of naked chance. Us, the race of gamblers, not being able to recognise the permeable border between eroticism and ascetic mysticism - of a God we make a whore out of, a God weak due to his immutable nature.... never taking a chance (and chance, against the vicissitudes of time, being the most affable thing) - we are forever lacerated by attempts to communicate with one another, by trying to tell one another about the labyrinthine logic of the summit we each clamour towards.

I believe this work, in conjunction with Virilio’s Speed and Politics, really does provide a bulletproof anthropology, a perfect assessment of the current state of affairs. Speed and Politics has a macroscopic lens which becomes hyper focused in Bataille’s own interior monologue, with the fraught tension of occupied France being the backdrop of these contemplative diary entries seeing Bataille pushing toward the beyond of his particularlity, attempting to affect an abortive summit toward a transcendent nothingness.

This book’s a real beauty.]]> 4.07 1945
author: Georges Bataille
name: Theo
average rating: 4.07
book published: 1945
rating: 5
read at: 2021/11/05
date added: 2021/11/05
shelves: owned, endlessly-worth-re-reading
review:
“Don’t take our word for it! Alas, we’re not all that logical. We say God - though in reality God is a person, a particular individual. We speak to him. We address him by name - he is the God of Abraham and Jacob. We treat him just like anybody else, like a personal being...��

“So he’s a whore?��

“_��������������������������������������

This work is turgid with concepts structured like thicket bushes, with terms such as ‘summit��, ‘chance��, ‘risk��, ‘impalement��, ‘laughter�� and ‘theopathy�� bristling with contradictory value judgements. We have here limit concepts that induce a pendulum to continually swing between anguish and unbridled joy, clinging on to a minute prospect of naked chance. Us, the race of gamblers, not being able to recognise the permeable border between eroticism and ascetic mysticism - of a God we make a whore out of, a God weak due to his immutable nature.... never taking a chance (and chance, against the vicissitudes of time, being the most affable thing) - we are forever lacerated by attempts to communicate with one another, by trying to tell one another about the labyrinthine logic of the summit we each clamour towards.

I believe this work, in conjunction with Virilio’s Speed and Politics, really does provide a bulletproof anthropology, a perfect assessment of the current state of affairs. Speed and Politics has a macroscopic lens which becomes hyper focused in Bataille’s own interior monologue, with the fraught tension of occupied France being the backdrop of these contemplative diary entries seeing Bataille pushing toward the beyond of his particularlity, attempting to affect an abortive summit toward a transcendent nothingness.

This book’s a real beauty.
]]> 446542 241 Samuel Beckett 0802151361 Theo 5 4.06 1951
author: Samuel Beckett
name: Theo
average rating: 4.06
book published: 1951
rating: 5
read at:
date added: 2021/11/03
shelves: endlessly-worth-re-reading, owned
review:

]]> 24874291 'Yes, bastard, you're the one I love'

A pair of lovers �� a young female journalist and an older man who owns an isolated farm in the Brazilian outback �� spend the night together. The next day they proceed to destroy each other. Amid vitriolic insults, cruelty and warring egos, their sexual adventure turns into a savage power game. This intense, erotic cult novel by one of Brazil's most infamous modernist writers explores alienation, the desire to dominate and the wish to be dominated.]]> 64 Raduan Nassar 0141396806 Theo 5 3.11 1978
author: Raduan Nassar
name: Theo
average rating: 3.11
book published: 1978
rating: 5
read at:
date added: 2021/11/03
shelves: endlessly-worth-re-reading, owned
review:

]]> 436806
Story of the Eye, written in 1928, is his best-known work; it is unashamedly surrealistic, both disgusting and fascinating, and packed with seemingly endless violations. It's something of an underground classic, rediscovered by each new generation. Most recently, the Icelandic pop singer Björk Guðdmundsdóttir cites Story of the Eye as a major inspiration: she made a music video that alludes to Bataille's erotic uses of eggs, and she plans to read an excerpt for an album.

