animedad posted:
im about 60 pages into butler's story by liminov. it's kinda meh to me, liminov approaches his stories with a bitterness, he scores high on the "lf 'fuck yeah'" checklist, but i find him a bit boring. like, houellebecq can pull off this sort of thing because his novels are very well crafted, and you get the impression of he being on the horizon of something at all times, while liminov just makes me feel small.

could be that im just really tired tho

yeah they're certainly very different styles of novel. what do you mean by limonov making you feel small - as in the book itself is small in its aims, or he actually makes you personally feel small? i also disagree to some extent that houellebecq's novels are particularly well crafted... they definitely have decent structures but it's a weakness of houellebecq's... but then too great a structure would be sterile imho

A review of Ben Jeffery’s Anti-Matter: Michel Houellebecq and Depressive Realism (Zero Books)
by Rob Horning


It can be hard to keep French writer-provocateur Michel Houellebecq’s novels straight in one’s head. Like Haruki Murakami — in some ways his gentler (and far more gifted) Japanese counterpart — Houellebecq writes about the sulky crises of middle-aged male protagonists confronting existential superfluity while dealing with the destabilizing presence of alternately willing and withholding nubiles. But whereas Murakami’s novels often feature cats, whimsical sci-fi conceits, and passively befuddled protagonists, Houellebecq’s have sex tours, mutant clones, and gale-force gusts of excoriating self-loathing. His narrators manage to be both pitiless and myopic, with an unshakable and tiresome confidence in their incipient obsolescence. Convinced that life is basically pointless if tantalizing women won’t have sex with them, they look persistently to their inevitable failures on the meat market to confirm their overall worthlessness.

To call Houellebecq’s work misanthropic seems inadequate, as his characters seem to hold human beings, including themselves, to be beneath contempt. His international breakthrough, The Elementary Particles (1998) — published as Atomized in Britain — goes so far as to posit the end of the human race, put out of its misery by fortuitous discoveries about cloning. One of the novel’s post-human scientists remarks that “it has been surprising to note the meekness, resignation, perhaps even secret relief with which humans have consented to their own passing.” But even representing humanity as eager for extinction is insufficiently hopeless for Houellebecq; in The Possibility of an Island (2005) he returns to his neohuman species to describe their terminal psychosexual miseries as well.

Houellebecq’s indiscriminate cynicism is not especially hard to get a handle on. He seems to operate on the assumption that the more mercilessly pessimistic or debasing an observation, the more titillatingly truthful readers will take it to be. He yearns to sound transgressive but more often than not comes across as petty and self-parodic.

Ben Jeffery, in a book-length essay recently published by Zero Books, fittingly labels Houellebecq’s caustic literary approach “depressive realism,” likening his narrative style to the cognitive deadlock that can characterize clinical depression. His protagonists accept that their problems are meaningless in the cosmic scheme of things yet cannot stop mulling them over. Though they believe that a cure for their malaise is impossible, they are compelled to continually refine their self-diagnoses. They appear determined, or consigned, to have no illusions about themselves, even though a certain amount of illusions may be necessary for staving off paralyzing solipsism. Stringing one’s experiences into a coherent narrative, positing an ability to sympathize with others, developing a sense of personal identity — these are ultimately faith-based notions after all. We have to get past our own insignificance to regard anything else as worthy of contemplation and connection. “Depression is the pathological frontier of individualism,” Jeffery writes, “the point at which the whole world is eaten up by the self.” Houellebecq’s work inhabits that frontier and attempts to present it as the universal truth of the human condition.

Houellebecq operates under the fallacy that if hopelessness is the truth of our condition, then we must be made to feel hopeless in order to see it. So his books often seem to make it their purpose to talk us out of living. But if they were merely the contemptuous mutterings of a kind of cut-rate Schopenhauer, bullying us endlessly with rants about the humiliation of sex and the unendurability of life, they wouldn’t warrant much serious attention. Jeffery makes the case that

Houellebecq’s porno-dystopias merit careful consideration, dubbing them “perhaps the literary product from the underbelly of the liberal-capitalist End of History.” Contradictions inherent in consumer capitalism, Jeffery suggests, provide the conditions for Houellebecq’s novels, which function as art about the uselessness of art, soulful cries of our craven soullessness. “Consciously or not, Houellebecq’s writing exhibits the schizophrenic pull of consumption culture,” Jeffery writes, “how unreal it seems and yet how enmeshed in it we remain.”

Houellebecq’s characters are notable for how completely they embrace the consumerist ethos: believing that youth is society’s primary index of value, that sex is the only pleasure and is eminently commodifiable, that disposability is natural, that quality is ultimately reducible to quantity, that the quest for novelty is our only genuine tradition, that secular materialism has triumphed once and for all over atavistic spirituality. Jeffery notes that despite their cynicism (or perhaps as an expression of it), the protagonists wholeheartedly buy into consumerism’s flattened fantasies of the good life, even as they complain continually of their harmfulness. Because consumerism “exists only with our complicity,” Jeffery points out, it “has already turned our imagination against us and taught us to distrust it.” Houellebecq’s novels, then, are ostensibly protests against this at the level of tone; they are “works of imagination against the imagination,” Jeffery writes. “They hate themselves.”

