roseweird posted:

NoFreeWill posted:

melville is cool and everyone should read moby dick, but if you read 'literary' fiction written by americans after 1950 or 60 its all garbage.

english, not american, but some of penelope fitzgerald's work is very good, especially a novel called gate of angels, and a biography of the poet charlotte mew. a couple of others i read were just okay (the golden child, at freddie's), i've been meaning to read the blue flower though, which it hink will be good.

if there has been much good american fiction after the 60s it has been science fiction, but science fiction mostly hasn't been good since the 80s, and fantasy is pretty uniformly terrible

Might I recommend A Song of Fire and Ice by George RR Martin?

roseweird posted:

if there has been much good american fiction after the 60s it has been science fiction, but science fiction mostly hasn't been good since the 80s, and fantasy is pretty uniformly terrible

don't forget rhizzone favorite Tomas Pynchon

ilmdge posted:

Might I recommend A Song of Fire and Ice by George RR Martin?

i was going to post this meme at the same time you did :spooky:

roseweird posted:

yeah it is obviously i could look harder, maybe that is just it, the immense volume of it all, it is so difficult to just find something worth reading on a shelf . i kept trying to think of people whose books i had found and liked in this way and none of them were american, or if american they wrote science fiction. michelle tea is an exception who is cool but i hesitate to mention her here, where she might not be as cool to people as final fantasy midis.

to be fair though i think it's probably the case that lke, a lot of the acclaimed modern authors really arent that great?

deadken posted:

i dunno what the criteria for a good intellectual are. probably someone who engenders the self-disclosure of the world through their thought, someone who gives us weapons for the struggle, someone who recognises the intrinsic impoverishment of mere intellectual activity, and someone who trolls liberals. badiou's a good intellectual

badiou does none of that

1.5. Set theory distinguishes between membership and inclusion. A term is included when it is part of a set in the sense that all of its elements are elements of that set (one then says that b is a subset of a, and one writes it b ⊂ a ) . But a term may be a member of a set without being included in it (membership is, ⊂ after all, the primitive notion of set theory, which one writes b ∈ a ) , or, conversely, a term may be included in a set without being one of its members. In a recent book, Alain Badiou has developed this distinction in order to translate it into political terms. Badiou has membership correspond to presentation, and inclusion correspond to representation (re-presentation). One then says that a term is a member of a situation (in political terms, these are single individuals insofar as they belong to a society). And one says that a term is included in a situation if it is represented in the metastructure (the State) in which the structure of the situation is counted as one term (individuals insofar as they are recodified by the State into classes, for example, or into “elect orates”). Badiou defines a term as normal when it is both presented and represented (that is, when it both is a member and is included), as excrescent when it is represented but not presented (that is, when it is included in a situation without being a member of that situation), and as singular when it is presented but not represented (a term that is a member without being included) ( L’être, pp. 95-115).

What becomes of the exception in this scheme? At first glance, one might think that it falls into the third case, that the exception, in other words, embodies a kind of membership without inclusion. And this is certainly Badiou’s position. But what defines the character of the sovereign claim is precisely that it applies to the exception in no longer applying to it, that it includes what is outside itself. The sovereign exception is thus the figure in which singularity is re presented as such, which is to say, insofar as it is unrepresentable. “What cannot be included in any way is included in the form of the exception. In Badious scheme, the exception introduces a fourth figure, a threshold of indistinction between excrescence (representation without presentation) and singularity (presentation without representation), something like a paradoxical inclusion of membership itself. The exception is what cannot be included in the whole of which it is a member and cannot be a member of the whole in which it is always already included. What emerges in this limit figure is the radical crisis of every possibility of clearly distinguishing between membership and inclusion, between what is outside and what is inside, between exception and rule.

