Alexander > Recent Status Updates

"The pathological must be understood as one type of normal, as the abnormal is not what is not normal, but what constitutes another normal". (1904!!!)

So nice to zip through a book and think - OK I'm not a complete idiot the books before this one were just very very hard :3

"I am not proceeding by linear deduction, but rather by concentric circles, moving sometimes towards the other and sometimes towards the inner ones... And I will consider, not that I have constructed a rigorous theoretical model, but that I have freed a coherent domain of description, that I have, if not established the model, at least opened up and arranged the possibility of one".

This is a kind of glorious effort to establish continuities in thought and history, but all the better to more properly articulate discontinuities. An incredibly sophisticated work of pattern recognition.

It was all going quite swimmingly until I slammed head-first into the chapter on language (this is mostly a me problem, to be clear).

"For Mallarmé then, as for Heidegger, Being is neither substance nor form in the sense of eidos. It is rhythm."

Two essays on Nietzsche, two on Benjamin, and a bunch to come on Heidegger. This is comfort food, old worn and shaped pants.

Fun, breezy, scholastic.

More of a pamphlet than a book really.

It's really ... nice, to read about care.

I'm very torn on these kinds of books that aim to shift the *scale* of analysis of any one thing/network/entity/practice so that analysis is made somehow better off by that shift. Like, u can pick any scale you like, and then detail the dynamics of that scale and sure, they'll be benefits (& costs). But these are "merely" empirical questions. Philosophy aims at the transcendental: at what motivates any scale at all.

One way to think about what this book is doing: asking - what if we took seriously the (Nietzschian) idea that morality (or rather, moral-izing) is a driving force in history, equal to economics, ideology, geography, or whatnot? Moralizing (negative valence) as a mover and shaper of how humans come to understand themselves? A: this book, in the field of the history of madness.

Pretty much finished, only the appendices to go, and since I dunno if I will write a full review I just wanna say: two years after having started this with a friend, this book - three books! - is a total masterpiece. It's also a complete blast to read, so much fun, even if 1/2 of it is meetings and conferences and committees (such was the Russian revolution, apparently!). What a writer, what an achievement.

End of Part II. Tougher and drier than Part I, wading through the dense written clinical/theoretical material on madness of the time and drawing out implications.

A book more focused on clinicians and their practice than analysands, strictly speaking; an effort to think about the politics of psychoanalytic theraphy under conditions of occupation, and what this means for psychoanalysis itself. Infused with the language of activism, and less so that of Theory, although where the latter makes itself felt, it's in the sphere of decolonial thought.

End of part 1. If he had written this alone and nothing else this would already have been a classic.

This is very good, but it's also what happens when you remove the sex from the psychoanalytic pairing of sex and death.

Really good at taking the measure of distance and proximity between Deleuze and Lacan.

I always forget that Buchanan is a first rate cultural critic, and not just one of the best commentators on D&G out there. Or rather, he is likely one because of the other. The 'treatise on militarism' that serves as the hinge of this book of essays is terrifyingly prescient, given the explosion of just such state-forwarded violence in the last two years alone.

You wouldn't know it from the title but this has an incredible reading of Australian indigenous law from the perspective of the work of Giorgio Agamben. Annnd a wonderful reading of Hitchcock's The Birds through a Deleuzian lens.