there's our catastrophe

May 15

sodawound:

Have I ever discussed the salt crystal formations in my copy of A THOUSAND PLATEAUS? This happened a year ago, soon after I ’finally’ (uh, ‘finally’ because this book is a part of a new canon of contemporary socio-philos-rhetorically minded poetic and radical people that i have shared thoughts with in the last 10 years many of whom are senior to me in their academic study and recommended this and the preceding book highly based on my own ramblings of ideas and life, but y’know, not ‘finally’ because i think that there is a necessity to have any particular book ever, read what you want man) purchased my own copy and had only read a few parts of it before this happened. Anyway I think its very funny and I keep it on my shelf as an example of keeping my salt lamp in a safe spot as well as uh, look at the rhizomic bends to the way the salt had formed between pages… nice little deleuzian sculpture. uh anyway I feel d&g may have approved.

lena is the only theory blogger I care about

Have I ever discussed the salt crystal formations in my copy of A THOUSAND PLATEAUS? This happened a year ago, soon after I ’finally’ (uh, ‘finally’ because this book is a part of a new canon of contemporary socio-philos-rhetorically minded poetic and radical people that i have shared thoughts with in the last 10 years many of whom are senior to me in their academic study and recommended this and the preceding book highly based on my own ramblings of ideas and life, but y’know, not ‘finally’ because i think that there is a necessity to have any particular book ever, read what you want man) purchased my own copy and had only read a few parts of it before this happened. Anyway I think its very funny and I keep it on my shelf as an example of keeping my salt lamp in a safe spot as well as uh, look at the rhizomic bends to the way the salt had formed between pages… nice little deleuzian sculpture. uh anyway I feel d&g may have approved.

lena is the only theory blogger I care about

May 8

Anonymous asked: Have u read 1000 years of non-linear history? thoughts? U post about delueze and guatarri quite a bit and 1000 years is in that vein....

I post about deleuze and/or guattari because I’m trying to learn about them, though, not because I’m an expert! anybody else got thoughts about 1000 years of non-linear history by manuel de landa? I have to admit that nothing about it particularly grabs me, but I’m totally open to being persuaded otherwise…

“Uncovering the secrets of capitalism is a difficult process because the bodies of the workers keep disappearing, to be replaced by objects or commodities. If the worker is a victim, he’s a secret victim because his exploitation is hidden by the sensational allure generated by money, capital, and commodities. Capital is thus no ordinary mystery novel; it uncovers a nightmarish world in which bodies become things, and things become people, and in which the victim is also the agent. In the course of its search for the secret origins of profit, Capital renders the category of agency problematic. The capitalist, for example, is actually only “capital personified,” the human recipient of profits that are not of his own making. And the worker who produces surplus value would seem to be complicit in the very process that exploits him. Capital is a whodunit that cannot find its resolution by locating a human agent to blame for the violence it uncovers. ” Ann Cvetkovich, “Marx’s Capital and the Mystery of the Commodity”, Mixed Feelings: Feminism, Mass Culture and Victorian Sensationalism.

May 5

illustrations to “1914: One or Several Wolves?” from Deleuze and Guattari’s A Thousand Plateaus, by Marc Ngui

Apr 16

mayhap:

“F as in Fidelity”

Gilles Deleuze: From A to Z with Claire Parnet Semiotext(e) and MIT Press

Mar 31

“A Brechtian maxim: do not build on the good old days, but on the bad new ones.” Walter Benjamin, ‘Conversations with Brecht’ (via aidsnegligee)

(via adornoble)

foucault & gay marriage

mewmewfoucault:

ourcatastrophe:

everybody brings up foucault as their go-to radical queer who would just HATE gay marriage and whatever, but I have this vague recollection that his actual position on marriage was a bit less readily pigeonholed. didn’t he say something to the effect that legally sanctioned marriage between queers would be more of a threat to the current social order than legalised queer sex? maybe in an interview or something? does anybody know what I’m talking about? it’s really difficult for me to find this out by googling because all I get is a million blog posts saying “gay radicals like French philosopher Michel Foucault would just HATE this” and it’s driving me up the wall. I just wanna knowwwwwwwwwww. am I just making shit up?

