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Notebook

Notebook

This category is stuff that I come across in stuff I read, or watch, or listen to, and don’t want to forget. It’s also a record of thoughts that make up my head noise.

Speaking at the right moment

I've been doing some work to prepare for teaching I'll be doing in the fall. Part of that work leads me to re-read The Subversion of the Subject and the Dialectic of Desire in the Écrits (pp. 671-702 in the English edition). On page 673, there

More on Energetic Pessimism

Yesterday, I wrote about the concept of [https://www.surplusjouissance.com/energetic-pessimist/]energetic pessimism [https://www.surplusjouissance.com/energetic-pessimist/]. Today I want to keep exploring this idea. To do this, I want to look at the author's description of her energetic pessimism. (This is different than the author&

Energetic Pessimist

This is another short burst from the excellent intellectual biography At the Risk of Thinking: An Intellectual Biography of Julia Kristeva [https://www.amazon.com/Risk-Thinking-Intellectual-Biography-Psychoanalytic-ebook/dp/B084GW69DX/ref=sr_1_1?crid=QLZQEPHZLAFK&keywords=an+intellectual+biography+of+julia+kristeva&qid=1649782785&sprefix=an+intellectual+biogaphy+

Kristeva | A Contestatory Intellectual

These words from Alice Jardine's [https://scholar.harvard.edu/alicejardine/home] At the Risk of Thinking: An Intellectual Biography of Julia Kristeva [https://www.amazon.com/Risk-Thinking-Intellectual-Biography-Psychoanalytic-ebook/dp/B084GW69DX/ref=sr_1_1?crid=QLZQEPHZLAFK&keywords=an+intellectual+biography+of+julia+kristeva&qid=1649782785&sprefix=

Symbolic Bodies

In Philosophy of Care [https://www.versobooks.com/books/3951-philosophy-of-care] Boris Groys [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Boris_Groys] explains in the present we have a "symbolic body" that is administered by large bureaucracies, the most powerful of which is the state. > Indeed, protection of our living

The Modern State is Biopolitical

In the introduction to his book Philosophy of Care [https://www.versobooks.com/books/3951-philosophy-of-care] Boris Groys [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Boris_Groys] says: > Foucault was right when he described modern states as biopolitical. Their main function is to take care of the physical well-being of their populations.

Why People Like to Hate Freud

A while back, I did an InForm: Podcast [https://inform.transistor.fm/] about why people enjoy hating Freud so much [https://inform.transistor.fm/episodes/inform-046-why-do-people-enjoy-hating-freud-so-much] . More recently, I found this great bit of text in Janet Malcolm [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Janet_Malcolm]'s The Purloined Clinic