א Badiou’s thought is, from this perspective, a rigorous thought of the exception. His central category of the event corresponds to the structure of the exception. Badiou defines the event as an element of a situation such that its membership in the situation is undecidable from the perspective of the situation. To the State, the event thus necessarily appears as an excrescence. According to Badiou, the relation between membership and inclusion is also marked by a fundamental lack of correspondence, such that inclusion always exceeds membership (theorem of the point of excess). The exception expresses precisely this impossibility of a system’s making inclusion coincide with membership, its reducing all its parts to unity. From the point of view of language, it is possible to assimilate inclusion to sense and membership to denotation. In this way, the fact that a word always has more sense than it can actually denote corresponds to the theorem of the point of excess. Precisely this disjunction is at issue both in Claude Lévi-Strauss’s theory of the constitutive excess of the signifier over the signified (“there is always a lack of equivalence between the two, which is resolvable for a divine intellect alone, and which results in the existence of a supera bundance of the signifier over the signifieds on which it rests” ) and in Emile Benveniste’s doctrine of the irreducible opposition between the semiotic and the semantic. ‘The thought of our time finds itself confronted with the structure of the exception in every area. Language’s sovereign claim thus consists in the attempt to make sense coincide with denotation, to stabilize a zone of indistinction between the two in which language can maintain ir self in relation to its denotata by abandoning them and withdrawing from them into a pure langue (the linguistic “state of exception”). This is what deconstruction does, positing undecidables that are infinitely in excess of every possibility of signification.

p. 21, Homo Sacer

babyfinland posted:

1.5. Set theory distinguishes between membership and inclusion. A term is included when it is part of a set in the sense that all of its elements are elements of that set (one then says that b is a subset of a, and one writes it b ⊂ a ) . But a term may be a member of a set without being included in it (membership is, ⊂ after all, the primitive notion of set theory, which one writes b ∈ a ) , or, conversely, a term may be included in a set without being one of its members. In a recent book, Alain Badiou has developed this distinction in order to translate it into political terms. Badiou has membership correspond to presentation, and inclusion correspond to representation (re-presentation). One then says that a term is a member of a situation (in political terms, these are single individuals insofar as they belong to a society). And one says that a term is included in a situation if it is represented in the metastructure (the State) in which the structure of the situation is counted as one term (individuals insofar as they are recodified by the State into classes, for example, or into “elect orates”). Badiou defines a term as normal when it is both presented and represented (that is, when it both is a member and is included), as excrescent when it is represented but not presented (that is, when it is included in a situation without being a member of that situation), and as singular when it is presented but not represented (a term that is a member without being included) ( L’être, pp. 95-115).

What becomes of the exception in this scheme? At first glance, one might think that it falls into the third case, that the exception, in other words, embodies a kind of membership without inclusion. And this is certainly Badiou’s position. But what defines the character of the sovereign claim is precisely that it applies to the exception in no longer applying to it, that it includes what is outside itself. The sovereign exception is thus the figure in which singularity is re presented as such, which is to say, insofar as it is unrepresentable. “What cannot be included in any way is included in the form of the exception. In Badious scheme, the exception introduces a fourth figure, a threshold of indistinction between excrescence (representation without presentation) and singularity (presentation without representation), something like a paradoxical inclusion of membership itself. The exception is what cannot be included in the whole of which it is a member and cannot be a member of the whole in which it is always already included. What emerges in this limit figure is the radical crisis of every possibility of clearly distinguishing between membership and inclusion, between what is outside and what is inside, between exception and rule.

א Badiou’s thought is, from this perspective, a rigorous thought of the exception. His central category of the event corresponds to the structure of the exception. Badiou defines the event as an element of a situation such that its membership in the situation is undecidable from the perspective of the situation. To the State, the event thus necessarily appears as an excrescence. According to Badiou, the relation between membership and inclusion is also marked by a fundamental lack of correspondence, such that inclusion always exceeds membership (theorem of the point of excess). The exception expresses precisely this impossibility of a system’s making inclusion coincide with membership, its reducing all its parts to unity. From the point of view of language, it is possible to assimilate inclusion to sense and membership to denotation. In this way, the fact that a word always has more sense than it can actually denote corresponds to the theorem of the point of excess. Precisely this disjunction is at issue both in Claude Lévi-Strauss’s theory of the constitutive excess of the signifier over the signified (“there is always a lack of equivalence between the two, which is resolvable for a divine intellect alone, and which results in the existence of a supera bundance of the signifier over the signifieds on which it rests” ) and in Emile Benveniste’s doctrine of the irreducible opposition between the semiotic and the semantic. ‘The thought of our time finds itself confronted with the structure of the exception in every area. Language’s sovereign claim thus consists in the attempt to make sense coincide with denotation, to stabilize a zone of indistinction between the two in which language can maintain ir self in relation to its denotata by abandoning them and withdrawing from them into a pure langue (the linguistic “state of exception”). This is what deconstruction does, positing undecidables that are infinitely in excess of every possibility of signification.

p. 21, Homo Sacer

not one word

babyfinland posted:

I don't understand any of this. How long did you spend studying set theory, babyfinland, before you were able to grasp how it connects to language, the state and political radicalism?