What are you reading?

[trentk]

Sorry faust, if this constitutes "literature".... rorty's assertion won't do anything to alleviate your headache.

http://www.amazon.com/Cyclonopedia-C.../dp/0980544009

[thehouseofdis]

James Joyce Dubliners

[viv1984viv]

Sorry faust, if this constitutes "literature".... rorty's assertion won't do anything to alleviate your headache.

http://www.amazon.com/Cyclonopedia-C.../dp/0980544009

Ha, I love Negarestani! I think half of the problem people have with this book is the sans serif font - proven to be tougher to read. Faust - don't touch it.

I'm not too versed in the Speculative Realist stuff, tend to be focused on the horror philosophy tip right now.

Currently reading Dostoevsky's Crime and Punishment and Eugene Thackers In the Dust of this Planet...nothing much else, I was reading Potocki's Manuscript found in Saragossa but have put it down.

I recently read DBC Pierres Vernon God Little - nice book.
Also read Will Self's How the Dead Live - amazing book, love Self.

[tweeds]

Currently filling in the gaps with Freud and Lacan - Interpretation of Dreams, Civilisation and its Discontents, Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis, various pieces from his Écrits, etc. I started with psychoanalytic theory from the contemporary & applied end of the timeline with Zizek, so now I'm going backwards to cover ground I ought to have done. At the same time, to account for misconceptions in the clinical aspects of Freudian and Lacanian thought, I'm getting through some Ramachandran as well.

Any other recommendations welcome. This isn't my field, and I'm flying blind so to speak.

[docus]

^^^ @ tweeds

If you're coming from a philosophical direction (as you seem to be, and as I was when I first approached psychoanalysis), and you're looking for psychoanalytic ideas to enrich your thinking about consciousness, then I strongly recommend the work of Wilfred Bion, an influential British psychoanalyst. He built on Freud and Melanie Klein's metapsychologies to produce a very rich theory of thinking, with manifold connections to the philosophy of mind.

I particularly recommend his 1962 paper, 'A Theory of Thinking' published in the International Journal of Psycho-Analysis, volume 23, and reprinted in his 1967 book of selected papers, 'Second Thoughts'.

[trentk]

reading more speculative realism, this time, brassier's nihil unbound.

An excerpt from the preface:
"Nihilism is not, as Jacobi and so many other philosophers since have insisted, a pathological exacerbation of subjectivism, which annuls the world and reduces reality to a correlate of the absolute ego, but on the contrary, the unavoidable corollary of the realist conviction that there is a mind-independent reality, which, despite the presumptions of human narcissism, is indifferent to our existence and oblivious to the ‘values’ and ‘meanings’ which we would drape over it in order to make it more hospitable. Nature is not our or anyone’s ‘home’, nor a particularly beneficent progenitor. Philosophers would do well to desist from issuing any further injunctions about the need to re-establish the meaningfulness of existence, the purposefulness of life, or mend the shattered concord between man and nature. Philosophy should be more than a sop to the pathetic twinge of human self-esteem."

[several_girls]

This last headache-inducing page makes me want to repeat Rorty's assertion that all philosophy worth reading is in literature.

*ahem*



That's just the first one off the top of my head, I'm certain there are plenty more. Foucault being the least of them.

[Faust]

Oh, no. Spare me!!! :-)

[Crowzer]

Currently I'm reading a novel series by Jeffrey Lord (It's a house name). There a lot of writters behind this nickname.

BLADE

Plot: (From Wikipedia)

The novels were a series of adventures featuring the titular character (MI6A's special agent Richard Blade), who was teleported into a random alternate dimension at the beginning of each novel and forced to rely on his wits and strength. Richard Blade was distinctly British, and all the stories are set in England (at least at the beginning and end, with Blade being teleported to some other dimension for the bulk of each tale). The series was translated into several languages, including French and German.

Some cover:


The series was created in 1969 in the United States, and 37 titles were released until 1984.
Then the series was repeated in French by Richard D. Nolan will sign a total of 43 novels, anonymously and under his real name of Olivier Raynaud. The series has found its autonomy and incredible longevity to reach 198 titles (March 2011).

It reads fast enough and it's very entertaining.

[gavagai]

@trentk: i don't think we talk about the same thing then, actually i don't understand what you're talking about. The principle of noncontradiction, in my book, is only a logical rule which forbids you to assert the proposition p and its negation non-p at the same time.

