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good point/totally agree/been feeling a serious case of analysis paralysis for the last five years or soI didn’t realize he got into anarchism later in life, but that may explain his enthusiasm and lack of disillusionment. I suspect most theory is developed *after* engagement by embittered former activist types like me. That can be a problem too…
w/r/t
well, I feel compelled to defend myself by saying I know it’s not really a New Idea and certainly not a New Epiphany, I was more Clarifying and Restating My Position against the tides of forgetfulness and decontextualisation and continual reinvention of the wheel that characterise the tumblrsphere — but like, I’m so white that my first, last, and middle names can all be found on street signs in melbourne, so you’re defs within your rights here
more importantly, my understanding of the idea of “chosen family” as anglocentric and generally naive, and of family and tradition as important sites of strength and connection with heritage, is totally influenced and predated by the perspectives of women of colour and migrant women, particularly you and Lia
long story short, go for it, always
you didn’t already have that from blogging?
what r u saying about my blogging, sir
in all seriousness: casual register, no actual requirement to submit something, therefore not the same
definitely helpful, though
probably the main reason I feel okay about wasting my life on the internet is that it’s improved my writing
ultraviolent-revolution-deactiv asked: god do i hate u tumblr sjw leftists. so zizek is a "vile misogynist" because he told one distasteful joke. u are alienating so many people from communism and socialism by insisting that everyone who isn't on board with your latest sj tumblr craze is tantamount to a nazi. sexists jokes are the least of any woman's problems.
presented without commentary
well, you can get all your calories from the necronomicon, apparently it’s made out of human flesh
and I wouldn’t even have to worry about rabbit starvation what with humans being a high-fat species and all
I learned from the example of christopher mccandless, everyone
OMG ALL OVER???
lol poor choice of words
I’m finished; uni’s not
it’s over in a few weeks and I’m waaaaaaay behind schedule
I never want to think about or be in a city again, as soon as this is over I’m moving to a shack in the woods to read about the occult
guardian.co.uk/uk/2000…
“Psychologists have discovered a strong link between belief in superstition and poor exam performance in academics”
ok fine, I’ll get off the internet and work on my bibliography
ARE there people who do astrology + radical theory? lord knows there are enough radical ppl who are into astrology?
well, a lot of radical anthropologists talk about the social functions of belief in magic, the occult, etc
anthropology being anthropology, it’s almost entirely descriptive, “this is how they understand the world” rather than “this is how we can understand the world”, but it’s still a really interesting place to start
also I guess some of the kookier ecofeminists??? but to be honest I don’t really wanna go there, it’s a mess
guess we can’t use theology either then. get out of here St Augustine and Kierkegaard! Get out of here Chesterton! Get out of here liberation theology!
dude come on, you know that theology is being treated more like astrology than like psychoanalysis here
i.e. most lefties don’t have a lot of respect for religious ontologies and it wouldn’t occur to them to use a religiously-based analytical framework just because it could be interesting; in fact it would seem bizarre to use a religious framework if you weren’t ready to commit yourself as a believer. where religiously-grounded theorists like Kierkegaard are used, I feel like they’re usually secularised in some way — if they’re not torn from their religious context entirely, the religious aspects of their thought are held at arms’ length.
but the lack of empirical support for psychoanalysis or predictive capacity of psychoanalysis is judged completely irrelevant because it’s an interesting and potentially revealing lens through which to look at things. this is also something that comes up when you talk about dialectical materialism, not to go all Popper on you all.
I mean I think any framework of understanding the world should be at least entertained unless it’s self-evidently fucked up, because a new framework can reveal relations/dynamics we did not previously see or understand. but left-wing intellectuals value capital-T theory over folk ontologies even when they’d both be equally interesting potential lenses to use. it’s elitist and forecloses the range of possibilities that are open to us.
feyerabend talks a bit about this in against method — I mean I never actually finished that, but, you know, further reading for the intrigued
Anonymous asked: Do you have some recommendations for like, five or so non-fiction books that you consider to be seminal? Maybe a sentence or two about each of them. Thank you.
idk what seminal means in this context? like seminal for leftist theory? I don’t know if I necessarily believe that reading “foundational” works is more helpful than reading later, descendent works; also I’ve probably been influenced more by excerpts, conversations, essays, and fiction than by actual non-fiction/theory books I’ve read cover to cover, I read a lot more fiction than anything else
having said that, off the top of my head, the five non-fiction books that have influenced me the most could be:
caliban and the witch by silvia federici. federici argues that witch-hunts are part of the process of alienating women’s labour under capitalism, and that we see them when societies are in the (inevitably violent) transition to capitalism, e.g mid-millenium Europe, the colonisation of the Americas, much of sub-saharan africa today.
the color of violence edited by the INCITE! collective, which is a series of great, awesome, nuanced essays about the theory and practice of ending violence against women of colour. it talks a lot about the collusion of white feminisms with racist state institutions and the limits of state-based strategies aimed at ending violence against women. it’s incredibly important reading for anybody who is interested in theorising the state.
this bridge called my back edited by cherríe moraga and gloria anzaldúa, an actually-foundational text in intersectional/women of colour-centred feminism, sadly out of print but you can download most chapters at the link.
the history of sexuality vol. 1 by michel foucault, which was really important to me in clarifying the reasons for my discomfort with the centrality of confessional narratives to a lot of feminist discourses (i.e. that there’s not enough acknowledgement that the confession shapes, rather than simply describes, subjectivities, and that the demand to confess is a form of domination)
the making of the english working class by e.p. thompson, which is another book about the early stages of the rise of capitalism, very detailed, full of interesting stories. this one didn’t have a single unified takeaway message for me like the others, and it’s interesting partly because of that. it goes into so much detail, shows that there were a lot of revolutionary platforms in the past that are strikingly different to what we see today, that there were a lot of ways things could have gone and we should remember that because otherwise we forget that history is contingent, and get trapped in unexamined ideas of what the world is like.
you can download all of those at the links above, except The Color of Violence, which I kind of want you to buy.
