Belphegor posted:shriekingviolet posted:
cars posted:
like if David Foster Wallace collected ninja swords as a hobby
"if"
If read infinite jest because I was young and hype-prone. What a colossal waste of time. Better than sinking 40 hours into crusader Kings I suppose
some giant hype prone books are actually good, but they tend to be weird ones that like three old guys and nobody else have read(but those three old guys really loved the book)
lo posted:some giant hype prone books are actually good, but they tend to be weird ones that like three old guys and nobody else have read(but those three old guys really loved the book)
William Gaddis The Recognitions... and Robert Musil The Man Without Qualities. Those are two really good modernist doorstoppers no one reads, hwich I recommend 2 everyone
Ruzbihan posted:lo posted:
some giant hype prone books are actually good, but they tend to be weird ones that like three old guys and nobody else have read(but those three old guys really loved the book)
William Gaddis The Recognitions... and Robert Musil The Man Without Qualities. Those are two really good modernist doorstoppers no one reads, hwich I recommend 2 everyone
gaddis is really funny
lo posted:some giant hype prone books are actually good, but they tend to be weird ones that like three old guys and nobody else have read(but those three old guys really loved the book)
Ruzbihan posted:Reading Tristram Shandy finally and wow did I eff up by not reading it earlier
the rabelais/sterne current of literature is so cool and its a shame that comparatively few people read that stuff compared to 'normal' fiction
Jacques Lacan reminds us, that in sex, each individual is to a large extent on their own, if it can be put in that way.
Naturally, the other's body has to be mediated, but at the end of the day, the pleasure will always be your pleasure. Sex separates, doesn't unite. The fact that you are naked and pressing against the other is an image, an imaginary representation. What is real is that pleasure takes you a long way away, very far from the other.
-pg 18
It is an existential project: to construct a world from a decentered point of view other than that of my mere impulse to survive or affirm my own identity.
-pg 25
Political action tests out the truth of what the collective is capable of achieving.
-pg 53
In fact, at its own level, love is not necessarily any more peaceful than revolutionary politics.
-pg 61
It is instructive to see how the party that one might have thought was simply a transitory instrument for the emancipation of the working and popular classes thus becomes a fetish. I don't want to make fun of any of that: It was an era of political passion that we can't continue, that we must now view critically, but it was intense and counted its faithful in their millions.
-pg 71
There is...something communist in all theatre. By "communist" I understand that which makes the held-in-common prevail over selfishness, the collective achievement over private self-interest. While we're about it, we can also say that love is communist in that sense, if one accepts, as I do, that the real subject of a love is the becoming of the couple and not the mere satisfaction of the individuals that are its component parts. Yet another possible definition of love: minimal communism!
-pg 90
I think that it is vital to see that France is both the country of revolutions and a great land of reaction. This helps to understand France dialectically. I often argue about this with my foreign friends because they still entertain the myth of a wonderful France that is always on the brink of revolutionary inventions. So they were inevitably rather shocked by the election of Sarkozy, who doesn't at all fit this perspective... I tell them that they construct a history of France in which the Enlightenment philosophers, Rousseau, the French Revolution, June '48, the Paris Commune, the Popular Front, the Resistance, the Liberation and May '68 follow each other. That's all well and good. But there is another side to the story: the Restoration of 1815, the Versaillais, the Holy Union during the Great War, Pétain, horrendous colonial wars...and Sarkozy. So there are two histories of France and they are entwined. Whenever great revolutionary hysteria runs riots, it is met with obsessive reaction.
-pg 96
Even Sarkozy may be suffering as he desperately awaits a text that never arrives.
-pg 101
There is...something communist in all theatre. By "communist" I understand that which makes the held-in-common prevail over selfishness, the collective achievement over private self-interest. While we're about it, we can also say that love is communist in that sense, if one accepts, as I do, that the real subject of a love is the becoming of the couple and not the mere satisfaction of the individuals that are its component parts. Yet another possible definition of love: minimal communism!
i strongly dislike quotes like this i think they're designed to be just-so stories in order to make artsy leftists feel good. like if i said there was something communist about all death metal for the same reason people would laugh.
Chthonic_Goat_666 posted:There is...something communist in all theatre. By "communist" I understand that which makes the held-in-common prevail over selfishness, the collective achievement over private self-interest. While we're about it, we can also say that love is communist in that sense, if one accepts, as I do, that the real subject of a love is the becoming of the couple and not the mere satisfaction of the individuals that are its component parts. Yet another possible definition of love: minimal communism!
i strongly dislike quotes like this i think they're designed to be just-so stories in order to make artsy leftists feel good. like if i said there was something communist about all death metal for the same reason people would laugh.
That's a fair comment, but also feels like reflexive cynicism. He's relating the collective nature of the theatre company in that section to the concept of Fraternity (in a Liberty, Equality, Fraternity sense). I guess it can be goofy cornball arty twaddle, but the point is the relationship of the engagement of the collective of the enthusiasm that is a theater company, or any community unit, with the fraternal aspect of the political project of communism. I do get entirely what you're saying with it being a wispy little aphorism though.
^collective and fraternity (brotherhood) of METAL
Jacques Lacan reminds us, that in sex, each individual is to a large extent on their own, if it can be put in that way.
