Over winter break I had the weird idea of habituating myself more towards reading. I had a literal month to just be a NEET so I was playing path of exile and listening to philosophy lecture series. I dive-bombed through The Second Sex, a couple of critical theory books (finally read some of the Horkheimer essay collections), Sartre's Nausea, Baldwin's the fire next time, a couple others.
One day in a bookstore I was actually looking for Freud's Civilization & Its Discontents so I could take a quick look, I'm reading Eros & Civilization by Marcuse for a philosophy independent study that I forced into existence kinda just so I could read Eros & Civilization. They didn't have Civilization & Its Discontents, but they did have Deleuze & Guattari's Anti-Oedipus, so I finally took a looksie at that. I had only really understood Deleuze as philosophy's last great boogeyman.
So, the very short of it is that I'm overwhelmed. Anti-Oedipus is exactly as weird/discomforting/alien as I expected, it is a stylistic jackhammer to the brain. It's also worth the time, and it is a great deal of time, which it takes to process. The foreword to Anti-Oedipus, written by Foucault, is the mortar for the book; Foucault's language is plainer, his goal is to make the book come forward about its goal of addressing the paranoia of fascism (that is, the paranoia that fascism takes advantage of, paranoia that produces fascist behavior). It makes the book out to be the object in the world that has an answer to the concerns which critical theory put forward. Adorno, Horkheimer, and Marcuse all seem to be only concerned (in different ways) that our actions in the name of science, logic, psychology seem to be creating impediments to real human progress and[, instead of producing the ethical guidance we need, away from fascism, towards a community which absolves itself of its most senseless material possessions and exists in a gratification of ideas, unions, differences, explorations, changes, notions of self which defy categorization,] claiming to be """""""depolitical.""""""
And now I suppose I might want to open up the toolbox and start explaining away the concepts, so that I don't sound ridiculous. Here is that, made radically brief: Deleuze reconceptualizes ontology and life until you can really start to image a person like a puppy (in Freud's language, as "polyamorous perverse") in healthy behavior and like a fascist, a desk-murderer, a technocrat, a number-cruncher, a person with a healthy "work-life division" only because they have been forced that way in particular circumstances. Deleuze's concept of the subject - that thing which is "I," "Noah," "moi" in a certain instance and fast-frozen in writing - is more truthful than I could believe one could get across. But this is really beside the point of the message, I just wanted to make a post that says "if you've been hiding from Deleuze, you should want to stop doing that," and the sooner that you take the time to let him scramble your conception of self (out into millions of little threads and statements and images and plans) the better. It's weird reading, but both exemplifies and produces the case for weird reading, and why reading is not simply a matter of taking crude, inert knowledge and putting it in your brain-as-box for perpetuity.
Anyway, I'm about half through Anti-Oe, I read Eugene W. Holland's companion ("Introduction to Schizoanalysis"), and my next reads on my desk are the last 100 pages or so of Eros and Civilization, Butler's Gender Trouble (yeah), and Difference & Repetition (assuredly, I'll have to go find a companion for that as well). Life is weird and awesome, thinking about things can sometimes make things different.Statistics: Posted by popcorn — Mon Feb 17, 2020 10:21 pm
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