The Haunting of Finders Keepers
Little calamity has come to pass, at all. While my graceful lady rests her weary head in my bed I sit here wondering when I will hear back from various mirages collected beneath the term 'people'.
This morning I got a reply from AC about the conference typo and his impending Philosophy Colloquium seminar critiquing Levinas' conception of enjoyment through the model of 'Spiel' (play). He had forwarded his abstract to me for my perusal and Lacanian 2 cents. I coughed up a few things about "fort da", desire is always the desire of the Other, the economic contrast of sadism and narcissism (and the latter's problematic economy), and the limit of enjoyment as jouissance.
amabile did a very kind thing for me today; she purchased a shirt for me. It's a nice white, fitted, french-cuff number that promises I'll be able to accept cufflinks as gifts by Christmas.
In unrelated news, I made a random breakthrough with setting up my website ftp to be serviced through OS 10.3's "Finder". Sure, it still looks like I need a nice ftp program like Cyberduck to adjust the permissions, but by and large it seems to work just dandy.
Yesterday I bought Palahniuk's new book Haunted. The prospect of reading another Gibson novel, i.e. Virtual Light, straight after Count Zero left me uncertain. I thought I'd read through something fun and darkly satirical, as Palahniuk almost always tends to be. The back cover of Haunted reads: Haunted is a novel made up of stories: twenty-three of them to be precise. Twenty-three of the most horrifying, hilarious, mind-blowing, stomach-churning tales you'll ever encounter -- sometimes all at once. They are told by the people who have all answered the ad headlined 'Artists' Retreat: Abandon your life for three months'. They are led to believe that here they will leave behind all the distractions of 'real life' that are keeping them from creating the masterpiece that is in them. But 'here' turns out to be a cavernous and ornate old theatre where they are utterly isolated from the outside world -- and where heat and power and, most importantly, food are in increasingly short supply. And the more desperate the circumstances become, the more desperate the stories they tell -- and the more devious their machinations become to make themselves the hero of the inevitable play/movie/non-fiction blockbuster that will certainly be made from their plight.
Yes, it does seem old Palahniuk wants to get his teeth into the reality tv industry and destroy its jugular vein. Further down the jacket the phrase "appallingly entertaining" caught my eye. Obviously this was what won me over, screw that bunch of text up above, if something's appallingly entertaining it's got a 93% chance of making me laugh.
I was brooding about writing a paper yesterday. I was thinking of finding a way to pick up The Incredibles, Perfect Blue, Snatch, and Memento through Lacan's four forms of knowledge. Of course, I think I need some type of hard objective content to get me through to Thesis Eleven with such a plight... Maybe a piece on Zizek's Leninist choice and the comedy of freedom in liberal democracy... And yet again, I still seem to be operating at that meta-point on the surface of discourse. This is okay because, to quote the closing comments of my email to AC, I realise that was a fairly convoluted stream of comment. But in plain speak, with Castoriadis, representative pleasure always trumps organ pleasure. Thus we are barred from recourse to a materialist notion of a biological drive to pleasure because the pull on desire in the decentered subject of postmodernity is what the Other wants -- which we do not know --, an argument that resides at the level of (ontological) phenomenology rather than (ontical) phenomena.
Getting ready to theorise really does mean getting naked sometimes.
~Niveau
PS currently reading PostSecret
This morning I got a reply from AC about the conference typo and his impending Philosophy Colloquium seminar critiquing Levinas' conception of enjoyment through the model of 'Spiel' (play). He had forwarded his abstract to me for my perusal and Lacanian 2 cents. I coughed up a few things about "fort da", desire is always the desire of the Other, the economic contrast of sadism and narcissism (and the latter's problematic economy), and the limit of enjoyment as jouissance.
amabile did a very kind thing for me today; she purchased a shirt for me. It's a nice white, fitted, french-cuff number that promises I'll be able to accept cufflinks as gifts by Christmas.
In unrelated news, I made a random breakthrough with setting up my website ftp to be serviced through OS 10.3's "Finder". Sure, it still looks like I need a nice ftp program like Cyberduck to adjust the permissions, but by and large it seems to work just dandy.
Yesterday I bought Palahniuk's new book Haunted. The prospect of reading another Gibson novel, i.e. Virtual Light, straight after Count Zero left me uncertain. I thought I'd read through something fun and darkly satirical, as Palahniuk almost always tends to be. The back cover of Haunted reads: Haunted is a novel made up of stories: twenty-three of them to be precise. Twenty-three of the most horrifying, hilarious, mind-blowing, stomach-churning tales you'll ever encounter -- sometimes all at once. They are told by the people who have all answered the ad headlined 'Artists' Retreat: Abandon your life for three months'. They are led to believe that here they will leave behind all the distractions of 'real life' that are keeping them from creating the masterpiece that is in them. But 'here' turns out to be a cavernous and ornate old theatre where they are utterly isolated from the outside world -- and where heat and power and, most importantly, food are in increasingly short supply. And the more desperate the circumstances become, the more desperate the stories they tell -- and the more devious their machinations become to make themselves the hero of the inevitable play/movie/non-fiction blockbuster that will certainly be made from their plight.
Yes, it does seem old Palahniuk wants to get his teeth into the reality tv industry and destroy its jugular vein. Further down the jacket the phrase "appallingly entertaining" caught my eye. Obviously this was what won me over, screw that bunch of text up above, if something's appallingly entertaining it's got a 93% chance of making me laugh.
I was brooding about writing a paper yesterday. I was thinking of finding a way to pick up The Incredibles, Perfect Blue, Snatch, and Memento through Lacan's four forms of knowledge. Of course, I think I need some type of hard objective content to get me through to Thesis Eleven with such a plight... Maybe a piece on Zizek's Leninist choice and the comedy of freedom in liberal democracy... And yet again, I still seem to be operating at that meta-point on the surface of discourse. This is okay because, to quote the closing comments of my email to AC, I realise that was a fairly convoluted stream of comment. But in plain speak, with Castoriadis, representative pleasure always trumps organ pleasure. Thus we are barred from recourse to a materialist notion of a biological drive to pleasure because the pull on desire in the decentered subject of postmodernity is what the Other wants -- which we do not know --, an argument that resides at the level of (ontological) phenomenology rather than (ontical) phenomena.
Getting ready to theorise really does mean getting naked sometimes.
~Niveau
PS currently reading PostSecret