What are you reading?

[galia]

You could read "Adolphe" by Benjamin Constant. Super annoying. I think depressing love stories as a genre are annoying, Malina was a pain in the ass, and Werther I couldn't even finish. I guess Belle du Seigneur could fall into the description? The first 1/3 is really good, as far as I recall.

[Faust]

You could read "Adolphe" by Benjamin Constant. Super annoying. I think depressing love stories as a genre are annoying, Malina was a pain in the ass, and Werther I couldn't even finish. I guess Belle du Seigneur could fall into the description? The first 1/3 is really good, as far as I recall.

I vividly remember a discussion one one of my graduate classes that to the contemporary reader Werther is simply a melodramatic teenager. How far we have fallen! Or matured...

[galia]

he's so emo ahah

[Czx]

That's funny, when we read it in highschool as part of the program most people had the exact same opinion. Many couldn't even finish the book because they were put off by how annoyingly emo he was in their words hahah.

Although, even though I'm still young, I'm beggining to consider depressing love stories a pain in the ass aswell, or I already do. Seen too much (unfortunately already) to care for the characters not to mention most of the absurd exaggeration and the very common reception of weakness and self-loathing as virutes and things of beauty. I actually became quite disgusted by most of the stories of this kind and the praise the receive especially (I'm talking only about the stories and aforementioned feelings they describe themselfes here of course, not the literary skills of the authors). Once ago I laughed at self-help writing and elevated such literature to absurd highs but I now see the irony of it.

Blah, been thinking about this stuff a bit too much lately. Sorry for the accidential essay.

[Magic1]

About a hundred pages into the Marx-Engels Reader 2nd edition by Robert Tucker. It's really good. I've read a couple Marx compilations, but nothing of this breath. I think anyone who wants a to get an idea of his philosophical approach (aside from just the economics/politics of manifesto) should read this book.

[Czx]

@fit_magna_caedes - Agreed with the above. As much as I don't care for the politics themselves I do care for the philosophy and the sociology of music in his views. He is in fact a good, interesting read and I definitely agree with the statement about subtlety and humour. Your last sentece is the exact thing going on in my opinion, before I read any of his works the image of him that Marxians built in my mind was astonishingly boring.

[MJRH]

spot on, fit. funny that the fanatically anti-N league often seems to miss the humour in his stuff just as much as the fanatically pro-, isn't it?

re:werther, i'm another one that couldn't stomach it, for the same romantic themes of strong emotion and lovesickness and lack of self-consciousness that are currently out of vogue. Ahimsa, a romantic novel from the next generation after goethe i heartily recommend is M. du Maupin, though it's only superficially "depressing" and spends a lot more time subtly lampooning the poor tortured hero than commiserating with him. much more in keeping with the more satirical and unsentimental modern temperament (the hero talks of stealing away from society prudes to sneak a swig of brandy and some pages of rabelais)

[Faust]

Yeah. Being fiercely pro/anti- something can be a good way of getting into it at first, but neither is the best way to understand something in the long run.

Applies to fashion too. If you can't see the limits of designer X and just extol their genius to the skies, you won't ever really appreciate what they're doing, I think.

And more generally, truly empathising with something/someone terrible will make you really viscerally feel its/their terribleness. Just hating/despising without empathy is a way of not engaging... which is sometimes useful, of course, or maybe even necessary.

To return to the main theme of this thread, have just started Latour's "We have Never Been Modern". Anyone here read it? Am enjoying it, so far - he seems a good example of someone who writes philosophy* without that overburdened seriousness that makes so much of it so dreary. Was put off reading him after encounters with Latourians here in Melbourne, another reminder not to judge the writer by their devotees...

*or whatever you want to call what it is that he does, idk/drgaf.

Unless the said designer is Rick Owens, apparently.

[kamsky]

About a hundred pages into the Marx-Engels Reader 2nd edition by Robert Tucker.

Not sure if there is an excerpt from it -I imagine so- but Marx's "Grundrisse" is worth reading if you find yourself wanting to delve a little deeper into his writing.

I actually enjoyed reading Capital vol 1, just diving in despite a few tedious chapters. Marx is more funny and more subtle than he's sometimes given credit for... perhaps especially by Marxians, who sometimes deify him to the point he becomes boring.

