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At a certain point in the diary, Shehab begins to acknowledge that the words he uses have been gradually stripped of meaning: clinic, aid, hospital, life, food, doctor, the sea. He uses them out of necessity, for the recognition of their form, but they've been severed from their referents, and with that, so too do the words collapse in on themselves, in a mirror of the world they're supposed to map.

At a certain point in the diary, Shehab begins to acknowledge that the words he uses have been gradually stripped of meaning: clinic, aid, hospital, life, food, doctor, the sea. He uses them out of necessity, for the recognition of their form, but they've been severed from their referents, and with that, so too do the words collapse in on themselves, in a mirror of the world they're supposed to map.

"How could ontology lay hold of a fart? It can always put its hand on whatever remains in the john, but never on the whiffs let out by roses. So the anthropy of a text that makes roses fart must be read. ... So the text is a gas; for the origin and the stake of the word, one hesitates, but this comes back to the same thing, between spirit (Geest, Geist) and fermentation".

Insufferable.

hmmmmm

Very apropos of Derrida to follow up one of the best essays he's ever written with two utterly useless ones.

Oooh a Derrida book on painting how ni- dammit it's a book on Kant.

Crowded with with large, colored illustrations on glossy, coffee-table pages, this is as much an luminous object of word and image as it is a book.

"Psychoanalysis is the art of taking advantage of lucky breaks."

"Given that contemplation is praised for being the most solitary and ultimate self-sufficient human activity, it is hard to resist the conclusion that, for Aristotle, the fundamental good of ethics is to get as far away from your neighbors as possible. The less you have to do with them the better!"

Feel like calling this a manifesto is a cheating a little bit because rn it's more like a (useful!) non-technical recap of Logic of Worlds. Maybe it manifests a bit more later on.

Reviving James C. Scott from the dead just to make him read Badiou's analysis of Brasilia, watching him throw up, and then putting him back in the ground again.

Things appear. Sometimes they appear identically, sometimes they appear differently. Sometimes the differences are differenter than others, sometimes the identities are identitier than others. [Math]. 325 pages.

Accidentally reading this and now I can't stop.

When the diagrams stop this is a lot less fun.

Category theory more like cate-GORY practice amirite? (because i am being gored by this book)

This book was written for me.

Probably best read with Aristotle's Poetics, if only to get a sense of the distance traveled.

Incredible deterritorializations of gender here: if land could only be inherited by males, and there was only a daughter left as offspring, no worries: she'd be reclassified as a 'male daughter' and the property would be passed to her, while respecting the rules.

reading this in public and loudly saying 'yes' on every page and while nodding unreasonably often and writing about it on goodreads

"If I have learned to eat my own flesh in the forest – starving, keening, learning the lesson of the she-wolf who chews off her own paw to leave the trap behind – if I must drink my own blood, thirsting, why should I stop at yours until your dear dead arms hang like withered garlands upon my breast and I weep for your going, oh my sister, I grieve for our gone".

"'I can't possibly teach Black women's writing - their experience is so different from mine.' Yet how many years have you spent teaching Plato and Shakespeare and Proust?"

Without naming it as such, Oyěwùmí theorises a kind of 'Western feminist gaze' that finds 'women's issues' everywhere it deigns to look, which has the unfortunate side-effect of presuming and entrenching the stability of who counts as fulfilling the role of 'women', without, in fact, asking the women - or men - in question. Jarring to a certain feminist sensibility which I've also imbibed!

so this is a book about touching and in the middle there is a section which instead of chapters are titled "tangents" because a tangent is where a line and a circle t-

Read the 'Force of Law' essay. +800 xp