@todes: it looks like we have opened a pandora's box here. for many reasons (number 1, lack of time) i won't deal with all the difficulties i see in your post on badiou (and his followers), but let's just say that i'm not a complete ignorant on these matters and the joke on ed hardy was just a joke. actually french philosophers love crafted words exactly like Audigier loves shiny details, whence the comparison...

"To be is to be the value of a variable"

A ;ittle light Friday afternoon reading for me from Mr. Quine.

[Icarium]

Neal Stephenson's latest Reamde. Liking it a lot. Probably going to be my favorite alongside Cryptonomicon. Though some of his mechanics which supposedly allowed his fictitious mmorpg to dominate the industry is highly suspect which is rare since he usually is pretty sharp when it comes to computer geek stuff.

[Acéphale]

█ Algernon Blackwood, The Willows

«

A rising river, perhaps, always suggests something of the ominous; many of the little islands I saw before me would probably have been swept away by the morning; this resistless, thundering flood of water touched the sense of awe. Yet I was aware that my uneasiness lay deeper far than the emotions of awe and wonder. It was not that I felt. Nor had it directly to do with the power of the driving wind -- this shouting hurricane that might almost carry up a few acres of willows into the air and scatter them like so much chaff over the landscape. The wind was simply enjoying itself, for nothing rose out of the flat landscape to stop it, and I was conscious of sharing its great game with a kind of pleasurable excitement. Yet this novel emotion had nothing to do with the wind. Indeed, so vague was the sense of distress I experienced, that it was impossible to trace it to its source and deal with it accordingly, though I was aware somehow that it had to do with my realisation of our utter insignificance before this unrestrained power of the elements about me. The huge-grown river had something to do with it too -- a vague, unpleasant idea that we had somehow trifled with these great elemental forces in whose power we lay helpless every hour of the day and night. For here, indeed, they were gigantically at play together, and the sight appealed to the imagination.

But my emotion, so far as I could understand it, seemed to attach itself more particularly to the willow bushes, to these acres and acres of willows, crowding, so thickly growing there, swarming everywhere the eye could reach, pressing upon the river as though to suffocate it, standing in dense array mile after mile beneath the sky, watching, waiting, listening. And, apart quite from the elements, the willows connected themselves subtly with my malaise, attacking the mind insidiously somehow by reason of their vast numbers, and contriving in some way or other to represent to the imagination a new and mighty power, a power, moreover, not altogether friendly to us.

»

[tweeds]

^^^ @ tweeds

If you're coming from a philosophical direction (as you seem to be, and as I was when I first approached psychoanalysis), and you're looking for psychoanalytic ideas to enrich your thinking about consciousness, then I strongly recommend the work of Wilfred Bion, an influential British psychoanalyst. He built on Freud and Melanie Klein's metapsychologies to produce a very rich theory of thinking, with manifold connections to the philosophy of mind.

I particularly recommend his 1962 paper, 'A Theory of Thinking' published in the International Journal of Psycho-Analysis, volume 23, and reprinted in his 1967 book of selected papers, 'Second Thoughts'.

Just saw this, thanks docus

[MetroBulotDodo]

I never thought I'd read these words from a Frenchman!

Yeah, gears and springs are coming out of my ears. BSR, are you an analytic philosopher?

MBD

[MetroBulotDodo]

Currently filling in the gaps with Freud and Lacan - Interpretation of Dreams, Civilisation and its Discontents, Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis, various pieces from his Écrits, etc. I started with psychoanalytic theory from the contemporary & applied end of the timeline with Zizek, so now I'm going backwards to cover ground I ought to have done. At the same time, to account for misconceptions in the clinical aspects of Freudian and Lacanian thought, I'm getting through some Ramachandran as well.

Any other recommendations welcome. This isn't my field, and I'm flying blind so to speak.

Tweeds, I recall that you asked a question about art and politics in the line of can art be separated from politics?

I have my own answer for that (and even a political collective) but a good place to start is with the Frankfurt school philosophers, particularly with a compiled volume from Verso (a great publishing house, btw) called "Aesthetics and Politics." The letters compiled in this volume were correspondence between interlocutors such as Ernst Block, Georg Lukacs, Brecht, Walter Benjamin, and last but not least, the jazz-hating curmudgeon Theodor Adorno (who was a student of Schoenberg, I think it's worth pointing out.)

Through their correspondence, they deal with questions that are absolutely relevant today around the possible political stakes of artistic action.

MBD