Jacqueline+Bowler

Tim Morton, "Ecology as Text, Text as Ecology." 2010. Oxford Literary Review 32.1

“One thing that modernity has damaged, along with the environment, has been thinking. To bring thinking to a point at which the damage can be assessed will require us to use the broken tools to hand. One damaged concept is ‘Nature’- I capitalise it to denature t- damaged and damaging, almost useless for developing ecological culture. Of far greater benefit would be concepts that ruthlessly denature and de-essentialise: they are called deconstruction.”

Derrida’s “re-mark”.. the basic flickering of language as it constitutes the environment

Saussure on the linguistic sign: “The value of just any term is accordingly determined by its environment, it is impossible to fix even the value of the word signifying “sun” without first considering its surroundings: in some languages it is not possible to say “sit in the //sun//”. Signs are interdependent. The existence of a sign implies coexistence with other signs.

The text context distinction is only an interpretive convenience.

Text as Ecology as Metaphor but also as non Metaphor

Nature, that sign of the extra-textual, does not strictly exist...

“Julia Kristeva formulates environmental textuality as //genotext//, which like genotype (from which it derives) is the genome of the text, the factors that produce it like an algorithm or recipe produces a set of results. This genotext includes the ecological environment: ‘[Genotext] will include semiotic processes but also the advent of the symbolic. The former includes drives, their disposition and their division of the body, plus the ecological and social system surrounding the body, such as objects and pre-Oedipal relations with parents. The latter encompasses the emergence of object and subject, and the constitution of nuclei of meaning involving categories: semantic and categorical fields’. Texts have environments.” (Morton)

On algorithms and fractals: reminds me of my father who describes how he gets nauseous at the site of things like the inside of pumpkins and of organic corn, in the geometric fractal shapes of the vegetables.

The fact that homosexuals exist across a vast array of sexually reproducing life forms, for instance, indicates that evolution has no problem with them. In fact, heterosexual behavior floats on top of a vast ocean of cloning, transgender switching, homosexuality and intersexuality.

Darwinism frees the mind for an ethics and politics based not on soulles authoritarianism, but on intimacy with coexisting strange others (//Autrui)// because Darwinism shows how utterly flimsy and contingent and non-teleological the biosphere is.

//Lifeworld// is strictly delimited to experience, not ontology. This limitation curtails the bad circularity of phenomenological justifications for ecological (in)action. The gratifying illusion of immersion in a lifeworld provides yet another way to hold out against the truth of global warming: it has been put to me on more than one occasion that only internally poor white Westerners, lacking a lifeworld, could think such a thing as global warming, whereas the Third World peasant, immersed in her lifeworld like a pair of Van Gogh shoes, has no need for such concepts. As the recent actions to mark the surpassing of a human-friendly limit of atmospheric Co2 have suggested, however, peasants are far from incapable of holding more than one idea and one place in mind at a time. In contrast, the view that starts from the fact of intimacy with coexisting strangers compels us to assume responsibility for global warming, a direct cause of the ongoing Sixth Mass Extinction Is sentience this recursive algorithmic process? It’s an interesting thought proposition. Rep

SUSTAINABILITY

“Capitalism did away with feudal and pre-feudal myths such as the divine hierarchy between classes of people. In so doing, however, it substituted one heck of a giant myth of its own: Nature. Nature is precisely the lump that pre-exists the capitalist labor process. Martin Heidegger has the best term for it: standing reserve, //bestand.//

The way people talk about nature is intricately related to the way people talk about technology, because often any new developments in technology are dichotomized with a “natural” state that preceded it.

The concept of materiality is kind of paradoxical? Like everything is material so it loses its meaning?

“So again, I ask, what exactly are we sustaining when we talk about sustainability? An intrinsically out of control system that sucks in grey goo at one end and pushes out grey value at the other.

My article on Lars Von Triers' Melancholia, the psyche, and the death of the American dream

http://ersatzformalism.tumblr.com/post/19136020779/the-apocalypse-film-and-the-death-of-the-american-dream


 * //Polemos//: ‘I am at war with myself’ or, Deconstruction(tm) in the Anthropocene? **

My question is whether deconstruction is equipped to be able to take on the anthropocene... How to deconstruct the moment that humanity, or, a human, is facing destruction and death. Although I found this article extremely intriguing, it made me lament that I do not know enough about Derrida's entire body of work to understand or question why he focused on certain issues to deconstruct at the expense of others. My first thought is that the environmental crisis was perhaps not considered the greatest threat to humanity (perhaps the threat of the Cold war and nuclear collapse was stronger?)

Two words haunt any ecologically attuned consideration of the historical hour in which our increasingly globalized world currently finds itself: one... is ‘anthrpocene’; the other, lurking as a grim potential, or even an unfolding reality, within the notion of the anthropocene is ‘ecocide’. (Rigby, qtd. on 239).

Anthropocene... two antipodal poles of non-sense.. (240).

//Extinction:// since the ‘anthropocene’ can only be named from without or after, as if by another looking back-hence Hollywood’s routine evocations of aliens’ arriving after the fact (as in Spielberg’s //A.I.//). (241)

One might have wished for Derridean texts examining the pitiable nomenclature that persists amidst this solar haze of discourse- environmentalism, ecology, sustainability, the retro-personifications of systems theory, the regressive othernesses of animal ‘studies.’ (245).

The ecocidal.. being stuck in rather a backloop.. (245).


 * The Mosquito Hut**

...It is, on the one hand, an impersonation of a village home, an abstraction of the //oikos.// On the other hand, the experimental hut must concretize- or, in Roy Wagner’s terms, //expersonate-// the domestic character of malaria transmission: it renders vivid the parasitic exchange between mosquito and human S146

The hut as site of interspecies management

Hospitality- a frame of action to respond and relate to the other, a gesture that both encompasses and upholds difference S147

The domestic camouflage of this peculiar trap creates a space in which to recognize this reciprocity and transform its lethal potential into an exercise in restraint.

If hospitality evokes a higher form of relating that ‘transcends the political and moral systems in which we live’ the hut generates relatins between experimental practice and research setting that supercede those cultivated by traditional research ethics, belonging instead to a specific geography and temporality of well-being. S147

.....The mosquito’s //umwelt// or atmosphere-e.g. the viscosity of the cooling air, the odours emanating from the field- and how these perceptions relate to its capacities S148

Re-creating the world of the mosquito thus demands empirical attention to the specific places //where species meet.//

Traps as ‘lethal parodies of the animal’s umwelt’ (Gell 1996, qtd. on S150)

“Donna Haraway, in //When Species Meet,// develops the concept //response-ability// as an ethical comportment for engaging with non-humans.” (S151).

