"Nico" > Recent Status Updates

25% in and questioning the life choices that sent me here. Reading Hegel formulate crime and punishment in terms of his idealist dialectic is maddening.

If you see me binging Hegel: I'm sorry. It will happen again.

Oh I am in love with the editorial introduction, wonderful stuff.

Philosophy was a mistake, someone kill Aristotle.

"The fundamental meaning of the Oedipus complex is that human desire is a history, that this history involves refusal and hurt, that desire begins educated to reality through the specific unpleasure inflicted upon it by an opposing desire."

"Americans are obsessively clean, to us, everyone is dirty…it's about coping with our own feelings about personal hygiene. Arguments like these might sound like unscientific conjecture, and in a way they are" Yeah, no kidding. The real joke is the psychologist that doesn't know the insular cortex.

Hard not to see the immense anxiety Heidegger feels towards his "They"/"das Man" (including the horrors of newspapers and public transit) as determining his very flight from socialization. I just can't see how Sartre felt that "the question of Heidegger's naziism remained open" after reading BT, it's just too blatant.

If Heidegger asserts one more time that being-towards-death is non-relational I might scream.

"Our first, last, and constant task is never to allow our fore-having, fore-sight, and fore-conception to be presented to us by fancies and popular conceptions, but rather to make the scientific theme secure by working out these fore-structures in terms of the things themselves."

Pleasantly surprised by BT and how palpable its influence has been on later philosophers who are dear to me.

Excited to finally get to parts of Lacan that influenced some of Judith Butler's work.

"Images and symbols in women cannot be isolated from images and symbols of women. The representation...of female sexuality, whether it is repressed or not, conditions its implementation, and its displaced emergences...seal the fate of the tendencies, however naturally refined one assumes them to be."

"The point is not to know whether I speak of myself in a way that conforms to what I am, but rather to know whether, when I speak of myself, I am the same as the self of whom I speak."

"I am not, where I am the plaything of my thought; I think about what I am where I do not think I am thinking."

This is the most maddening read I have ever embarked on. I am downing secondary sources like ibuprofen in a chronic flare-up.

Reading this for spooky season was easily the greatest decision I've made all year. In Derrida's hauntology the reader is faced by revenants, haunted by specters, weaved from ghosts, and indebted to spirits. Spooky vibes all around.

There's a preface by Edward Said! How cool is that??

Really impressed with this so far. Sacco does a great job of managing the weight of the topic through timing, his cartoonishly exaggerated art style and his dweeby authorial voice. Still, I didn't expect to feel so sad about olive trees.

"...sure it's too heavy, even for a vulture like me. But...I mean, who's to say they'll be too heavy tomorrow?"

Jungians can be a bit boggling, like the analyst who wrote:

"storehouse of self-affirming ancestral memories"
"inner psychology...is a description of groups or classes...as filtered through the psyches of generations of ancestors"

Still, some of these essays are quite good (particularly those incorporating affect and systems theories) and it's nice to know what they're on about.

Adam Frank once said to Eve Sedgwick that learning made him tired, and gee do I feel that reading this.

Very wary of Critique being made into an object like it is treated in at least this first half of the book, but I'm heatsick and out of hyperfocus so I'm also just grumbly. Happy I read Touching-Feeling before this since it picks up where T-F left off (reparative vs paranoid reading).