Self-hatred thus appears as a mode of self-protection from the allure of consumerism, which threatens to take our propensity to daydream and use it to trap us on the hedonic treadmill, chasing after goods that always fail to satisfy. Houellebecq works to instill in readers a healthy revulsion toward their explicit desires, the ones that advertising magnifies in their consciousnesses. Repudiating those wants could potentially open the space for other, less conscious desires — yearnings that can’t be articulated in words or encapsulated in products — to flourish. These inarticulate desires, Jeffery suggests, drawing on Susan Sontag’s “Against Interpretation” among other texts, are the eternal preserve of art, but changing historical conditions require artists to keep coming up with new ways to protect desire from co-optation, vulgarization. Depressive realism, arguably, is a currently viable strategy.

The point of life, like the point of art, is only graspable indirectly. The inescapability of death immediately calls any direct attempt to frame life’s meaning into question. Jeffery credits Houellebecq for being willing to confront directly the fear of death that most culture, in his opinion, works to distract us from. “Death is the terrifying, singular fact consciousness tries to suppress,” Jeffery writes, “although it can never do this completely.” But by foregrounding death, by reveling in its obscenity, Houellebecq paradoxically manages to neuter it. The self-refuting aspects of his extreme pessimism and his art against art ultimately reassure us that we are always left with some modicum of faith, “even if it’s only a faith in your own hard-eyed veracity.” Such faith, Jeffery suggests, can redeem life in the face of death. By expressing the limits of what can be expressed, depressive realism, unlike actual depression, posits something beyond the recursive loops of despair. No matter how viciously he debunks our dreams, reading Houellebecq’s novels presents us with an unlikely gift — the realization that life can’t possibly be as bad as he makes it sound.

http://thenewinquiry.com/post/13456522904/death-dreams

animedad posted:
But whereas Murakami’s novels often feature cats,

i'm the star of his latest masterpiece

dm posted:
to the extent that i understand him, Hegel fucking owns

and to the extent that i don't, fuck him. seriously.

sosie posted:
Reason and Revolution - Hegel and the rise of Social Theory by Herbert Marcuse. The first part of this book, "The Foundations of Hegel's Philosophy", made more sense out of Hegel than any other expository book on that motherfucker that I've ever read, and all in the service of eventually telling him to fuck off and I think at the end we're supposed to be Marxist as heck, though I haven't finished it yet. Ass. Fart.

i hadn't heard of that before, but it looks really interesting and i really want to read it. at least for now, i'm pretty sure that view of Hegel is backwards. it's important to understand that one must hate Hegel at the start and this is basically universal (at least in the US and UK). listen to this excerpt by the editor of a reader that's actually really nice because it tries to cover his whole system rather than just the Phenomenology (which is also his whole system):

It has become customary in the introduction and exposition of Hegel to begin by bemoaning the difficulty of the task and, especially, of making a beginning at all. Many of Hegel's commentators have been compelled to go through a sort of personal catharsis before plunging into the labyrinthine abyss of Hegel's system and its expression. But if it is true, as Goethe says, (and Hegel repeats), that there is no remedy but love against the great superiority of others, then purging of one's complacency and conceit may indeed be the best way to approach Hegel--or any other great thinker.

Marcuse was probably dealing with the difficulty posed by Heidegger. while it is true that Marx can be understood independently of Hegel, there would be no Marx without Hegel. Marx wrote a letter to his father on November 10, 1837 (Hegel died just six years earlier) about how great Hegel was: http://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1837-pre/letters/37_11_10.htm

I had read fragments of Hegel's philosophy, the grotesque craggy melody of which did not appeal to me. Once more I wanted to dive into the sea, but with the definite intention of establishing that the nature of the mind is just as necessary, concrete and firmly based as the nature of the body. My aim was no longer to practise tricks of swordsmanship, but to bring genuine pearls into the light of day.

I wrote a dialogue of about 24 pages: "Cleanthes, or the Starting Point and Necessary Continuation of Philosophy". Here art and science, which had become completely divorced from each other, were to some extent united, and like a vigorous traveller I set about the task itself, a philosophical-dialectical account of divinity, as it manifests itself as the idea-in-itself, as religion, as nature, and as history. My last proposition was the beginning of the Hegelian system. And this work, for which I had acquainted myself to some extent with natural science, Schelling, and history, which had caused me to rack my brains endlessly, and which is so written (since it was actually intended to be a new logic) that now even I myself can hardly recapture my thinking about it, this work, my dearest child, reared by moonlight, like a false siren delivers me into the arms of the enemy.

....

While I was ill I got to know Hegel from beginning to end, together with most of his disciples. Through a number of meetings with friends in Stralow I came across a Doctors' Club, which includes some university lecturers and my most intimate Berlin friend, Dr. Rutenberg. In controversy here, many conflicting views were expressed, and I became ever more firmly bound to the modern world philosophy from which I had thought to escape, but all rich chords were silenced and I was seized with a veritable fury of irony, as could easily happen after so much had been negated. In addition, there was Jenny's silence, and I could not rest until I had acquired modernity and the outlook of contemporary science through a few bad productions such as The Visit, etc.

so yeah, it's universal

Edited by dm (Dec. 17, 2011 08:44:35)

sosie posted:
oh right, of course, excuse my hysterical histrionics, what kind of insane person could ever interpret someone referring to the book they are reading seriously as "babys first" as any kind of a slight - IM CLEARLY INSANE!

then, in 10 years when i come visit you, scold me in distant wonderment at my paralyzing lack of self esteem, and be wildly popular with amazing artists and musicians, including all those who i always thought were MY people - leaving me with nothing but the pleasure of agonizing pain, the shameful tears of a self aware narcissist, and my inevitable suicide

youre crazy