“We must learn to kill patiently- a response that entails both awareness of the victim (what Haraway would describe as curiosity 2008) and personal restraint. S151

The hut is a between-space.. S156 Cosmopolitical engagement.. Shared Suffering..

KAFKA

My first question is how the concept of minor literature can be compared to Bakhtin's notion of heteroglossia, or Kristeva's intertextuality in texts (and the Khora). Is the minor literature

It’s not Oedipus that produces neurosis; it is neurosis- that is, a desire that is lready submissive and searching to communicate its own submission- that produces Oedipus. Oedipus, the market value of neurosis. In contrast, to augment and expand Oedipus by adding to it and making a paranoid and perverse use of it is already to escape from submission, to lift one’s head up, and see passing above the shoulders of the father what had really been the question all long: an entire micropolitics of desire, of impasses and escapes, of submissions and rectifications. Opening the impasse, unbloking it. Deterritorializing Oedipus into the world instead of reterritorializing everything in Oedipus and the family. P. 10

To the inhumaness of the “diabolical powers,” there is the answer of a becoming-animal: to become a beetle, to become a dog, to become an ape, “head over heels and away,” rather than lowering one’s head and remaining a beureacrat, inspector, judge, or judged. All children build or feel these sorts of escapes, these acts of becoming-animal. And the animal as an act of becoming has nothing to do with a substitute for the father, or with an archetype.P. 12

To become animal is to participate in movement.... Kafka’s animals never refer to a mythology or to archetypes but correspond solely to new levels, zones of liberated intensities where contents free themselves from their forms as well as from their expressions, from the signifier that formalized them. P 13

Kafka marks the impasse that bars access to writing for the Jews of Pargue and turns their literature into something impossible- the impossibility of not writing, the impossibility of writing in German, the impossibility of writing otherwise. (16).

When Kafka indicates that one of the goals of a minor literature is the “purification of the conflict that opposes father and son and the possibility of discussing that conflict,” it isn’t a question of an Oedipal phantasm but of a political program. (17).

The three characteristics of minor literature are the deterritorialization of language, the connection of the individual to a political immediacy, and the collective assemblage of enunciation. (18).

“Almost every word I write jars up against the next, I hear the consonants rub leadenly against each other rub leadenly against each other and the vowels sing an accompaniment like Negroes in a minstrel show.” //Language stops being representative in order to now move toward its extremities or its limits.// (23).

French as a spoken language in Godard (23)

One can understand Yiddish only by “feeling it” in the heart. In short, it is a language where minor utilizations will carry you away.. (25)

**Another Round...**

Becoming Undone Ch 4 philosophy, life, nature.. Pre-Socratics to Spinoza to Darwin, Nietzsche and then BERGSON. To reconstitute the meaning of Freedom. Freedom, agency, and autonomy is “Freedom” from, “[when] freedom is conceived negatively, as the elimination of constraint.” (60).

But rather, “freedom to,” is a “positive understanding of freedom as the capacity for action, reframing the concept of freedom by providing it with a different context that may provide it with other, different political affiliations and associations and a different understanding of subjectivity.” (60).

Bergson’s concept of freedom may “serve to explain Irigaray’s understanding of what autonomy might be for a subject only in the process of coming into existence, a subject-to-be (a female subject). Bergson might help to rethink how subjectivity and freedom are always and only enacted within and through the materiality that life and the nonliving share, a materiality not adequately addressed in alternative traditions that have until now remained so influential in feminist thought.” (62). Both sides of the free will/determinism debate “presume the separation or discontinuity of the subject from the range of available options or alternatives; the subject’s stable, ongoing self-identity; a fundamental continuity between present causes and future effects (whether causes are regarded as internal or as external to the subject are what tend to define the positions of the determinist and the libertarian, respectively. “ (63).

To Bergson, an act is free insofar as “the self alone will have been the author of it, and... it will express the whole of the self.” (Time and Free Will 165-66, qtd. on 64). Free will originates from within a subject and “expresses all of that subject... [it] is integral to who or what the subject is.” (64). Even when acts emerge as spontaneous they have that indefinable resemblance to it which one sometimes finds between the artist and his work.” (Bergson, Time and Free Will). As I understand it, acts are always “sprung from the subject” as well as constituting the subject at the same time because the subject is changed through the process. So to “measure” freedom in a Bersonian sense, one must look to see how the act resembles the subject as well as how the subject is transformed by and engaged through her acts. I find this to be the crux of this chapter, and wonder how this could be expanded upon and analyzed. How does one examine less free acts? As acts that do not construct the subject or in which the subject is not transformed or engaged by their acts? How does one make sense of the modes of limitation imposed upon a subject that seem to constitute the identity of the subject and her history?

Psychical states are always qualitative. “Psychical states function, not through distinction, opposition, categories, identities, but through ‘fusion or interpretation.’ (65). Psychical life cannot be measured spatially. Psychical states “emerge or can only be understood in duration rather than through the conventional modes of spatialization that generally regulate thought, especially scientific or instrumental thought- that is to say, any mode of analysis or division into parts.” (65). The distinction between the possible and the real - “The possible is at best the retrospective projection of a real that wishes to conceive itself as eternally possible but which becomes actual only through an unpredictable labor and effort of differentiation, an epigenesis that exceeds its preconditions.” (66). Any “unchosen” options of action dissolve as possibilities. I find this also an interesting idea and yet our society is so fixated on “alternative” universes and paths. It is difficult to conceptualize a freedom without a sort of sequencing of “alternatives.”

On Freedom and Materiality Freedom does not exist inherently in subjects “but is immanent in the relations that the living has with the material world, including other forms of life.” This is of course, very opposite to the Kantian necessity for autonomy and the sort of “spontaneous” speech act as an component of the human mind. “Life is consciousness, though not always on act on consciousness. Consciousness is the projection onto materiality of the possibility of a choice, a decision whose outcome is not given in advance; that is to say, it is a mode of simplifying or skeletizing matter so that it affords materials on and with which to act.” (68). “At the root of life there is an effort to engraft on to the necessity of physical forces the largest possible amount of indetermination. Life opens the universe to becoming more than it is.” (70)

“In turn, matter, while providing the resources and objects of living activity, is also the internal condition of freedom as well as its external limit or constraint.” (70). “[Life] was to create with matter, which is necessity itself, an instrument of freedom, to make a machine which should triumph over mechanism, and to use the determinism of nature to pass through the meshes of the net which this very determinism had spread.” (70-71). “The universe has this expansive possibility, the possibility of being otherwise not because life recognizes it as such but because life could only exist because of the simultineity of the past with the present that matter affords it.” (71). This feels like a very dense statement. Can this idea coincide with the Bergsonian idea above that “alternatives” dissolve through action, or possibly I am reading it wrong.

