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"Nothing is easier to teach than joy – alas, one only needs to be truly joyful oneself. But alas, this "alas" means that this is in fact not so easy – that is, it is not so easy always to be joyful oneself, for it is easy enough to teach joy when one is joyful: nothing is more certain than that".

"Oh, the scholars are proud of the calculations of the infinite, but here is the philosophers' stone: the least little expression of love is infinitely greater than all sacrifices, and all sacrifices are infinitely less than the least little bit in part-payment on the debt [of the infinitude of love]."

"The life of that man is truly poetical, he solves the great riddle: to live in eternity yet so to hear the parlour clock strike that its striking does not shorten but prolongs his eternity – a contradiction no less profound, but far more glorious, than the the story of the unfortuanate of whom it recounts that he woke up in hell and shouted 'What time is it?', to which the devil answered 'An eternity'.'

OK time to sit down and read this classic work of proto-existentialism and hopefully learn about faith and authenticity and — oh good God it's the horniest philosophy book I've ever read.

Last update for the year. HNY all :)

This is a book with a lot of heart and learning. It speaks, in subtle and moving ways, of the experience of devastation and loss. Its language is a language that might be increasingly necessary in the world - of lack of it - to come. And yet! It inscribes it all in a vocabulary of hope that's - I think - a failure of nerve. A recuperative move that's - I'm sorry for this - more cope than hope.

I cannot wait to be done with this interminable thing.

Kind of insane to write about The Century and to not mention even once the convulsions of decolonization (or, 'the national question', in more Marxist terms) that punctured it all over. Plenty of art, war, and sex though. Probably more a case of - The Century if you're European but are also a big fan of Mao.

A kind of selected dossier of writers and writings by figures of the 20th century - Freud, Celan, Mao, Brecht, Mandelstam - each reflecting on their time, with Badiou in turn, writing on them. A 'thematic' approach to the time, rather than a periodizing one. A little scattered, but interesting and unique.

There's a climactic moment here where, after 170 pages of exhaustive close reading of labyrinthine Hegelian text, Derrida is poised to reveal that symptomatic instance of what both inheres in and escapes the dialectic – only for D to interrupt himself literally mid-sentence to interpose some letters Hegel sent to his mate. If you think the dialectic is frustrating wait till you encounter the non-dialectic.

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!"