Lucas Mattos > Recent Status Updates

Finished Fear and Trembling

I am 73% done with Fear and Trembling

I am 58% done with Fear and Trembling

I am 51% done with Fear and Trembling

Recently, I marked Fear and Trembling as read for the second time this year—though I will have reread it at some point within the next few weeks, I haven't completed it yet. I don't know how to remove this reread without also deleting my first, so I'll keep my second read-through up and give another general update once I've actually completed the essay.

Before I ever got any significant way through The Plague, I heard from multiple sources that it held a harrowing mirror up to the general experience of living through the COVID-19 pandemic. I've dismissed these claims as overdramatic until now, by which time I'm struggling to persist through the book on account of how distressing it is. I rescind my skepticism of the novel's relevance and emotional impact.

Completed Part 1.

Completed Part 1.

I've finished The Postmodern Condition proper, and am on this book's appendix. Even after I've read the last word of the appendix, I won't be ready to consider myself as having "finished" the work, but I'll be more than happy to shelf it as such here.

Administrative procedures [...] make individuals "want" what the system needs in order to perform well.

Read through part 13 and the first two pages of part 14 (the last part of the essay). Part 13 is both the longest and most technical of the book so far, and I'll definitely be revisiting it. In it, Lyotard takes recourse to mathematical language and recent developments in the field to justify his prescription of "paralogy" in the postmodern condition.

Read section 12 and reread sections 9, 10, and 11. This essay is finally coming together for me, and I'll likely reread more sections before finishing this book.

What we are approaching is not the end of knowledge—quite the contrary. Data banks are the Encyclopedias of tomorrow. They transcend the capacity of each of their users. They are "nature" for postmodern man.

Read through parts 10 and 11.

Since "reality" is what provides the evidence used as proof in scientific argumentation, and also provides prescriptions and promises of a juridical, ethical, and political nature with results, one can master all of these games by mastering "reality." That is precisely what technology can do.

Read through parts 8 and 9.

Read through parts 6 and 7.

I become one with the rain. I'm the storm you shelter from.

I touch the cheek of my coworker; she is covered in tiny hairs all over, like a peach. My humanoid friend.

“Bodies left over after sickness or reuploading.” “Sickness” must be in reference to humans who die on board. “Reuploading” may refer to a transfer of humanoid consciousness from one body to another (for whatever reason), as a result of which the old body is left over to be disposed of. If this is so, why could the old body not be repurposed? Would it concern the humanoid that once inhabited it, to see it repurposed?

Read through the Foreword, Introduction, and parts 1-6.