Feminism and Freedom “Subjects choose and make themselves through how and what they do...” (71). “Freedom is not an accomplishment granted by the grace or good will of the other, but is attained only through the struggle with matter, the struggle of bodies to become more than they are, a struggle that occurs not only on the level of the individual but also of the species.” (72). “Challenging facing feminism today is no longer only to give women a more equal place within existing social networks and relations but to enable women to partake in the creation of a future unlike the present.

CH 5 It must be acknowledged that feminism has not succeeded in either of its competing and contradictory aims: either the creation of a genuine and thorough-going equality, which reveals the fundamental sameness of humanity underneath or beyond all its morphological and representational variations; or the constitution of a genuine and practical autonomy, in which women choose for themselves how to define both themselves and their world, this second goal being the ideal represented in philosophies of sexual difference. (75). I find this very well-said. It also very much reminds me of Spivak’s defense of allusions to essentialism. “In addressing the question, ‘what is feminist theory?,’ we are primarily addressing the question of what it is to think differently, innovatively, in terms that have never been developed before, about the most forceful and impressive impacts that impinge upon us and that thinking, concepts, and theories address if not resolve or answer.” (77).

What is different between Foucault and Deleuze and Guattari concerning truth? “How strong could feminist theory become if it flourished where knowledge comes to understand itself and its relations to the real most directly?” (76-77). To Deleuze and Guattari, a concept evolves and emerges out of chaos. They are contingent upon the problems that they are connected to as means of address. They are not solutions, but they “add ideality to the chaos. They are practices we perform on events. I am not quite sure how exactly Deleuze’s notion is so opposite to Foucault. The author mentions that Foucault doesn’t always account for the very truth-power of his own theory? Is it that he doesn’t delve into the ontology of his own theory? Or that he sees truth-power as constraining whereas Deleuze sees the evolution of concepts as liberatory?

“Most interestingly, concepts cannot be identified with discourses or statements, which means that concepts can never be true.” (79). “Along with the percept and the affect, the concept is how we welcome a people to come, a world to come, a movement beyond ourselves, rather than simply affirming what we are.” (81).
 * Unlike identity politics, which affirms what we are and what we know, the concept, theory, is never about us, about who we are. It affirms only what we can become, extracted as it is from the events which move us beyond ourselves.” (81).**
 * Concept is freed from representation / enters the virtual. “Feminist theory is essential, not as a plan or anticipation of action to come, but as the addition of ideality, incorporeality, to the horrifying materiality, the weighty reality, of the present as patriarchal, as racist, as ethnocentric, a ballast to enable it to be transformed.” (81).**
 * It’s hard for me to comment here without first just basically positing that I wonder what these possibilities could be Maybe that is a testiment to the lack of imagination our culture has placed on the incorporeal aptitude for a free, feminine actualization.**
 * “To focus on the subject at the cost of focusing on the forces that make up the world is to lose the capacity to see beyond the subject, to engage with the world, to make the real.” (84).**


 * Don’t forget about the ontology in place of epistemology. Needs to return to questions of the real. “We need to reconceptualize the real as forces, energies, events, impacts that preexist and function both before and beyond, as well as within, representation.” (85). Opens up a domain of natural systems.**
 * “Feminist theory needs to place the problematic of sexual difference, the most fundamental concern of feminist thought at its most general, in the context of both animal becomings and the becomings microscopic and imperceptible that regulate matter itself.” (86).**
 * I agree to an extent that the post-structuralist focus on identity has led a focus on animal becoming astray... It is so difficult to have discussions about it without invoking sometimes terrible implications, or justifications for inequality based on “evolution.”**
 * “At its best, feminist theory has the potential to make us become other than ourselves, to make us unrecognizable.” (87).**
 * An extremely interesting idea. That it can transform us, or aid in our becoming, rather than articulate problems that were already there.**


 * CH 6 Deleuze and Feminism**
 * How to look at identity through new terms? Its problematic when it is always defined in opposition to something else. Otherwise it always leads to individuality.**
 * Difference is the movement of self differentiation... It’s about interest and materiality (not just representation)**
 * Identity, analogy, opposition, and resemblance are the “four primary means by which difference is converted, transformed from an active principle to a passive residue.” (93).**

As opposed to Derrida, representation “is the limit of difference rather than its privileged milieu or its mode of expression.” (94). “Instead of asking how to equalize differences, supplementing the least privileged through compensations sought from the most privileged, we need to address the question of whether a plurality of subject positions can be adequately accommodated by the ideals represented by the able-bodied, white, middle-class, Eurocentric, male heterosexual subject. That peoples of color seek the rights of whites, and gays seek the rights of heterosexuals is, it seems, a highly contestable claim.” I also very much like this idea. However the rights can intersect. For example the concept of marriage means something completely different to heterosexuals and to gays but it also affords some similar rights. I don’t think the national dialogue has evolved to articulate the differences, just the sameness.

**FEMINIST COCKTAIL**

**Butler, Judith. Excitable Speech (selection)**

Some people argue that language as the site of local inquiry that often is institutionalized by law definitions.. One site of inquiry is the hate crime, which is understood “not only to communicate an offensive idea or set of ideas but also to enact the very message it communicates: the very communication is at once a form of conduct.”

Protected by the first ammendment, hate crimes renter its victims as stateless people. (Matsuda, qtd. on 73)

Some language, as performative act and an expression of freedom, can take place at the expense of other ciizens’ rights to equal participation and the equal exercise of fundamental rights and liberties. Porngoraphy can be a form of unequal treatment, invoking questions about power and subordination in the text of pornography. (Mackinnon)

“MacKinnon’s use of the perfomrative engages a figure of the perfomrative, a figure of sovereign power that governs how a speech act is said to act- as efficacious, unilateral, transitive, generative.” (74)

“When the courts become the ones who are invested with the power to regulate such expressions, new ocasisions for discrimination are produced in which the courts discount African-American cultural production as well as lesbian an dgay self-representations as such through the arbitrary and tactical use of obscenity law.” (75)

WHEN does language become tantamount to the act?

