Jesse Hilson > Recent Status Updates

My attention span splashes and recedes with no effect on this solid object of a book

Jameson is long-winded. I’m clawing for survival to the end of this book, I must finish it. It might be one of the most difficult books I’ve read. It’s proving to me that ADD reading styles are like waves to this book which is like a sea wall or pylon sunk deep in the ground. My concentration splashes and recedes w/ no effect

Finished the Sartre section. It started to make a little more sense to me. Still pretty difficult and dense. Something about comparing Sartre to Marx in his sense of understanding history, and what this means for literature. Sartre has his own lingo and his own set of concepts, his own philosophical structure

God help me, the 100-page section on Sartre is melting under my eyes and starting to make some sense.

The Jean-Paul Sartre section is starting and I feel very bored with it already. Something about Sartre is mind-numbing…

Very dense but I’m able with my feeble brain to pick up glimpses and glimmerings of things. Need to read Schiller and more Freud. I’m comparing this book to The Years of Theory where Jameson lectured over zoom on French theorists. This is constructed prose, and oh how constructed it is…I’m on the trail of something, not exactly clear

Fredric is rushing and I’m rushing. There’s a lot of books he put in the footnotes, or his editor Carson Welch did, that will need to be tracked down. I find I’m most interested in the Freudian mutations and demolitions (of Freud) in these French thinkers, simply because I’ve read more Freud than I have Marx.

Althusser and Derrida. Kind of yawning. I wanted to hear more about Lacan and I’m looking forward to Foucault. My readings of Freud have me in a psychological frame of mind.

Lectures on Lacan. Fascinating and frustrating.

About to enter the set of lectures on Lacan. I don’t know why that name fills me with annoyance and trepidation. Jameson himself talks about how needlessly difficult and abstruse Lacan makes everything.

I don’t know if this is the best place to start with Jameson. His lecturing style seems to be scattered.

Just read the chapter on “theosophical Sufism.” A lot of talk about “wahdat al-wujud,” the Unity of Being. I don’t fully understand it. I take it that saying God is everything and everything, and everyone, is God, could get you into trouble with some true believers, whether Muslim or Christian or whatever. Still, mystical poets went crazy with this