isaac’s Year in Books

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2023

4,179

pages read

books read

isaac gatz

Shortest Book

pages

The Farther Reaches of Human Nature by Abraham H. Maslow

Longest Book

432

pages

Average book length in 2023

208

pages

Most Shelved

314,305

people also shelved

Fran?ois Laruelle's <i>Philosophies of Difference</i> by Rocco Gangle

Least Shelved

people also shelved

isaac’s average rating for 2023

3.0

liked it

3.0

Highest Rated on 欧宝娱乐

4.67 average

isaac’s first review of the year

liked it

Morton mentions the abject but not Kristeva's abject, which is perhaps where 'dark ecology' fails as "a means of expressing the apparent irony, ugliness, and horror of ecology". Kristeva's abject concept encompasses experiences or objects that provoke discomfort and challenges our understanding of identity. Morton's work overlooks the abject nature and horror of these crises, focusing on interconnectedness and obscuring unsettling aspects of degr Morton mentions the abject but not Kristeva's abject, which is perhaps where 'dark ecology' fails as "a means of expressing the apparent irony, ugliness, and horror of ecology". Kristeva's abject concept encompasses experiences or objects that provoke discomfort and challenges our understanding of identity. Morton's work overlooks the abject nature and horror of these crises, focusing on interconnectedness and obscuring unsettling aspects of degradation. The abject confronts pollution, extinction, and climate change, forcing us to confront our complicity. Morton's approach blurs boundaries between self and other, risking neglect of distinctiveness and vulnerability. The abject highlights the strangeness of the other and the damage caused by crises. Kristeva's abject concept emphasizes bodily reactions like nausea, shaping our relationship with the environment. Morton's work places less emphasis on affective dimensions, limiting our understanding of visceral responses to the crisis. He aestheticizes the horror instead of placing it in the form of the symbol and the formless of the real.

I also think that the contradictions of hyperobjects are explosive, so hyperobjects are not properly paraconsistent. I would like to compare this to Meillassoux's "After Finitude" with the emergence of givenness, which challenges correlationism by proposing a speculative materialist form of the absolute. He emphasizes the significance of facticity and its transformation from a limiting factor to a transcendental principle, unveiling the in-itself. Meillassoux tackles Hume's problem of primary and secondary qualities, providing a speculative solution through the concept of contingency and its relation to stability. He also addresses the arche-fossil, which points to the possibility of a time that preceded givenness and made it possible (this seems to subsume Morton's hyperobject). By re-absolutizing the scope of mathematics while avoiding metaphysical necessity, Meillassoux aims to reconcile thought with the absolute, challenging Kant's epistemological regression.

Morton goes explicitly OOO, & this is a nice summarial quote: "Correlationism is true: you can’t grasp things in themselves, facts are different from data, and data is different from things. But that doesn’t mean that what gets to decide what’s real – the correlator, the decider – is more real than those things, whether the decider is the Kantian subject, Hegelian history, Marxist relations of human production, Nietzschean will to power, or Heidegger’s flickering lamplight of Dasein."

Apparently, in "Epistemontology in Spinoza-Marx-Freud-Lacan", Kordela ventures beyond the realm of correlationism and its challengers, embarking on a parallel journey between words and things, guided by the interplay of Spinozan monism and Marx's theory of commodity fetishism. Via secular thought, Kordela illuminates the gravitational pull towards formalism and structuralism, threading its influence across ontology, epistemology, aesthetic theory, and psychoanalytic thought. Within this domain is the surplus lurking beneath the facade of structuralism, manifesting as immanent causality, singular essence, labor-power, and libido/enjoyment. This surplus beckons a profound reimagining of biopower, transcending the confines of Foucault's limited bios, which confined its essence to the discursive inscriptions of the biological body and population.

This doesn't even touch on my interest in math, which perhaps Morton mentions elsewhere. If anything, I would now be interested in exploring either the many Spinozist-Postmarxists or some Psychoanalytic Aesthetics. ...more

滨厂础础颁’厂 2023 BOOKS

Revolution in Poetic Language by Julia Kristeva

Hard-Boiled Wonderland and the End of the World by Haruki Murakami

really liked it

The Birth of the Clinic by Michel Foucault

really liked it

Nietzsche and Philosophy by Gilles Deleuze

The Fifth Corner of Four by Graham Priest

liked it

On the Heights of Despair by Emil M. Cioran

isaac’s last review of the year

liked it

Cioran really just says stuff. He sometimes makes over simple over general remarks. He often makes over dramatic remarks. He likes to put ideas in opposition to each other and stack things in hierarchy so that anything that is not his brand of despair is opposing his brand of despair, and his brand of despair is the best while everything else is of lower rank.

Buddhism and psychoanalysis have spoiled me even though I get tired of making things nee Cioran really just says stuff. He sometimes makes over simple over general remarks. He often makes over dramatic remarks. He likes to put ideas in opposition to each other and stack things in hierarchy so that anything that is not his brand of despair is opposing his brand of despair, and his brand of despair is the best while everything else is of lower rank.

Buddhism and psychoanalysis have spoiled me even though I get tired of making things needlessly abstract and complicated too. A functional and pragmatic method in these areas is opposed to Cioran's trademark, but that is the direction I am set in.

I like the idea of the pessimists, but their execution disappoints and fails to inspire an connections within or without their texts.

"At the edge of life you feel that you are no longer master of the life within you, that subjectivity is an illusion, and that uncontrollable forces are seething inside you, evolving with no relation to a personal center or a definite, individual rhythm." (23)

"The solitude of the melancholic man is less profound. It even has sometimes an esthetic character. Don't we talk of sweet melancholy or of voluptuous melancholy? Melancholy is an esthetic mood because of its very passivity. The esthetic attitude toward life is characterized by contemplative passivity, randomly selecting everything that suits its subjectivity. The world is a stage, and man, the spectator, passively watches it. The conception of life as spectacle eliminates its tragic element as well as those antinomies which drag you like a whirlwind into the painful drama of the world. The esthetic experience, where each moment is a matter of impressions, can hardly surmise the great tensions inherent in the experience of the tragic, where each moment is a matter of destiny. Dreaminess, central to all esthetic states, is absent from tragedy. Passivity, dreaminess, and voluptuous enchantment form the esthetic elements of melancholy. Yet, due to its multifarious forms, it is not purely esthetic. Black melancholy is also fairly frequent." (47)

"I can doubt everything, I may very well smile contemptuously at the world, but this will not prevent me from eating, from sleeping peacefully, and from marrying. In despair, whose depth one can fathom only by experiencing it, such actions are possible only with great effort. On the heights of despair, nobody has the right to sleep. Thus a genuinely desperate man cannot forget his own tragedy: his consciousness preserves the painful actuality of his subjective torment. Doubt is anxiety about problems and things, and has its origins in the unsolvable nature of all big questions. If such questions could be solved, the skeptic would revert to more normal states. The condition of the desperate man in this respect is utterly different: if all problems were solved, he would not be any less anxious, since his anxiety arises out of his own subjective existence. Despair is the state in which anxiety and restlessness are immanent to existence. Nobody in despair suffers from Problems" (54)

...more

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