.... In Pornography, thats for sure (84-85) *The pornographic utterance as deprivition of “illocutionary force” “The speech of the addressee no longer has the power to do what it says, but always to do something ohter than what it says” (82). *“The resistance to sexuality is thus refigured as the peculiar venue for its affirmation and recirculation” **(83).**
 * *No is yes, speech sets her words against her intentions **
 * * Language is never intended in pornography. also evidenced in seduction (a perlocutionary) rather than truth based, constative **
 * *The subject is reduced to nothing but a consent giver. **
 * *This can also be witnessed in seduction, as perlocutionary act rather than truth based, constative one.. Pornography debases the utterances to the status of rhetoric, and exposes its limits as philosophy. **


 * But.. **


 * Where is the origin and cause of racist structures in speech? **


 * What is the sovereign organization of language meanings/ the rules of proper speech of citizens/ **


 * “One who is excluded from the universal, and yet belongs to it nevertheless, speaks from a split situation of being at once authorized and deauthorized (so much for delineating a neat “site of enunciation.” (Butler, 91) **


 * “For Foucault, as for pornography, the very terms by which sexuality is said to be negated become, inadvertently but inexorably, the site and instrument of a new sexualization.The putative repression of sexuality becomes the sexualization of repression.” (90). **

Sedgwick, Eve Kosofksy "Paranoid Reading and Reparative Reading, or, You're So Paranoid, You Probably Think This Essay Is About You"


 * The Hermeneutics of suspision... coined by Paul Ricoeur, “by now nearly synonymous with criticism itself/coextensive with critical theoretical inquiry rather than being viewed as one kind of cognitive/affective theoretical practice among other, alternative kinds.”It might have made it less possible to “unpack the local contingent relations between any given place of knowledge and its narrative/epistemological entailments for the seeker,knower, or teller.” (124). One good example was that paranoia was able to illumate the mechanisms of homophobic and heterosexist enforcement against it (126) Paranoia has come to affect most reading styles... A mystified view of systemic oppressions that may or may not coincide with their existence.. Demystification does not “entail a denial of the reality or gravity of enmity or oppresion.” **


 * Beyond the Paranoid? Naomi Klein offers a taxonomy of “positions,” in which the paranoid is only one. There is also the depressive position... they are ever changing and heterogenous relational stances. **


 * Characteristics of Paranoia: anticipatory (knowledge as power and preparation) reflexing and mimetic in dual ways of knowing, a strong theory, a theory that wards off negative affect, with faith in exposure. **


 * The violence of gender reification cannot be defintiely halted in advance, it must at least never arrive on any conceptual scene as a surprise.... (133) **


 * Is this not grounded in practical theory? Does it have prescriptive power, or is it reduced to an aesthetic? **

**Wilson, Elizabeth. Neural Geographies: Feminism and the Microstructure of Cognition.**

How subversive is this theory of affect? Or To what extent does this theory of affect propgate certain normative, hegemonic, or restrictive expectations? (2)

Connectionism is a name given to new theories about cognitive organization? The concept of the neural network?

Does this deepen the relationship between essentialism and cultural practice/construction in the female subject? **Shout to Spivak, “the issue is not that deconstruction cannot found a political program while other modes of analysis can, but rather that deconstruction can articulate the problematic foundations of our currently founded political programs. “ (22).**

Wilson, Elizabeth. "Gut feminism." differences (X:Y):n-n+p


 * A problematic in the disassociation of ideation and biology **


 * “The body comes to know in states of extreme psychological distress and how a synthesis of biology and psychoanalysis (what he eventually call psychoanalysis or depth biology) is necessary to understand the character of not just hysterical states but any biological substratum.” (71). **


 * Unwarranted hysterical symptoms as paraesthesia.. (73).. **


 * The psychic stream of the organism **


 * Components of bulima as Frenczian language of digetsive organs. Vicissitudes of ingestion and vomiting are complex thinking enacted organically: binging and purging are the substrata themselves attempting to question, solve, control, calculate, protect, and destroy. (82) **


 * demarcations among organs and between psyche and soma are intelliglbe only within a convential (flat) biological economy(83)... **Between psyche and soma, there is no a priori fundamenal demarcation betweenthese entities... exists in the gut, with the fantastic capacity to digest and ruminate. (84-85).

SPIVAK.......................................


 * On the difference between writing and speaking. "There is a violence that exists in the world that cannot be reduced to the violence in writing." **


 * Outside the Teaching Machine. **


 * 25.What is the relationship between critical and dogmatic philosophies of action? By “critical” I mean a philosophy that is aware of the limits of knowing. **


 * 26. The slash between these two proper names [Zillah R. Eisenstein’s new book?] that “emerged out of a strange revolutionary concatenation of Parisian aesthetic an dpolitical currents which for about thirty years produced such a concentration of brilliant work as we are not likely to see again for generations,” marks a certain // non // alignment: critique, denunciation, nonresponse, uneasy peace in acknowledgment of political work, and after one’s death, a formal tribute by the other. **


 * “One needs to be a nominalist, no doubt: power, it is not an institution, and it is not a structure, it is not a certain strength [puissance] **


 * [Nominalism- metaphysical view in philosophy= general /abstract terms nd predicates exist while universals or abstract objects which usually correspond to these do not exist. wikipedia] **
 * 27. [what is paleonymy again? One continues to put old words to work. New names for old words. Operates inside and outside systems. “critiques, deconstructs, wrenches apart the traditional, hierarchical system.” (John Phillips on Deconstruction) **


 * 28. How does Derrida’s speculations about the general and the narrow illuminate Foucault’s work on the fit between the theory and practice as well as his writing about power?? **


 * 30. I loved the idea that Heidegger was Foucault’s essential philosopher in which “it is important to have a small number of authors with whom one thinks, with whom one thinks, but about whom one does not write.” **


 * 31. Power. Institutional power? Writing as production of power? Force? **


 * 32. “Rather than seek to legitimate feminist psychoanalytic theory, a Foucauldian looks for its dangers, its normalizing tendencies, how it might hinder research or serve as an instrument of domination despite the intentions of its creators. Whether it serves to dominate or to liberate is irrelevant to judging its truth. **


 * 33. How does the electrical metaphor relate? “Foucault cautions .. that the force field cannot be naturalized and constituted as an object of investigation...” **


 * 35. Pouvoir/savoir. “There is no need to valorize repression as negative and production as positive. (Incidentally, this is a much ‘truer’ view of things than most theories of ideology will produce).” **


 * 36. The differential substance of // savoir // is discourse, with its irreducible connections to language. **


 * I think it is finally more effective that the distinction between force and power is kept, by contrast, elusive. **


 * 39. Derrida- madness wis within thought? Deconstruction is justice? To transform human beings into subjects? **


 * 47. Mahsweta’s place of woman within her texts. **


 * 49. Pouivoir/savoir- writer/activist, subaltern/citizen. Good for postcolonial womanspace. **