Naturally, the other's body has to be mediated, but at the end of the day, the pleasure will always be your pleasure. Sex separates, doesn't unite. The fact that you are naked and pressing against the other is an image, an imaginary representation. What is real is that pleasure takes you a long way away, very far from the other.
the self drives a car like this. yeah but the other drives a car, like this
lo posted:the rabelais/sterne current of literature is so cool and its a shame that comparatively few people read that stuff compared to 'normal' fiction
if you count "Don Quixote" as the first real novel (which is also a very funny, weird, meta, ribald book) and then look at the 20th century with Joyce and Pynchon at the other end, you could make a really obnoxious argument that "ACTUALLY, the weirdos are the true 'normal' novels and the Balzac/Flaubert school of realism is the real deviation from the norm"
Chthonic_Goat_666 posted:There is...something communist in all theatre. By "communist" I understand that which makes the held-in-common prevail over selfishness, the collective achievement over private self-interest. While we're about it, we can also say that love is communist in that sense, if one accepts, as I do, that the real subject of a love is the becoming of the couple and not the mere satisfaction of the individuals that are its component parts. Yet another possible definition of love: minimal communism!
i strongly dislike quotes like this i think they're designed to be just-so stories in order to make artsy leftists feel good. like if i said there was something communist about all death metal for the same reason people would laugh.
i think though it should be read in context of the desperate attempt to promote & rehabilitate the term in context of a time when it seemed like “communism” and even “socialism” (if just the terms and other terms associated with them) were headed from unpopularity to complete obscurity in conversations in the West. so much of Badiou is an attempt to raise such terms back up into view & it’s maybe too easy to look back in hindsight and ask what the hell was going on with that
Petrol posted:Jacques Lacan reminds us, that in sex, each individual is to a large extent on their own, if it can be put in that way.
Naturally, the other's body has to be mediated, but at the end of the day, the pleasure will always be your pleasure. Sex separates, doesn't unite. The fact that you are naked and pressing against the other is an image, an imaginary representation. What is real is that pleasure takes you a long way away, very far from the other.the self drives a car like this. yeah but the other drives a car, like this
this, but unironically
cars posted:Chthonic_Goat_666 posted:There is...something communist in all theatre. By "communist" I understand that which makes the held-in-common prevail over selfishness, the collective achievement over private self-interest. While we're about it, we can also say that love is communist in that sense, if one accepts, as I do, that the real subject of a love is the becoming of the couple and not the mere satisfaction of the individuals that are its component parts. Yet another possible definition of love: minimal communism!
i strongly dislike quotes like this i think they're designed to be just-so stories in order to make artsy leftists feel good. like if i said there was something communist about all death metal for the same reason people would laugh.
i think though it should be read in context of the desperate attempt to promote & rehabilitate the term in context of a time when it seemed like “communism” and even “socialism” (if just the terms and other terms associated with them) were headed from unpopularity to complete obscurity in conversations in the West. so much of Badiou is an attempt to raise such terms back up into view & it’s maybe too easy to look back in hindsight and ask what the hell was going on with that
In Praise of Love came out in 2012 so that's not really it. I think the reaction to it is just that it's kind of touchy feely and that makes some of our more cynical 'Zoners a bit grumpy. Badiou did theater when he was younger so that's why he uses the example, it's not abstract for him.
Parenti posted:In Praise of Love came out in 2012 so that's not really it.
...do you remember 2012? i take it you’re familiar with Badiou as concerns the PS and Hollande...?
to me what he’s done comes from a significantly different place than, like, grad students in the U.S. writing theses on the Marxism-Leninism of Twilight movies or DSA people on YouTube explaining that the U.S. is Actually Socialist because of TRICARE. my even less popular opinion is that all of the above were among the causes of the rhetorical rehabilitation of those terms, it’s just that history tells us that’s not enough to build socialism. i’m probably biased though because before i was assigned Badiou to read I was black bloc anarcho child.
Him and Zizek are friendly and "contemporaries" but I've always preferred Badiou, because he's not as critical of 20th Century Communism, though you see his PR-friendly feints in a lot of his stuff. I think the best part about Badiou is that he does talk about Communism in ways that are "popular" and culturally relevant. In Praise of Love was a best-seller in France, and it wasn't just black bloc anarcho students reading it. Even goofy people are going to have to be onboard with communism if anyone wants it to win, and that means just so stories aren't necessarily bad.
Edited by Parenti ()
shapes posted:lo posted:
the rabelais/sterne current of literature is so cool and its a shame that comparatively few people read that stuff compared to 'normal' fiction
if you count "Don Quixote" as the first real novel (which is also a very funny, weird, meta, ribald book) and then look at the 20th century with Joyce and Pynchon at the other end, you could make a really obnoxious argument that "ACTUALLY, the weirdos are the true 'normal' novels and the Balzac/Flaubert school of realism is the real deviation from the norm"
i believe some people have already made this argument incorporating all your favourite post modernists and so on. theres an academic called stephen moore who wrote 'the novel: an alternative history" which basically traces this strand of literature from obscure medieval stuff(and earlier in some cases) through to the present day. hes only written two volumes so far though and hasn't got past 1800 yet, even though i believe he does reference more modern stuff a bit in them.
Chthonic_Goat_666 posted:i think having a hobby in which many are thoroughly reactionary, and in certain instances (some black metal) openly fascist, has disabused me of the notion that these little collective diy projects are some sort of romantic/socialist thing. people can call that cynical or grumpy but i think its just a realistic viewpoint when we look at most subcultures. maybe ill get into model trains instead.
fwiw Badiou hates the idea that "everything is political" and cites poetic writing as an example of something where he figures, like, you can be a communist and a poet but it doesn't mean your poetry is therefore communist
Parenti posted:Political action tests out the truth of what the collective is capable of achieving.
-pg 53
doing things shows what we can do *thunderous applause the ceiling collapses*
tears posted:there is something *sips champaign* communist about all theater. now now, hear me out, by communi
this is a pretty stupid way to talk about Badiou imo considering what he does with his time when he’s not writing
tears posted:doing things shows what we can do *thunderous applause the ceiling collapses*
you’re responding to an out of context quote that is a tiny part of a larger analogy about love. no investigation,
