Metal Reviews

To blow one's own trumpet. Clearly, for all the highbrow reading you would do, you fail to grasp that one.

Reading Polybios' World Histories, translated to Dutch. Fantastic how 2300 years later certain insights into peoples' characters still ring true. Also, what a fucking hero Philip V was. Conquering eight cities in six days... Great read so far, a definite recommendation for fans of history (Fingon, I'm pointing at you).

What did you think of it (Nausea)? I found it a bit intangible, but interesting enough.

My Favorite Sartre is Troubled Sleep

Which sentence?

It was definitely odd. Some of the journal entries just seemed so surreal or absurd that I didn't know what the fuck I was reading. Overall it's cool though. It helped knowing just what he was going for philosophically, basically just the death of forms and essences and now things are uprooted from some transcendent meaning and they just exist with no function or purpose except to be. I'll have to check out Troubled Sleep. I really liked No Exit and The Flies (at least I think it was, it was the one about a hanging in the deep South or something rather) but those are the standards.

I can't find it but it was early on and he was describing how when we perceive phenomena we bring our own framework of seeing and point of view which is applied to the phenomena and out of that arises what we actually perceive. That sounds dialectical but it almost seems like it could come out of some Locke.

Oh and while I'm thinking of it I'd highly recommend forking out the $13 equivalent in pounds for the new Zizek. It's probably the best out of the four I've read of his. I have 20 pages left or so and it has blown my mind several times over. He is describing positive revolutionary prospectives, he wipes away the USSR's past failings by quoting Lenin himself, he criticizes anti-semitism to help buff his reputation and he defines the "dictatorship of the proletariat" and points out Hugo Chavez is successfully implementing it. It's really damn good. His insight into the most recent economic meltdown maybe rather obvious to a Marxist but when he actually talks about positive emancipatory politics like never before it's really good.

Reading Polybios' World Histories, translated to Dutch. Fantastic how 2300 years later certain insights into peoples' characters still ring true. Also, what a fucking hero Philip V was. Conquering eight cities in six days... Great read so far, a definite recommendation for fans of history (Fingon, I'm pointing at you).

Good stuff. The Hound is probably my fav Lovecraft, but they're all good.

Don't want to post any spoilers, but I've finished the new Wheel of Time book and it is actually... (wait for it)... good. Not great, and there's still some bloat, but the plot advances, it focuses on interesting characters who develop in interesting ways (Rand! The main character! Is in it! For more than two chapters! Wow!), and while Sanderson's writing is nothing amazing, it is a hell of a lot better than Jordan's, and he can at least write female characters who are slightly interesting and have some self awareness. So, a fun and good read. Maybe there is hope for the end of this series after all.

I just cracked open Fahrenheit 451 again.

It's kind of the sad little cousin to 1984 and Brave New World for me. Still a good read though

A Clockwork Orange dominates all three in classic dystopian novels.

Going to read up on Foucault as it turns out I'm going to be leading seminars on him over the next couple of weeks

And I don't really know much about him at all... time for some revision.

foucault essentially asks: how is nietzsche's ubermensch possible within the world of heidegger's enframing (ge-stell) which alienates (pace hegel / feuerbach / marx) us from ourselves (as "dasein")? rolling eyes

foucault's project:

homoerotic "care of self" as resistance to the discipline-effects of norm / deviance structures generated by systems of institutions (e.g. clinic, prison, asylum, school, factory, etc) which constitute a well-regulated, panoptically administered (bourgeois) 'society'; the development of these norm / deviance structures (aka epistemes) can be approximately recovered as layers / strata via an archeological method; and resistances to the discipline-effects of norm / deviance structures can be historicized via a genealogical method which interprets practices & accounts of "desire" as a hermeneutics of subjectivity; both methods applied concurrently can inform ad hoc, decentralized, local strategies of opposition by uncovering temporarily accessible fissures in the regimes & apparatuses of social control.

this is what i take from foucault (sans jargon & rhetoric), but certaintly it's not all there is. as far as i'm concerned his project begins with "a politics of subversion" (radical relativism) and culminates in "an ethics of desire-as-transgression" (polymorphic perversity) as opposition to authoritarian mentalities (e.g. fascism, puritanism, legalism, scientism, etc).

Foucault says that it is indeed futile to expect a complete revolution which will make everything perfect. All systems are dangerous because all systems have an inherent repressive element. But at the same time all systems have pockets of resistance to the system. These are driven by an untheoretic awareness of there being something wrong ('intolerable', he once said).

He primarily attacks those philosophers who believe that truth and science will help liberation, by showing how those very sentiments have led us to be less free in certain respects (or at least have led to some people, the outsiders, to be less free).