 * Last quote... These women of Mashasweta's fiction are almost like unconnected letters in a script neither archaic nor modern, caught neither in a past present, nor on the way to a future present. They are monuments to the anxiety of their inevitable disappearance as justice is done and the episteme is on the way to regularization. That the characters are characters, both written by authority, fading away in the end, something happening something more to them than their appearance or how they are described. They are both particular and somehow representative.**

On Africa

Last chapter: The Mirror.
 * 1The African discourse can only be experienced by a negative interpretation. **
 * Incomplete, mutilated, unfinished. Its history reduced to a series of setbacks in nature in its quest for mankind. **
 * Discourse is almost always framed as a metatext of the animal, the beast. **
 * Africa as Lacan's "O." (big other)?? **
 * 3 "Africa is the mediation that allows the west to accede to its own subconscious and give a public account of its subjectivity." **
 * 4 "More than any other region, Africa thus stands out as the supreme receptacle of the west's obsession with, and the circular discourse about, "absence," "lack," and "non-being," of identity and difference, of negativeness- in short, of nothingness. **
 * 6 There is a false dichotomy of objectivity of structure and subjectivity of representation? how? **
 * 9 This leads to the fact that we now know what Africa is not, but we don't know what it is. **
 * 12 "an endless interrogation of the possibility." **
 * Ours is an endless horror and spectacle of arbitrariness. Permits us to kill. **
 * To rehabilitate age and dureé. **
 * 12ishSecond, this time is made up of disturbances, of a bundle of unfore- **
 * seen events, of more or less regular uctuations and oscillations, not nec- **
 * essarily resulting in chaos and anarchy (although that sometimes is the **
 * case); moreover, instabilities, unforeseen events, and oscillations do not **
 * always lead to erratic and unpredictable behaviors on the actors part **
 * (although that happens, too). **
 * Finally, close attention to its real pattern of ebbs and ows shows that **
 * this time is not irreversible. All sharp breaks, sudden and abrupt out- **
 * bursts of volatility, it cannot be forced into any simplistic model and calls **
 * into question the hypothesis of stability and rupture underpinning so- **
 * cial theory, notably where the sole concern is to account for either West- **
 * ern modernity or the failures of non-European worlds to perfectly repli- **
 * cate it **
 * 16 pecular time, time of existence and experience. 3 postulates; neither linear time nor time where each moment effaces an annuls the previous moment as a single age. not a series but an interlocking of presents, pasts, and futures that retain their depths **
 * of other presents, pasts, and futures, each age bearing, altering, and main- **
 * taining the previous ones. Is this Deleuze?? **
 * 27 forced affection**
 * 28 slave was virtual, contingent **
 * 32 other parts of the world, to an unprecedented privatization of public prerogatives. On the **
 * other, it not only allowed a degree of socialization of state power gen- **
 * erally poorly understood by analysts,but also the correlative social- **
 * ization of arbitrarinessthe two movements (privatization of public pre- **
 * rogatives and socialization of arbitrariness) becoming, in this process, **
 * the cement of postcolonial African authoritarian regimes. **
 * 32 object of colonialism was circular. to order, to obey. **
 * 44 state as mass machine creating and regulating inequalities and divisions **
 * 45 This way, the old elites were co-opted and new middlemen between the **
 * state, society, and the market came into being. This was also howeven **
 * though the postcolonial states aim was to overcome old hierarchies **
 * relations of subjection were introduced and consolidated that broadly **
 * perpetuated those the colonial state had initiated. **
 * 45 state creates social debts **
 * 47 ,which not followed through with, was social suicide, akin to witchcraft. **
 * 51 "What can be said is that, in the countries in Africa that were, until recently, **
 * reputed the most stable and the most prosperous (Cameroon, CÙte **
 * dIvoire, Kenya, Gabon, Zimbabwe), a compromise guaranteeing the **
 * welfare of the middle classes and administrative elites had made it pos- **
 * sible to ensure the viability of the postcolonial state and provide it with **
 * authentically indigenous roots." **
 * 55 neoliberal deregulation led to mass poverty, unemployment, instability, loss of identity, **
 * 56 nomadism I wish he had gone more into this? **
 * 57 and violence **
 * 58 (on both the private and public end). **
 * 70 Citizenship meant how unlikely someone was to be captured and sold. **
 * 79 It was no more a general technology of domination but rather- **
 * 80 indirect, private government. **
 * 86 international networks of foreign trafckers, middlemen, and businessmen are linking with, and be- coming entwined with, local businessmen, technocrats, and warlords, causing whole areas of Africas international economic relations to be **
 * swept underground, making it possible to consolidate methods of gov- **
 * ernment that rest on indiscriminate violence and high-level corruption. **
 * 87 These processes are accompanied by an unprecedented resurgence of **
 * local identities, an extraordinary insistence on family and clan an- **
 * tecedents and birthplaces, and a revival of ethnic imaginations. In most **
 * of the major urban centers faced with land problems, distinctions be- **
 * tween indigenes, sons of the soil, and outsiders have become com- **
 * monplace. This proliferation of internal borderswhether imaginary, **
 * symbolic, or a cover for economic or power strugglesand its corollary, **
 * the exacerbation of identication with particular localities, give rise to **
 * exclusionary practices, identity closure, and persecution, which, as **
 * seen, can easily lead to pogroms, even genocide. **
 * 102 The banality of power, the grotesque. **
 * 104 A convivial relationship, signified by "gestures in public and covert responses underground (sous maquis). Instead, this logic has resulted in the mutual zombication of both the dominant and those apparently dominated. This zombication means that each has robbed the other of vitality and left both impotent (impouvoir)." **
 * 104 flexible identities **
 * 105 have a habit of separating words, using them in a different, opposite sense **
 * 106 commandment as fetish? what is the fetish, I had a question about that. **
 * 110 Laughing at the power is not dismantling it, not even unsettling it. **
 * 111 a simulacrum of obeying **
 * 111 An autocrat, in a Hegelian way, becomes completely arbitrary, his identity becoming purely self-referential. **
 * 115 The example of public executions as a source of enjoyment, an economy of death, that is the grotesque. **
 * 123 "Amid the cacophony accompanying such a show of strength could **
 * be found, scattered here and there, the debris of ritual acts of the past **
 * here, elements from rites enlisting the help of spirits for the hunt; there, **
 * bits of funerary or initiation ceremonies, of ceremonies to aid fertility or **
 * war. All these elements, juxtaposed, intertwined in a single web, form **
 * the postcolonial dramaturgy." **
 * 129 "What defines the postcolonized subject is the ability to en- **
 * gage in baroque practices fundamentally ambiguous, fluid, and modifiable **
 * even where there are clear, written, and precise rules." **
 * 133 "As we have seen, obscenityregarded as more than a moral category **
 * constitutes one modality of power in the postcolony. But it is also one **
 * of the arenas in which subordinates reaffirm or subvert that power. **
 * Bakhtins error was to attribute these practices to the dominated. But the **
 * production of burlesque is not specific to this group. The real inversion **
 * takes place when, in their desire for a certain majesty, the masses join in **
 * the madness and clothe themselves in cheap imitations of power to re- **
 * produce its epistemology, and when power, in its own violent quest for **
 * grandeur, makes vulgarity and wrongdoing its main mode of existence. **
 * It is here, within the confines of this intimacy, that the forces of tyranny **
 * in Africa must be studied." **
 * 143 Carichature as hallucination **
 * 144 Everything is made into a signifier **
 * 148 "orgiastic enjoyment of power" **
 * 175 French commandant [administrator], the police ofcer, and the native **
 * chief.7 It is sustained by an imaginarythat is, an interrelated set of signs **
 * that present themselves, in every instance, as an indisputable and undis- **
 * puted meaning.8 The violence insinuates itself into the economy, domestic **
 * life, language, consciousness.9 It does more than penetrate every space: **
 * it pursues the colonized even in sleep and dream.10 It produces a culture; **
 * it is a cultural praxis. **
 * 177 There are many ways of taking revenge on the fetish. It **
 * can be discarded, and another raised in its place as a higher authority. It **
 * may be bound and beaten, even destroyed and discarded, with another **
 * at once created to take its place. All this means that the Africans god re- **
 * mains in his/her power, to be acknowledged and created at will. Hegel **
 * concludes, A fetish of this kind has no independent existence as an ob- **
 * ject of religion, and even less as a work of art. It is merely an artifact **
 * which expresses the arbitrary will of its creator, and which always re- **
 * mains in his hands. **
 * 183 Beyond such distinctions, the act of colonization cannot be separated from four determining features: the abil- **
 * ity to multiply, the struggle for existence (in terms of space or means of **
 * subsistence), pride, and greed. **
 * 215. People didn't identify with the deaths of others. **
 * 220 God disappeared, is invisible **
 * 222 "It is an indelible fact that represents peoples' desire for immortality" **
 * 224 the writing of Gods history became equated with signification and writing, memory **
 * 230 brought to objectify a desire, language reaches the madness of its limits **
 * 231 **conversion always means that one is brought into the time of the other