yes, i think i know exactly the material you’re referring to - the title escapes me, but i believe it’s from an interview with a french gay newspaper, and i think it’s reprinted in ethics: subjectivity and truth

i thought at first that it was “friendship as a way of life” from that collection, but i found a PDF of that and it doesn’t appear to be the exact piece i’m thinking of, though there’s a good deal of conceptual overlap

and i know that leo bersani critiques it in homos, basically claiming that it’s part of what he sees as foucault’s reactionary anti-psychoanalytic stance that over-emphasizes the importance of social structures and downplays the power of desire / sex / abjection / etc

as i recall it, foucault claims that while we usually think that heterosexuals / heterosexist discourses are averse to queer sex in an of itself, he believes that it’s not so much gay sex per se that is repugnant to them, but rather the social positions and interpersonal relationships that gayness and queer sexual relations make possible

hence why he sees gay marriage as a potentially productive possibility - these juridical structures matter, and legal gay marriage could help push the meaning of marriage in useful new directions, as well as offering material and social resources to support a variety of interesting / radical / pleasurable queer social configurations, which might or might not look at all similar to ‘traditional heterosexual marriage’ (something of a moving target itself)

he also mentions in this piece wanting to expand the possibilities of other legal relationships; i remember him talking about adoption, as well, and musing about the interesting things that might happen if, say, an adult man could legally adopt a friend or lover his own age or even older - so he’s certainly not putting all his eggs in the marriage basket, either

eta: found my copy of homos; the piece i was thinking of is an interview reprinted as “sexual choice, sexual act” in ethics and a couple other places; JSTOR has it at http://www.jstor.org/discover/10.2307/40547562?uid=3739616&uid=2129&uid=2&uid=70&uid=4&uid=3739256&sid=21101951243531

aaah!! you’re the greatest!!!!

“…Benjamin suggests that sentiments themselves become things for the left melancholic, who “takes as much pride in the traces of former spiritual goods as he bourgeois do in their material goods.” We are more loyal to our left passions and reasons, our left analyses and convictions, than to the existing world that we presumably seek to alter with these terms or to the future that would be aligned with them. Left melancholy, in short, is Benjamin’s name for a mournful, conservative, backward-looking attachment to feelings, analyses, or relations that have become fetishised or frozen in the heart of the critic. …To “stand entirely to the left of the possible” is the political stance of the left melancholic, who prefers a particular analysis — who prefers to brood on the losses that this analysis documents — over seizing and developing the prospects of political transformation in the present.” Wendy Brown, Politics Out Of History, “Spectres and Angels: Benjamin and Derrida”.

Mar 30

“The hereafter is emptied of everything which contains the slightest breath of this world, and from it the baroque extracts a profusion of things which customarily escaped the grasp of artistic formulation and, at its high point, brings them violently into the light of day, in order to clear an ultimate heaven, enabling it, as a vacuum, one day to destroy the world with catastrophic violence.” Walter Benjamin (via spiritandteeth)

(via adornoble)

Mar 28

youmissyouroldfamiliarfriends:

bildungstheorie:

ourcatastrophe:

theory bros aren’t shit because they read theory

they’re shit because they ruin theory for everyone else

ditto for philosophy bros in general

I’ve yet to meet a theory bro.

someone explain to me what a theory bro is.

obviously you’ve never had that one dude in your class who cheated on his girlfriend with her best friend and, when she asked him why he did that, handed her a copy of nietzsche’s “beyond good and evil” with instructions to ask him again when she’d finished reading it and, when she read the whole thing and said she still didn’t understand, told her to read it again

in all seriousness, haven’t you ever come across that kind of man for whom intellectually dominating and humiliating others is the cornerstone of their particularly toxic masculinity? philosophy is notorious for being full of them

there's our catastrophe

work is its own cure. you have to like it better than being loved. ⚑ ♀

foucault & gay marriage

work is its own cure. you have to like it better than being loved.

⚑ ♀