click here for my article. stalled reading this ever since I was a 15-year-old "socialist-not-communist" reading the manifesto for the first time. partly because marx is called hard to read but that's because no one really reads marx. despite hegel's influence, he is really clear without being too dry or too ornamented. and despite the indimidating length, he repeats concepts when they become relevant again; his dialectic is easy to follow. you can tell at what point I read anti-oedipus because I started to bother with tabs. It will be interesting to read more of the Frankfurt school after reading the marx before them and the deleuze and guattari after them. capital is also a good reminder that women have always worked, they were just the poor ones.

felt like peak literature after cloud atlas. it was a cute read. also refreshing to read a woman writer; you'll think you're a uniquely unidentifiable subhuman until you remember that everything you read/hear/watch is made by men. this book also reminds you that academics and their navel-gazing are really embarrassing; my interest in the career is purely another one of my humiliation rituals.

longest 400 pages of my life. so boring I thought I was losing the attention span I'm so proud of having. I like that studying english forces me to read beyond my taste, and I can always get something out of books I don't even enjoy. but I really struggled to feel anything for cloud atlas. I can do style without substance but not substance without style -- it was too much plot. I get why we're reading it for the postmodernism unit, but does postmodernism have to be so corny? I lost the little investment I had when the sci-fi dystopia turned out to be north korean. (hover to view spoilers) my one positive is that I liked the robert chapters, and the second at the end even slightly revived my interest. but timothy's were insufferable to read and it only gets worse.

reminded me of Upton Sinclair's the jungle. not only for the early 20th century eastern european industrial labourers, but Ondaantje's references to his own work with archives made me think of Sinclair's journalistic efforts; even the labor of the book itself is forced on our consciousness. at first, I wasn't sure about a poet writing prose, but I can tolerate the more vague, concise language than the tumblr writer verbiage I expected (which was maybe an anachronistic assumption). we also read it with Hayden White and the Lacanian-historian-literary-critic indulged me.

embarrassed I only read it now. like Frankenstein, the plot details feel a little too convoluted when its premise is already general cultural knowledge. but I enjoyed it.

I was supposed to read it for a book club but I got impatient and read it on my own. after reading anti-oedipus and losing faith in structures and wholes it was hard to be persuaded by Zwicky's gestalts. I felt like I could vaguely agree with gestalt thinking when she used the examples of the little graphs or of poetry and music, but it was all lost on me whenever she elaborated on her reasoning (though maybe that vagueness proves her point). I would begin to nod along when the opposition of calculative and gestalt thinking appeared like the opposition of the symbolic and imaginary (sometimes the gestalt even seemed like Deleuze and Guattari's schizophrenizing), and this was nearly explicitly addressed when Zwicky assigned the calculative to Freud's second topography (ego) and gestalt thinking to the first (unconscious). but this only became an example of her failure to keep the opposition as strict as she suggests it is, because a couple of pages earlier she says the individual is a gestalt. and the lacan in me couldn't shake the conviction that ineffability is immanent to language... I would actually feel like she was making the same argument on the topic of poetry, but then she'd insist that poetry is outside of language. I was also suspicious of her insistence that the west went wrong when it began questioning gestalts, for being "puzzled" while the rest of the world "took them for granted"; I don't think critical thinking is exclusive to the west nor that we should reject it. I'm not sure how we would challenge the technocracy she is so vehemently against if we just took everything as they immediately are to us... I was surprised Zwicky never discusses cleanth brooks considering her interest in literature, because I noticed their wholes run into the same problems: science that isn't science but is science, and a liberal disregard for material conditions. on a final, lighter note, the experience of meaning often reminded me of this bird photography.

click here for my articles. deleuze and guattari answer the biggest question implied in lacan's third seminar: isn't there a benefit to never having symbolized oedipus? the first part was a rough read but it all clicked by the chapter "3 texts of freud." one thing I enjoyed was how they went further with the freud/marx lens by applying it to the form of the argument itself; I think it parallels marx's rejection of universal principles of economics (freud being deleuze and guattari's ricardo). anti-oedipus also answered to my suspiscions of how quick psychoanalysis was to represent the unconscious. It does feel like it should be thought of a little more abstractly... The inclusion of the preconscious was interesting too, since it's largely abandoned by lacan. I was also surprised that anti-oedipus actually convinced me against structuralism. Its optimism also surprised me knowing it was a response to the failure of may 68. I wonder what they would think about the reterritorialization of today's dsm-5... and their style inspires me to write.

it took me 7 months to read. for the first third I relied heavily on gregory b sadler but I eventually got used to hegel's writing on my own + he speaks more concretely as the book goes on. after the reason section I got bored and didn't read a page for 2 months, but I turned out to be this picture; the following spirit section was very rewarding. and now I can not only better understand marx and lacan but most importantly, dutch modern artist piet mondrian.

lacan is known for writing obscurely but his earlier seminars are very clear. I like how he elaborates on certainty in psychotics and I feel like that was missing from the associated paper in ecrits, "on a question prior to any possible treatment of psychosis." he makes his infamous statement here about how he makes himself deliberately difficult to understand, but I think he has a point, just a little bit, if you think about how confident people can be in their complete misunderstandings of freud...

read schreber's memoir so I could read freud's case on schreber so I could read lacan's third seminar so I can read deleuze and guattari's anti-oedipus...

click here for my article. denser than I expected. I like that jameson is clear about using "late capitalism" to refer to a purer, multinational capitalism because otherwise the term is usually thrown around redundantly. also, the word postmodernism actually means something to me now outside of the mouths of jordan-peterson-alan-sokal types. will reread when I'm more familiar with the literary criticism jameson is responding to.