"We know the world through language, and the acts and practices that constitute the 'real world' are inseparable from our discourses out of which they arise and as open to interpretation as any work of literature." -Ross Murfin, ed. Heart of Darkness, Joseph Conrad, second edition. (Pgs. 191-2)

( Linguistics is teh ev0l. )

I've about had it up to my fucking eyeballs with the 'objective' v. 'subjective' v. 'rhetorical 'RUN THE OTHER WAY' tactics' debate when it comes to beauty.

Someone just needs to give me the answer.

I have, God, a migraine. And so many ideas. Why is it that I am inundated with ideas the moment I can't do anything about them ( Read more... )

I think, maybe, I should look at the sefirot, see if I can somehow tie those in to the thesis I'm half-heartedly working on but always thinking about. Somehow bringing up shekinah as the cause of/for beauty, but then I think that's too mystical and while I want personal, mystical might not be the way to go. And then I wonder about the shekinah ( ( Read more... )

Or maybe I don't mean jouissance.

"As Richard Middleton (1990, p.261) puts it, "Plaisir results, then, from the operation of the structures of signification through which the subject knows himself or herself; jouissance fractures these structures." (Here.)

Sometimes I really hate the French language.

A list of books I need to re/read:

Pierre Bordieu: Distinction
Jacques Foucault: Discipline and Punish
Georges Bataille: Eroticism: Death and Sensuality
Helene Cixous: "The Laugh of the Medusa"
Audre Lorde: "The Erotic as Power"
Rolande Barthes: Pleasure of the Text
Rolande Barthes: A Lover's Discourse: Fragments
Julia Kristeva: Desire in ( Read more... )

A random question (or, actually, not that random) for any lit geeks on my flist: are there any cornerstone theory books that deal with the erotics of language? I was reading a Neruda poem tonight (under the LJ-cut) and it triggered something that relates to the other rambling post.

( I do not love you... )

I have a new manifesto, in which there are more questions than answers.

With apologies to Susan Sontag and Robert Pirsig.

( We have desensitised ourselves to the pure eroticism of language, the guttural, the sensual, the beautiful. Why? )

I gave up on Benjamin about the time that Sarah’s gameboy somehow moved on to my lap. For a while tonight, I wrote angel!fic, for anael (and, I suspect, son_of_darkness). Three and a half thousand words later, I needed a break and so turned to Susan Sontag’s Against Interpretations.My bad ( Read more... )