Elliot > Recent Status Updates

First two of three chapters done. Absolutely having a blast- easily the most enjoyable theory book I’ve read this year. Bringing together so many previous influences: Freud, Lacan, Foucault, Derrida/Deleuze, Levi-Strauss, and introducing great new ones: Irigaray, Wittig, Beauvoir. So far a really phenomenal nonessentialist, antifoundationalist account of sex/gender overcoming many of Freud/Lacan’s aporias.

1999 updated preface was great. An absolutely phenomenal point on style vis a vis critiques of the “difficulty” of the book-
“Style is a complicated terrain…there is nothing radical about common sense. It would be a mistake to think that received grammar is the best vehicle for expressing radical views, given the constraints that grammar imposes upon thought, indeed, upon the thinkable itself.”

I’m so close, god please give me the strength !

Space and time really important fr fr. This dude be critiquing reason big time

Sadly been busier than anticipated lately but this has been a blast as I’ve had time. Very readable, Liedman makes a convincing case for the need to thoroughly integrate Marx’s life and work- something that really doesn’t seem to have done well elsewhere in English.

This dude got a lot to say fr

Found the early sections on W’s early education and relationship with Russel quite tedious. Really picked up with W’s time in Norway, experience in WW1, and writing the Tractatus. Really enjoying spending some extended time on a bio, especially of such a fascinating figure.

Honestly absurd how many people killed themselves in Vienna in the late 19th/early 20th centuries. Excited to read this! Chapter one was already great.

Little Expressionless Animals slapped. A bit ironic that there’s a pretty heavy critique of masculinity within it yet DFW was seemingly a pretty shitty guy. Interested to see the stories that follow.

Classic McCarthy so far. Haven’t read him for years so I’ve had a blast getting back into the style. The main character’s name is Bobby Western lmao

Moving through a brilliant exposition of stages of early modernity in Spain/Portugal, its movement into Northern Europe (Holland) into the beginnings of mature modernity in UK/France. Careful exegesis of Las Casas, Sepulveda, Suarez, Descartes, Spinoza, Locke, Hobbes, Hume, Smith, Rousseau all covered. Crazy what a piece of shit most of these people were re colonialism/slavery (excepting Las Casas/Rousseau).

Dussel really getting into his critique of Eurocentric accounts of modernity at this point. Similar, but expanded, to his work The Invention of the Americas. Some great work on Chinese, Ottoman, and Venetian political thinkers/systems pre 1492. Great account of “early modernity” beginning in southern Europe (Spain/Portugal) in the 16th century.

Dussel really is polymathic in his ability to weave together philosophy, linguistics, world systems theory, political theory and history, and classical studies. It’s continually shocking and frustrating how little of his work has been translated into English. The beginning of this work is a doozy- quite literally giving an anti-Euro/Hellenic world history of political development from the Neolithic era up to 1492.