Top Ten Books
- Thread starter josef k.
- Start date
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- alan brazil caligula cool reasons bro corpsey's terrible preoccupation do you want to hurt me? gamergate i am a dead white man myself monocle man nomad's sexy list numerous books about psychopathy stick to your guns john the msm acquires linebaugh's problematic list the telephone book is very good transyuggothian power secrets
luka
Well-known member
Inevitably because of the two founding fathers having absolutely nothing in common. Was pulling in at least two different directions from the start
luka
Well-known member
That's right. Badiou!
The younger JK could be a bit of a pillock, and had a nasty attack-dog mode he'd go into from time to time when a seemingly deserving target presented itself, but seemed like a generally functioning personality, someone you could have a conversation with. Nowadays you can hear the rattle of a few too many loose screws - that firm, unwarranted conviction that others are "lying" about him, for one - and the shell of personality is looking a bit thin; there's that transformation into self-caricature that some people seem to undergo, ever more convinced that they're expressing their best selves even as the possibility of active, inquisitive selfhood becomes more and more remote. I don't know how much of that is internet-madness, and how much is other kinds of attrition.
luka
Well-known member
Middle age is a difficult time. Things rigidify and get more and more brittle.
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Corpsey
bandz ahoy
luka
Well-known member
They're not academics. Well Nina is and possibly poetix was but mostly they are just people with a feel for theory. It's a talent.
Corpsey
bandz ahoy
There is something intoxicating about it, it's a climbing frame for the brain. And perhaps the fact that so few people understand it is part of that intoxication. Being privy to secret, arcane knowledge. I figure it must be something like this because realistically how much influence does any of it have on the outside world? Perhaps it creeps in via osmosis.
The Badiou-mania was quite a thing. I read back over blog posts of mine from that period, and there's a certain glazed follow-the-Master quality to some of them which I find a bit unnerving in retrospect. We sort of used Zizek to channel the id, and Badiou for the superego, I think. I still do read Badiou - am reading his seminar on Lacan at the moment - but I'm a bit less inclined to bang on about militant procedures and Truths. At the time that kind of talk was indexed to a sense that there was an opportunity to be seized - a rush and a push and the land we stand on is ours - which is very evident in the blurb Mark did for Zer0, for example. The ordinary unfolding of history - personal and impersonal - tends to deal harshly with that sort of conviction.
luka
Well-known member
I think thought has an influence.
The joke is that I'm an arty type too - degree in Eng Lit, not even something fancy like philosophy. Never did A-level maths. I've always been a complete dilettante when it comes to Theory. But I do seem to have the sort of brain that enjoys play-apparatus of that kind. And by an accident of personal history I've ended up being a computer person for long enough to have got quite good at it, in the way that one becomes good at things just by doing them reasonably mindfully for over a decade.
luka
Well-known member
They made me read some Heidegger for my Therapy course and I must admit (it was a very small amount) that making some kind of headway with that was exhilarating and sort of even gave me a new lease of life, intellectual energy etc. Shook me out of a kind of stupor, an elective idiocy I'd been clinging onto wilfully.