Derrida - What is Iterability--

Derrida Everything is writing? "the motif of economic reduction in its homogenous and mechanical character".. "the absence" ? (5). Absence of addressee, absence of presence. "A writing that is not structurally readable - iterable - beyond the addressee- would not be readable. " (7).

On Art and Technology to Heidegger-

Technology is a way of revealing. If we give heed to this then a whole other realm for the essence of technology will open itself up to us. It is the realm of revealing, i.e. truth.

It is of utmost importance that we think bringing-forth in its full scope and at the same time in the sense in which the Greeks thought it. Not only handcraft manufacture, not only artistic and poetical bringing into appearance and concrete imagery, is a bringing-forth, poiesis. Physis also, the arising of something from out of itself, is a bringing-forth, poiesis. Physis is indeed poiesis in the highest sense. For what presences by means of physis has the bursting open belonging to bringing-forth, e.g., the bursting of a blossom into bloom, in itself (en heautoi).

how does bringing-forth happen, be it in nature or in handwork and art? What is the bringing-forth in which the fourfold way of occasioning plays? Occasioning has to do with the presencing [Anwesen] of that which at any given time comes to appearance in bringing-forth. Bringing-forth brings hither out of concealment forth into unconcealment. Bringing-forth comes to pass only insofar as something concealed comes into uncon­ cealment. This coming rests and moves freely within what we call revealing [das Entbergen].10 The Greeks have the word

aletheia for revealing. The Romans translate this with veritas. We say "truth" and usually understand it as the correctness of an idea.

LACAN-

xx. Lacan quotes: "The ego.. is structured like a symptom. (1.22 qtd. in Felman 6).

"It is obvious... that in analytic discourse, what is at stake in analytic discourse is always this- to what is uttered as a signfier [by the patient] you [analysts] give another reading than what it means." (S xx.37 qtd. in 21)

1. Zizke. On the Gaze

Zizek writes about the "radical incommensurability" between the the poststructuralist deconstructionist Derrida and then Lacan on the topic of the gaze. To Derrida, the gaze is like the voice, the "thing itself," or the medium of pure"auto-affection." And yet, it is completely determined by the "infrastructural" network, with limits unseen. The "self-presence of the voice is always already split/deferred by the trace of writing." (125). To Lacan, however, the gaze and the voice function in almost the opposite way. "These objects are not on the side of the //subject// but on the side of the //object.//" (125). "The gaze marks the point in the object (in the picture) from which the subject viewing it is already //gazed at//, i.e., it is the object that is gazing at me. Far from assuring the self-presence of the subject and his vision, the gaze functions thus as a stain, a spot in the picture disturbing its transparent visibility and introducing an irreducible split in my relation to the picture: I can never see the picture at the point from which it is gazing at me, i.e., the eye and the gaze are constitutively assymetrical. The gaze as object is a stain preventing me from looking at the picture from a safe, 'objective' distance, from enframing it as something that is at my grasping view's disposal. The gaze is, so to speak, a point at which the very frame (of my view) is already inscribed in the 'content' of the picture viewed." (125).

Do we see our own Gaze on the Screen?

On film: The acousmatique Dimension and Ideology

What is the symptom?

On the Subjectivity of Psychonalysis

2. Shoshana Felman

Shoshana Felman writes, "If... the originality of Freud's procedure consists in its being singularly reflexive and reflexively singular, how can Freud be sure that his reflexive method touches upon the real, or at the very least is in touch with a structural truth? Freud's method of verification, in Lacan's analysis, is again reflexive: it consists in the way the different reflective gestures, the different dialogically reflective interpretations, meet one another, find themselves- by an insistent chance- structurally cross-checked to, and cross-checked by one another.And there is only one method of knowing that one is there, namely, to map the network. And how is the network mapped? It is through the fact that one returns, one comes back, one keeps coming across the same path, it always overlaps and cross-checks itself in the same way. (Felman 61-62).

