thinking about virtuosity, that point of indeterminacy where the line between effort and effortlessness breaks down. what is shared and what is one's own. precocious children and how effort itself comes hard to them (us). help is always necessary and impossible. you have to want to rule the world before you can serve it. neuroses and how the ego ( Read more... )

so i am going to a dance party tonight! with the exception of my senior prom (at which i just didn't give a damn) i haven't danced in public since i think 6th grade. it was a seriously classic awkward-girl-coming-of-age moment, at a school dance, when, after i had been dancing in a (in retrospect) remarkably uninhibited way for a 12-year-old 6th ( Read more... )

omigod omigod omigod I GOT THE JOB ( Read more... )

cruelty and mercy have at least this one thing in common: neither are just.

1. The dynamic/s of BDSM, particularly the (possibility of the) phenomenon of "topping from the bottom," problematize/s transitivity in interpersonal relations, in part because of the peculiar structures of self-reference involved ( Read more... )

i think it's easy to be dismissive of the strike, as i (like many) doubt whether it will make any lasting impact on SUP. it seems to me some of the people involved are getting a bit too "democracy in action" about it, as if ad-free webspace were some sort of civil right. but i do get where these people are coming from ( Read more... )

a) make sweeping claims about the nature of the human world ( Read more... )

working on my essays (before noon!). posting here because, well, it's my journal, isn't it?

essay three: describe an experience from which you have derived exceptional benefit and explain its importance to you.

my experience: the 2004 presidential election.

( so why was the election important to me? )

or, where my head is at the moment.

i think levinas has it right to make something like interiority (and the radical exteriority/alterity for which it opens the way) the primary ethical determinant--even, nay, especially if we throw out the bit about it being uniquely human. it seems to me that totality and infinity still works if we say what he ( Read more... )

personal identity is the enemy of personal progress.

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we are already responsible for ourselves long before we are able/allowed to take responsibility for ourselves.

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"progress" (of the (hegelian?) historical variety) is defined meaningfully only in hindsight. the work that is worth doing now always appears as a catching-up, as ( ( Read more... )