Warning: Story of the Eye is graphically sexual, and is only suited for adults who are not easily offended.]]> 103 Georges Bataille 0872862097 Theo 5 3.70 1928
author: Georges Bataille
name: Theo
average rating: 3.70
book published: 1928
rating: 5
read at:
date added: 2021/11/03
shelves: endlessly-worth-re-reading, owned
review:

]]> 19506 Die Welt als Wille und Vorstellung is one of the most important philosophical works of the nineteenth century, the basic statement of one important stream of post-Kantian thought. It is without question Schopenhauer's greatest work. Conceived and published before the philosopher was 30 and expanded 25 years later, it is the summation of a lifetime of thought.

For 70 years, the only unabridged English translation of this work was the Haldane-Kemp collaboration. In 1958, a new translation by E. F. J. Payne appeared that decisively supplanted the older one. Payne's translation is superior because it corrects nearly 1,000 errors and omissions in the Haldane-Kemp translation, and it is based on the definitive 1937 German edition of Schopenhauer's work prepared by Dr. Arthur Hübscher. Payne's edition is the first to translate into English the text's many quotations in half a dozen languages. It is thus the most useful edition for the student or teacher.]]> 534 Arthur Schopenhauer 0486217612 Theo 5 4.21 1818
author: Arthur Schopenhauer
name: Theo
average rating: 4.21
book published: 1818
rating: 5
read at: 2021/08/22
date added: 2021/11/03
shelves: endlessly-worth-re-reading, owned
review:
The proudest I’ve been about actually finishing a fat ol�� tome since Gravity’s Rainbow. The philosophy in here is batshit, but the writing is incredible.
]]> 1207856 112 René Descartes 002367170X Theo 5 3.48 1641
author: René Descartes
name: Theo
average rating: 3.48
book published: 1641
rating: 5
read at:
date added: 2021/11/03
shelves: endlessly-worth-re-reading, owned
review:

]]> 80449 On the Genealogy of Morals (1887) is a book about the history of ethics and about interpretation. Nietzsche rewrites the former as a history of cruelty, exposing the central values of the Judaeo-Christian and liberal traditions - compassion, equality, justice - as the product of a brutal process of conditioning designed to domesticate the animal vitality of earlier cultures. The result is a book which raises profoundly disquieting issues about the violence of both ethics and interpretation. Nietzsche questions moral certainties by showing that religion and science have no claim to absolute truth, before turning on his own arguments in order to call their very presuppositions into question. The Genealogy is the most sustained of Nietzsche's later works and offers one of the fullest expressions of his characteristic concerns. This edition places his ideas within the cultural context of his own time and stresses the relevance of his work for a contemporary audience.]]> 208 Friedrich Nietzsche 019283617X Theo 5 4.16 1887
author: Friedrich Nietzsche
name: Theo
average rating: 4.16
book published: 1887
rating: 5
read at: 2021/10/31
date added: 2021/11/03
shelves: endlessly-worth-re-reading, owned
review:

]]> 167500 The Gift of Death, Jacques Derrida's most sustained consideration of religion to date, he continues to explore questions introduced in Given Time about the limits of the rational and responsible that one reaches in granting or accepting death, whether by sacrifice, murder, execution, or suicide. Derrida analyzes Patocka's Heretical Essays on the History of Philosophy and develops and compares his ideas to the works of Heidegger, Levinas, and Kierkegaard.

A major work, The Gift of Death resonates with much of Derrida's earlier writing and will be of interest to scholars in anthropology, philosophy, and literary criticism, along with scholars of ethics and religion.

Collection: Religion and Postmodernism Series]]> 124 Jacques Derrida 0226143066 Theo 5 4.09 1992
author: Jacques Derrida
name: Theo
average rating: 4.09
book published: 1992
rating: 5
read at: 2021/07/24
date added: 2021/11/03
shelves: endlessly-worth-re-reading, owned
review:

]]>