Lacan is specifically concerned with.. issues such as dialogue and the performative psychoanalytic character of understsanding and of knowlege as itself an act, a process of narration. It should be understood, however, that the pronouns "I" and "you" are not merely personal but also metaphorical or allegorical. If "I" and "you" are here, in practice, a pragmatic entryway into a theoritical (analytic) problematics, what they talk about should be approached with caution. (Felman 4-5).

Lacan "It is not a question of knowing whether I speak of myself in a way that conforms to what I am, but rather of knowing whether I am the same as that of which I speak. (E, N 165, qtd. in Felman 5).


 * My question is once we understand the continual, mutable, shifting perspective we take to all language we use, then what? How does he delineate this constant negotiation??**

"My reading of Lacan was radically transforming my own writing.." (Felman 5)

"Lacan's true clinical originality consists not in the incidental innovations that separate his theory from other schools, but in the insight he gives us, paradoxically enough, into the very structural foundations of what is in practice //common to all schools://in his uniquely sharp clinical grasp and his strikingly original account of the transferance relation and the dialogic psychoanalytic situation." (Felman 5)

Lacan has made possible a new contemporary way of reading. ( How does this compare with Derrida, or, how would Derrida read "The Purloined Letter" by Edgar Allen Poe?. "I [Felman] have attempted to follow up on the Lacanian challenge and to read Lacan's own thought (in the way that he himself attempts to read Freud) beyond the limits (and the limitations) of its own awareness (15).

"Like the purloined letter, //psychoanalysis always has to be recovered."// (11). "Freudian insight, Lacan claims, is not a cognitive possession, it is an event: the singular event of a discovery, the unique advent of a moment of illumination that, because it cannot by its very nature become a heritage, an acquisition, has to be repeated, reenacted, practiced each time for the first time." (12).

Felman talks about Lacan's commitment to the triple reference in his lesson of reading - the use of the triple dimension of practice (clinical event) concept (theory) and metaphor (literature) (16). It is not just the analyst that practices the act of reading what is //not// being said by the analysand (and thereby producing a new reading) it is also the analysand's interpretation of what takes place on both sides of the analytic situation.

"Unconscious desire proceeds by interpretation; interpretation proceeds by unconscious desire. The unconscious is a reader." (22).

The unconscoius is not just the object of pscyhoanalytical investigation, but its subject. The unconscious is a reader. "What this implies most radically is that whoever reads, interprets out of his unconscious, is an analysand, even when the interpreting is done from the position of the analyst." (22).


 * Freud's readings of hysteria were by no means introspective. (Felman 23).**


 * I love her questions: What was Freud in effect doing as a reader? What does it mean to be a reader of Freud? WHat does it mean to be a reader after Freud?**


 * She mentions a point about the influence of Poe's works (28) and whether this might be a testament to the concept of the anxiety of influence. I wonder more about this. First of all, is it a stretch, and also if there is merit behind this, could the same logic be true of influential texts today? **


 * To what extent is "all imaginative work the result of the unfulfilled desire which spring from either idiosyncratic or universally human maladjustments to life? (Krutch qtd. in 32).**


 * "The question of what makes poetry lies, indeed, not so much in what it was that made Poe write, but in what it is that makes us read him and that ceaselessly drives so many people to write about him." (35).**


 * [To continue 21/36]**

Butler, Judith. Excitable Speech (selection)


 * Some people argue that language as the site of local inquiry that often is institutionalized by law definitions.. One site of inquiry is the hate crime, which is understood “not only to communicate an offensive idea or set of ideas but also to enact the very message it communicates: the very communication is at once a form of conduct.” **


 * Protected by the first ammendment, hate crimes renter its victims as stateless people. (Matsuda, qtd. on 73) **


 * Some language, as performative act and an expression of freedom, can take place at the expense of other ciizens’ rights to equal participation and the equal exercise of fundamental rights and liberties. Porngoraphy can be a form of unequal treatment, invoking questions about power and subordination in the text of pornography. (Mackinnon) **


 * “MacKinnon’s use of the perfomrative engages a figure of the perfomrative, a figure of sovereign power that governs how a speech act is said to act- as efficacious, unilateral, transitive, generative.” (74) **


 * “When the courts become the ones who are invested with the power to regulate such expressions, new ocasisions for discrimination are produced in which the courts discount African-American cultural production as well as lesbian an dgay self-representations as such through the arbitrary and tactical use of obscenity law.” (75) **


 * WHEN does language become tantamount to the act? **

*No is yes, speech sets her words against her intentions * Language is never intended in pornography. also evidenced in seduction (a perlocutionary) rather than truth based, constative *The subject is reduced to nothing but a consent giver. *This can also be witnessed in seduction, as perlocutionary act rather than truth based, constative one.. Pornography debases the utterances to the status of rhetoric, and exposes its limits as philosophy.
 * .... In Pornography, thats for sure (84-85) **
 * *The pornographic utterance as deprivition of “illocutionary force” “The speech of the addressee no longer has the power to do what it says, but always to do something ohter than what it says” (82). **
 * *“The resistance to sexuality is thus refigured as the peculiar venue for its affirmation and recirculation” ** (83).

But..

Where is the origin and cause of racist structures in speech?

What is the sovereign organization of language meanings/ the rules of proper speech of citizens/

“One who is excluded from the universal, and yet belongs to it nevertheless, speaks from a split situation of being at once authorized and deauthorized (so much for delineating a neat “site of enunciation.” (Butler, 91)

“For Foucault, as for pornography, the very terms by which sexuality is said to be negated become, inadvertently but inexorably, the site and instrument of a new sexualization.The putative repression of sexuality becomes the sexualization of repression.” (90).

**Sedgwick, Eve Kosofksy "Paranoid Reading and Reparative Reading, or, You're So Paranoid, You Probably Think This Essay Is About You"**

The Hermeneutics of suspision... coined by Paul Ricoeur, “by now nearly synonymous with criticism itself/coextensive with critical theoretical inquiry rather than being viewed as one kind of cognitive/affective theoretical practice among other, alternative kinds.”It might have made it less possible to “unpack the local contingent relations between any given place of knowledge and its narrative/epistemological entailments for the seeker,knower, or teller.” (124). One good example was that paranoia was able to illumate the mechanisms of homophobic and heterosexist enforcement against it (126) Paranoia has come to affect most reading styles... A mystified view of systemic oppressions that may or may not coincide with their existence.. Demystification does not “entail a denial of the reality or gravity of enmity or oppresion.”

Beyond the Paranoid? Naomi Klein offers a taxonomy of “positions,” in which the paranoid is only one. There is also the depressive position... they are ever changing and heterogenous relational stances.

Characteristics of Paranoia: anticipatory (knowledge as power and preparation) reflexing and mimetic in dual ways of knowing, a strong theory, a theory that wards off negative affect, with faith in exposure.

