Lucas Mattos > Recent Status Updates

Read the Agamemnon.

"...each [book] affirms itself as an exercise in sainthood, inasmuch as sainthood consists in abandoning oneself to the mad [insinsée] chance of sense."

Read the Vienna Lecture.

"A book is born in agitation and anxiety, in the fermentation of a form in search of itself, in search of a deployment and appeasement for its impatience" (3).

The book as its own form/Idea (in the Platonic sense)—and, consequently, the work-in-progress as the gestation of a Form—is an incredibly interesting idea to me, and Nancy puts it beautifully here. "[Birth] in agitation and anxiety"...

The section of the Crisis we're reading in class follows directly from where I stopped back in 2023, so I'll post the corresponding update here. We'll also be reading The Vienna Lecture, which comprises the first appendix of the book; I'll be updating my progress to reflect that reading, too.

Can’t do the Grammatology right now, it’s doing nothing for me at the moment. My future reading activity—or, at least, what’ll be logged here—is looking like fiction, for the most part.

Spivak's Translator's Preface strikes me as self-absorbed and needlessly florid, and I'll be re-reading it before moving onto the actual Grammatology. I gave up on a deep read after about thirty pages. I suspect there's lots of value waiting to be recovered from beneath its layers of cryptic prose, especially for a newcomer to the Grammatology. I hope I'm right.

“Revolutionary or reformer – the error is the same. Unable to dominate and reform his own attitude toward life, which is everything, or his own being, which is almost everything, he flees, devoting himself to modifying others and the outside world. Every revolutionary and reformer is a fugitive. To fight for change is to be incapable of changing oneself. To reform is to be beyond repair.”