Sacred Exchange of Knowledge

Zweig anatomizes the modern confusion between weakness and virtue, how the display of vulnerability can become its own kind of power, obligating others into obligation and paralysis (bad). The protagonist wants to be merciful but discovers that pity, when staged and prolonged, is (naturally) both corrosive and coercive. The novel feels contemporary in its recognition that weakness itself can command, sometimes more effectively than strength, and that to “rescue” another can be a disguised form of cruelty. How does your (low grade) narcissistic obligation to others serve your own egoic pleasure?

Peter Brown maps the early Christian obsession with sex and renunciation, showing how bodily practices became instruments of authority. The text is less about theology than about the political economy of chastity and desire, who gets to abstain, who gets to Want. Reading it now, you see how discourses of purity, forbidden desire, etc. have never left us, they’ve just been repackaged and sold to us with the kind of postmodern legibility that is comfortable (?) to conform to. Also, mentions of vril and towel boys. Great.

Land’s read of Bataille and Nietzsche not as philosophy but as weapons against philosophy itself, and staging his argument through accelerationist first principles, is pretty neat (though at times veers into theater, which, i guess is to be expected). The book is compelling less because of alignment and more because of exposure, I think to read it is to become acutely away of the ouroboros of critique (which feels particularly relevant due to the current state of the academy, although this is a played out idea), critique as destruction of critique. The underside of “critical theory” which is not the analysis of systems, but the drive to implode them. Reading it now, it feels like a proof of concept for where certain online currents took themselves decades later, omniscient.

Jung at his most pedagogical, laying out his archetypal system through images, dreams, and case examples. Appealing for my “work” and also just deeply relevant when exploring the True Self (trite kind of language to use but useful in its description). The appeal isn’t in the system’s neatness but in the way it suggests that every private dream is already part of a collective lexicon. Gives you just enough language to create an understanding of the internal self, while reminding you that the unconscious will always produce more generative understanding than any conscious exploration or “self help” can offer.

There Is No Such Thing As Coincidences. Jung proposes that coincidences are not accidents but patterned expressions of meaning, acausal but still ordered. God’s plan. It destabilizes our comfortable reliance on causality, which, is perhaps why modern psychology still recoils from it. Movements towards professionalism, away from psychology as art, which, to be clear, psychology is an art and not a science. What’s compelling is not the proof but the reorientation offered in the idea that the psyche and the world might be two sides of the same coin, and that meaning, and experince doesn’t need causation to be real.

Reading Lacan is to endure, and enjoy, a deliberate obstruction in theory and language (I love the French and postmodern gruel. Sorry.). His texts, generally, lean away from popular legibility (lol) forcing the reader to circle around the world he is personally creating within his critique and particular lexicon. All that being said, desire structured like a language, the subject split by signifiers, the impossibility of wholeness, these are ideas that frame the way that I perceive the world. I love this man. Brutality of prose.

Breton. Nadja (much like the analyst) becomes the screen for his meditation on madness and love, but also on the disappearance of the object of desire once it is named. The lover’s gaze as both creative and destructive. Projection, the empty vessel, the blank sheet of paper, that which we desire most because we are creating the desired body. Projection as a technology of desire etc.

Žižek attacks the liberal usage of “totalitarianism” as an all purpose slur, how the language of totalitarianism often serves to exempt the West from critique. Obv. quite relevant for today’s social climate, but who am I to say really. The book is less about defending authoritarianism than about refusing the self satisfaction and egoic principles of liberal democracy. Philosophy written as a useful and utilitarian counter accusation. Ideology always works most effectively when it claims to be beyond ideology.

Houellebecq’s first novel is clinical in its bleakness (great!), dissects the exhaustion of intimacy in a culture ruled by markets and competition (we seem to circle the drain). His characters are already hollowed out, moving through sexual desire as if through an economic calculus, neat to track how the Houellebecqian man has evolved. Social diagnosis that refuses the palliative, which, can make me feel sort of doomed, but I think that’s why we are all in it anyways.

Oh Barthes. Just read it. Beautiful.

If you know me, you know that I love Bataille, this is a really excellent collection of essays. Here, he is not offering a “system” so much as insisting that culture is structured around what it decidedly throws away (waste, excess, sacrifice, eroticism). Utility is a fiction; the real motor is what can’t be contained (Lacanian principles). The appeal is not in agreement (who cares if he’s “right”)(irrelevant) but in how destabilizing it is to think of sacredness emerging from that which is superfluous. Philosophy has to face its own obscenity, “serious” people trying to talk about ecstasy, vomit, sex, death, Bataille is good at forcing this issue. Philosophy is just something you do, we should probably be freaks about it (sometimes).