Would agree by and large, but would exempt a few, notably David Harvey, whose scholarship on the subject/field is engaging and enlightening.

Should anyone else like to read Vol. 1 of Capital (or Vol. 2, which I have not gotten around to) with a little help (or, say, without reading Hegel, Smith or Ricardo beforehand, which I haven't and probably never will) is by watching his lectures on them which can be found in the link:

http://davidharvey.org/reading-capital/

[bukka]

Paris trip = tons of books. New acquisitions: Kundera, Mishima, Kawabata and Soljenitsyne.
Currently reading the unbearable lightness of being, great read so far.

Fuuma, what's the title of the Aleksandr Dugin's book you're recommending? thanks

[Faust]

Paris trip = tons of books. New acquisitions: Kundera, Mishima, Kawabata and Soljenitsyne.
Currently reading the unbearable lightness of being, great read so far.

Fuuma, what's the title of the Aleksandr Dugin's book you're recommending? thanks

Hmmm, that's some really creative spelling!

[bukka]

Hmmm, that's some really creative french spelling!

http://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alexandre_Soljenitsyne

I noticed this before, russian names translation vary a lot.

[gawkrodger]

good to see Marx being mentioned in this thread, and another vote for Grundrisse.

I rate David Harvey (up the geographers!) and thing is lectures are a great introduction, but they are that.

I'd heavily recommend reading Harry Cleaver - Reading Capital Politically, and the output from those associated with autonmia, well those bits translated from Italian into English

[Ahimsa]

Thank you to all of those who gave me recommendations (despite your opinions on such a subject matter )

[kamsky]

Really?

The flippantly short answer would be yes.

Harvey left me underwhelmed. Always seemed to be forcing Marx to say the things that would make him palatable to modern Marxists, when what Marx is actually saying is often both more radical and less modern than we'd/they'd like.

Fair enough. Truth to tell I no longer keep up overmuch with academic debates, having long left academia for other, more or less greener pastures. I can't speak intelligently to what modern Marxists would like, but I'd be less than surprised if they're still wringing some pretty suspect arguments out of Marx and/or people whose job it is to comment on Marx (e. g. Harvey). Bit more on this in a moment.

And it's a bad habit, I think, to import another's hermeneutics from day 1, especially if that person denies offering a hermeneutic, and instead seems just to be telling us "the facts" about what the author meant. It's the same problem I mentioned above, too many priests of their Marx-God making sure that new acolytes get the right version of the scripture.

Disclaimer: I'm not exactly sure how the word "hermeneutics" is being employed. I'm only passingly familiar with Heidegger, and not at all with Gadamer; as they're the writers most closely associated with that term, my understanding of hermeneutics might be charitably called incomplete.

This might then be overly simplistic, but I assume you are using it to mean something like a singular, systematic, close reading amongst many possible ones but which is inevitably shaped by all of one's attendant prejudices, biases, experiences, etc.

I think it's a bad habit to abrogate critical thinking on any matter. I'm not advocating using Harvey's commentary (or any other author's text) as some crutch to dispense with working one's own way through a text and engaging with it. I'm not interested in telling others how to read, but I think one would be remiss in taking such an approach.

Further, I think it's possible to read Harvey without necessarily importing his hermeneutics; one would have to be a pretty remarkably susceptible reader for this to be so. Moreover, at least in class he made it a point, on several occasions to specify that his was both an evolving and a circumstantially/temporally/culturally sited reading of Capital. (I attended another semester, not the one that is taped; perhaps wrongly, but I presume that he maintains this position in the taped lectures.) Admittedly, it's not clear to me that I remember him stating as much in "Companion to Capital Vol 1," but it's not unreasonable to expect a reader to know that this is so.

Even Derrida admitted somewhere* that you have to see a writer on their own terms before you begin seeing what else is buried there, and I think that means also before being told what isn't buried there. You have to read the gospel (Capital) before you go to your bible study classes (Marxist reading group or its online video equivalent).

(*I think it was part of the exchange with Foucault, maybe Derrida's final piece written after Foucault died?)

Again, doesn't seem to follow that reading a secondary commentary precludes one from seeing what is/isn't buried in the primary text for oneself. One might hope that neither kind of text is read so passively and certainly not accepted as gospel.