The violence of gender reification cannot be defintiely halted in advance, it must at least never arrive on any conceptual scene as a surprise.... (133)

Is this not grounded in practical theory? Does it have prescriptive power, or is it reduced to an aesthetic?

Wilson, Elizabeth. Neural Geographies: Feminism and the Microstructure of Cognition.


 * How subversive is this theory of affect? Or To what extent does this theory of affect propgate certain normative, hegemonic, or restrictive expectations? (2) **


 * Connectionism is a name given to new theories about cognitive organization? **
 * The concept of the neural network? **


 * Does this deepen the relationship between essentialism and cultural practice/construction in the female subject? ** Shout to Spivak, “the issue is not that deconstruction cannot found a political program while other modes of analysis can, but rather that deconstruction can articulate the problematic foundations of our currently founded political programs. “ (22).

**Wilson, Elizabeth. "Gut feminism." differences (X:Y):n-n+p**

A problematic in the disassociation of ideation and biology

“The body comes to know in states of extreme psychological distress and how a synthesis of biology and psychoanalysis (what he eventually call psychoanalysis or depth biology) is necessary to understand the character of not just hysterical states but any biological substratum.” (71).

Unwarranted hysterical symptoms as paraesthesia.. (73)..

The psychic stream of the organism

Components of bulima as Frenczian language of digetsive organs. Vicissitudes of ingestion and vomiting are complex thinking enacted organically: binging and purging are the substrata themselves attempting to question, solve, control, calculate, protect, and destroy. (82)

demarcations among organs and between psyche and soma are intelliglbe only within a convential (flat) biological economy(83)... **Between psyche and soma, there is no a priori fundamenal demarcation betweenthese entities... exists in the gut, with the fantastic capacity to digest and ruminate. (84-85).**

**Brief and smart biographing of Evelyn Fox Keller**

What is the legacy of semiotics? Linguistically it had quickly been overturned, the idea of parole as language used in daily life and langue as idealized abstraction... In every field that I can think of, literary analysis, behavior, economics, structuralism is attacked for its reduction (and lack of human agency thereof), and its inability to account for change. Yet the concept of the sign is a lasting one.. That the sign is made of both the signifier and the signified and that both parts are mental conceptions...

I was unaware of Pierce's tripartite structure of the sign as explained in Chandler: "the phenomenological distinction between the sign itself [or the representamen] as an instance of 'Firstness', its object as an instance of 'Secondness' and the interpretant as an instance of 'Thirdness.'" (Chandler Ch. 1). This triangle can also be described as the sign vehicle as the form of the sign, the sense of the sign, and the referent as what the sign 'stands for'. Pierce's "sense" of the sign seems somehow worth comparing to Deleuze's notion of "affect." This seems to add an element that goes into another territory?

Levi-Strauss' vast knowledge of different tribes' languages is impressive. It is not about the size of vocabularies or even the definitions, to Levi-Strauss, which are connected to their culture's needs as well as meeting intellectual requirements (also a need?) but that even these primitive tribes with their unscientific stories about magic still employ systematic commonalities in relation between words and grammar. He is full of beautiful sentences, though, "Wild cherries, cinnamon, vanilla and sherry are grouped together by the intellect as well as the senses, because they all contain aldehyde, while the closely related smells of wintergreen, lavender and bananas are to be explained by the presence of ester.' (8). I like how he bravely attempts to systematize smell. Or, on magic: "Like a shadow moving ahead of its owner it is in a sense complete in itself, and as finished and coherent in its immateriality as the substantial being which it precedes... (This is how he emphasizes that it is not rudimentary but rather a well-articulated system). The elements of mythical thought are halfway between percepts (inseperable from concrete situations) and concepts. Within such an intermediary exists- SURPRISE- signs!

The bricoleur is my favorite concept to come out of his work. "in an old sense the verb 'bricoler' applied to ball games and billiards, to hunting, shooting and riding. It was however always used with refrence to some extraneous movement: a ball rebounding, a dog straying or a horse swerving.. The characteristic feature of mythical thought is that it expresses itself by means of a heterogeneous repertoire.. Mythical thought is therefore a kind of bricolage.." (11). The bricoleur is opposed to the engineer.. The bricoleur 's universe is of instruments and the rules of the game are to make do with "whatever is at hand."Only the Bricoleur seems to invent its own relations and rules? "The scientist creating events (changing the world) by means of structures and the 'bricoleur' creating structures by means of events" (15). EXCEPT It is almost like Levi-Strauss's Bricoleur makes me think of Searle's person in the Chinese room though... not understanding the qualitative definition to anything, but following a rule book of incomes and outcomes. I suppose that leads to Derrida... "The whole history of the concept of structure, before the rupture I spoke of, must be thought of as a series of substitutions of center for center, as a linked chain of determinations of the center.".... Caving in itself. "The rupture begins when the structurality of structure had to begin to be thought, that is to say, repeated, and this is why I said that this disruption was repetition in all of the senses of this word." "The circle is unique. It describes the form of the relationship between the history of metaphysics and the descruction of the history of metaphysics." To Derrida, everybody is a bricoleur.. The requirement of a center is just as mythological..

On Nietzsche's Gay Science---

First off, I fell in love again with some of the songs in the beginning of the book. The meter, structure of the lines, and the sort of riddle like nature reminded me of the poetry of Emily Dickinson:

23 Interpretation

Interpreting myself, I always read Myself into books. I always need Some help. But all who climb on their own way Carry my image, too, into the breaking day

57 Choosy Taste

If it depended on my choice, It think it would be great To have a place in paradise Better yet - outside the gate.

I also found myself paying attention to certain criticisms he had of modern society which I didn't catch the first time around when I read it 10 years ago. One example is modern society's intolerance of pain and boredom

48 Knowledge of Misery

Perhaps there is nothing that separates man or ages more profoundly than a difference in their knowledge of misery....

The general lack of experience of pain of both kinds and the relative rarity of the sight of anyone who is suffering have an important consequence...

42 On Work and Boredom

(Paraphrasing, that the high breed of artists and creators do not fear boredom as much as work without pleasure. That boredom is required for their work)

I also very much liked his thoughts on Epicurious, one of his favorite Greek Gods. Paraphrasing, that such happiness could only be known by someone who has known extreme suffering.

99 - On Schopenheur - In this section, Nietzsche goes on to say that artists often get their philosophies wrong, and asks people to forgive Wagner for his bad temper.

125 A very untroubling and reocurring dream.

179 Thoughts are the shadows of our feelings- always darker, emptier, and simpler.