reading Marxist theory to avoid reading Hamnet, and it's Dense but interesting. I've never read Althusser so that doesn't help, but we're on page 32 and, I believe, have gotten past the worst of it.
4 likes
The Political Unconscious: Narrative as a Socially Symbolic Act | 
reading Marxist theory to avoid reading Hamnet, and it's Dense but interesting. I've never read Althusser so that doesn't help, but we're on page 32 and, I believe, have gotten past the worst of it.
"It does little good, in other words, to banish 'extrinsic' categories from our thinking when the latter continues to have a hold on the objective realities about which we plan to think."
pickA challenging but illuminating read. I could never read more than two or three pages a day, though that was a good pace for me. Jameson is a BIG thinker, and throws around concepts that I was mostly unfamiliar with. This resulted in lots of trips to YouTube to learn assorted philosophy terms. I continuously was getting more wisdom—sometimes having to relearn definitions multiple times. This didn‘t bug me though, and I‘ve come out much smarter.
it is increasingly clear in today‘s world (if it had ever been in doubt) that a Left which cannot grasp the immense Utopian appeal of nationalism (any more than it can grasp that of religion or of fascism) can scarcely hope to “reappropriate” such collective energies and must effectively doom itself to political impotence.
🔥
[T]here is a sense in which such faithful “expression” of the underlying logic of the daily life of capitalism programs us to it and helps to make us increasingly at home in what would otherwise—for a time traveler from another social formation—be a distressingly alienating reality.
The dialectic of desire is thus in Gissing something like the negation of a negation. Since his characters never reach the point of being in a position to desire, it is as though the whole system of success and failure has been undermined from the outset....
1) The Political Unconscious, tagged. Also realized I'm technically still reading Sakhalin Island and have been since 2017.
2) Talk on the Wild Side, okay, just reviewed
3) not numerical, but I have a list I may post if I either find a better image editor or can be arsed to open photoshop on my computer.
#weekendreads @rachelsbrittain
“structural analysis demands as its completion a kind of negative reconstruction, a postulation by implication and presupposition, of an absent or unrepresentable infrastructural limiting system.”
No clue what an “infrastructural limiting system” is...but I like it.
you guys this is going to involve Effort. deep breath. I have a degree in philosophy, I can do this. and it's written in English, not translated, so that helps.
The notion of overlapping modes of production outlined above has indeed the advantage of allowing us to short-circuit the false problem of the priority of the economic over the sexual, or of sexual oppression over that of social class.
If everything were transparent, then no ideology would be possible, and no domination either: evidently that is not our case.
Really difficult book that I grabbed because it was on display at the bookstore. I may have gotten a bit over my head with this one. I am though quite proud of myself for making it fifty pages so far. I decided I‘m gonna read at least one or two pages a day, to stay with it. It‘s excellent, but just...a lot of work.
Won some sort of christmas book gift jackpot this year. I think I got everything on my list??
