Impper posted:

do any of u remember that scene in the noah cicero book where he goes back to ohio and al his friends are just disgusting drug addicted barfly rednecks. that was awesome

i've only read some of his poetry and Best Behavior but i like how he writes about his midwestern hometown because that's basically my experience too

animedad posted:

im basically a garbage person

*puts you in the garbage can*

Impper posted:

read burning babies? i read another one of his but i dont think it was the human war

I read a dolan review of burning babies and it sounded cool but I stopped actually purchasing books for real money a long time ago. maybe I'll make an exception if its like $5.

the human war though, was not good. it was put out by this press that allegedly specializes in radically original writing or whatever, and I read reviews were people were going on about his sentence structure and the 'existential despair that the impending war in in iraq causes in the main character' and it is the fakest most bs existential despair ever, it really is a satire on how insulated americans are. at least in other books the character actually literally kills an arab instead of having sex in a trailer park and then thinking later 'wow, people are killing arabs somewhere.'

stegosaurus posted:

Impper posted:

read burning babies? i read another one of his but i dont think it was the human war

I read a dolan review of burning babies and it sounded cool

oh thats why impper likes it

tpaine posted:

my head grew three sizes today.

same

Impper posted:

i read that book before the dolan review. well watever ur a shitdjihnn

uh huh

We do not choose languages; we are situated within them. Structuralist psychoanalysts such as Lacan insisted that subjection to the Symbolic order was essentially oedipal. Because we must submit to law or system, and articulate our desire through signifiers, we imagine some lost original object that was prohibited. This fantasised lost origin is the prohibited mother, and the law to which we submit is imagined as the law of the father. It is just this all-encompassing law of Oedipus and lack which Deleuze and Guattari target in Anti-Oedipus. They agree that modernity and capitalism do indeed function through the image of law, lack and the individual; but they argue that this is because we are not asking the question of difference properly. If we accept that difference and desire are negative, then desire will be defined by what we are not or what we do not have, and so there will necessarily be some lost object towards which desire tends.

The signifier is phallic (for Lacan) and despotic (for Deleuze and Guattari). The signifier is the negation of natural desire, and is what the maternal original object lacks. When marriage structures are formed, women are no longer the immediate objects of desire; women are exchanged and function as signifiers. What is desired is that subjects recognise each other as other than natural, as beings who speak, as beings who have renounced nature (the feminine/maternal) for culture (the phallic/symbolic). Law must be other than, or the negation of, immediate nature. We accede to law because nature lacks the order of signification, system and recognition. The phallus is the signifier in general, other than lack, or that which stands in for presence.

The feminine is that which is renounced or negated to become human. This is why Lacan argues that ‘woman does not exist’, and why he defines the feminine as a function of lack (Lacan 1982). … We must imagine a lack at the heart of presence or the origin in order to account for the signifier as re-presentation, what presence or the origin lacks. To a greater or lesser extent all structuralists insisted on the two outcomes that followed from this theory of the primacy of exchange. The first is the primacy of the signifier.

Capital quantifies all desire and production according to the general (and exchangeable) equivalence of money and labour. Individualism demands that we all recognise ourselves as human, as subjects, as selves: equal, exchangeable and unified. So capitalism and modernity are oedipal: they both work on the notion of a difference that is nothing more than the relations between equivalent units produced by subjection to a universal and inescapable law. And we can only have this idea of a uniform and imposed system of difference if, oedipally, we see difference as a law that prohibits, and saves us from, the undifferentiated, unmediated and absent origin. But, Deleuze and Guattari insist, desire and difference extend well beyond the ‘imaginary’ or myth of capitalism. We need to see difference as something other than an imposed system of differentiation or the negative prohibition of law (other than castration or the threat of the father and law). This will enable us to understand desire as productive and positive, and not just that which is excluded by submission to the system of signification. … We imagine that there is some origin, presence or lost maternal plenitude behind the system of signs within which we are installed. And we also imagine that if we have lost that originary fullness then there must have been some prohibit- ing law or father who robbed us of our enjoyment. The whole system is built on original guilt and loss. There has been, Deleuze and Guattari argue, from the opening of civilisation, an imagined centre to the system of signification.

It is not that there is some (imagined) lost or lacking origin that we try to represent and retrieve through all our subsequent objects of desire. … For structuralism the system of differences that enables us to know the world is necessarily experienced as Other. We submit to a general system of language. Difference is a system imposed on an otherwise undifferentiated and meaningless ‘presence’. This system creates us as subjects, creates a world of objects and enables us to think of different beings. For structural psychoanalysis, it is this experience of language as a lawful order that produces a myth or fantasy of oedipal subjection: I imagine that there was some pure presence prior to differentiation (maternal plenitude); I imagine that ‘I’ abandoned this origin and submitted to this system for some end or law (the phallus, social recognition, or what can only be held by another and never presented in itself). However, ‘I’ am nothing outside this oedipal fantasy; ‘I’ am an effect of the speaking system. Subjectivity is an imagined presence behind signification that is necessarily lost, lacking, alienated and absent.

We shift from the idea of a world of identities that we then come to know and represent, to a system of differences that we impose on the world, such that knowledge and representation actually constitute the world. In the eighteenth century this system of differences was described by referring to the concepts or ideas that we impose on the world. In the twentieth century it was described as a structure of signifiers. The structuralists argued that we couldn’t even have concepts without some material system (of sounds or marks) that enabled us to conceptualise. Deleuze is in agreement with structuralism (and Hegel) that difference, rather than identity, is primary. But he differs from structuralism by arguing that difference is not an imposed system, nor is it a system. Difference is not a set of relations. Difference is neither the relation between one identical thing and another (as in common sense), nor is difference the general system that creates a world of objects (as in structuralism). For Deleuze, difference is itself different in each of its affirmations: sexual difference between bodies is different in each case (although we generalise and refer to men and women).

WeedSmoker420 posted:

The cool thing about reading (good) books is you can correctly cite it as proof of your intellectual superiority over everyone else

Apes don't read philosophy