The Bookworm Corner

This post is part 2 of 2 of a post that starts on the previous page.

bellona0544 said:

Graeber and Wengrow's "Dawn of Everything" is one of those books that I think every statist would benefit from. I haven't done "Debt" yet but it is also on the list after a friend recommended it. I want a better understanding of the origins of currency and then subsequent debt-based economics, although I understand there are some minor criticisms of some of the research that Graeber tightened up with DOE. Between Graeber and now Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz's "An Indigenous Peoples' History of the United States" and some Angela Davis, I've had a good crash course in indigenous genocide and--most importantly--how it feels like the genocide may soon lose steam and radical communities are bringing indigenous people and lifeways back as the empire crumbles.

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I will have to add Indigenous People's History of the United States to my shelf. I have some Angela Davis on my shelf as well. I have read a bit about the history of genocide through the Native Americans, Perlmans account is particularly harrowing. There is nothing I think people in general need to do more than read about the horrors of genocide, but especially white people. I always knew the native American genocide was a horror, but when I read about it it inflamed my imagination with horrors and anger I had never felt before. But I want to express that I don't mean to say anger is how I hope to solve the issue. Libertarian communism is.

bellona0544 said:

Amen again to all of this!! Ethics becomes difficult when you are constantly fighting for survival and are regularly told that the means to survive is to cast aside ethics rather than to develop a new ethics for a new situation. People are taught that they can be either good or bad, and the idea that there can be nuance beyond that would force people to accept that they aren't all-good as they so want to be thanks to lots of Abrahamic conditioning that set the scene for "objective" reality which capitalism and the nation-state so heavily rely on. Discussing ethics in-person in my neighborhood has proved fruitful because it gets folks to question some of the narratives the state has provided.

Thank YOU again for the book!!!

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Yes, I do not believe in a binary good or bad either, there are shades of good or bad; Franz Fanon's Wretched of the Earth showed that a lot of the things he had to do, like set up schools in the middle of Algeria during the revolution, was a huge technical problem. Sometimes there are not really good solutions - you need a crappy school in order to get people out of warlord gangs. But it is good to recognize that there is a good, and capitalism as Deleuze and Guattari tells us, says there's no good and bad, and this is the cynicism which is produced by capitalism. Capitalism likes it when we don't change the status quo. So knowledge is not absolute, it is always pushing beyond the limit, but at the same time recognizing that there's a good means that we can recognize how to improve the world.

I believe it's a basic phenomenological mood that one can experience, the ethical mood, where one sees the possibilities presented to them ready to hand in Heideggerian terms. We can see possibilities for justice, possibilities for freedom, and removing injustice which presents itself to us as what are truly the opposite of Christian values - the prosperity gospel, which ignores that the rich have a better chance getting into heaven through the eye of the needle as opposed to if they gave up their stuff and followed Jesus, and Jesus's destruction of the market in the temple, based on my limited knowledge of the Christian faith.

Thank you.

Notes from 5 pages of chapter 2 of Klossowski's Nietzsche and the Vicious Circle. The "image of forgetfulness" on page 28 seems like time immemorial of Deleuze in Difference and Repetition; repetition without memory. The locus of impulses which is the history of the circular movement is likely a feature of the eternal return, but it's not mentioned yet on page 30. Page 31 the self is established by passing through the limit continually re-drawn in a waking state. In other words, there's pathways and impressions on your neurology, which are not the eternal return itself, the transcendent field of intelligence that I assume Klossowski mentioned on page 33.

New excitations are assimilated through reaction formation, which is a term that is not mentioned, but the superego is a reaction formation of past actions the "assimilation with the habitual with what is foreign" on page 31. Through habitual assimilation, one's brain can take on the pathways of power and authority, which is not a point that Klossowski make here, but likely a point that Deleuze and Guattari will add on with the second synthesis, which is beyond much of the talk of the multiplicity of the body, the "millions of vague impulses" on page 33, which would likely be the first synthesis of Deleuze and Guattari, the partial objects. On 31, the trace of prior excitations, that might be called the gaze, that which sees you but you do not see it, because it is only a trace in your consciousness that governs you like a Stirnerian fixed idea.

Nietzsche rejects the notion of the will, on page 34 says it's illusory, but retains the notion of the self. Klossowski on page 31 talks about "moral specters," this might be akin to what a spook is for Max Stirner. Klossowski sounds like he's speaking of Freud's hydrolic model when he talks about Nietzsche. Spooks, and fixed ideas are produced by the "millions of vague impulses" partial objects, which is what produces representation as Stirner's creative nothing produces fixed ideas - Stirner's creative nothing which is an a-signifying semiotics of the brain. The partial objects of synthesis one, are also the creative nothing; Klossowski says that "every creative force" comes from the body, page 33.

The impulses transcend the body and the self, and there is a way to perform a sort of ethics for Klossowski. We merge with the "vast intellect" (33) and can learn through the body's desire to perfect itself in relation to this intelligence, through phenomenological feelings like pleasure and pain, we can determine, phenomenologically, and thousands of experiments how the experiments effect us pleasurably, or painfully. On page 34 you get a sense of Hume's bundle self, in that the self is not a unity, and also the ready to hand of Heidegger, in that you do not think, and are not aware of many of the processes your body does, while you carry out tasks "without any knowledge" (34).

One of the biggest points of the chapters which I think can be summarized from Oedipus at last, the last section before chapter 4 in Deleuze and Guattari's Anti Oedipus, is "we are all little colonies, and Oedipus colonizes us." When you think phenomenologically, what it means for someone's experience to consist in colonization, in first world countries people live in housing rows, under a state - their very habituations, and bodily memory are built on the consistency of the family order, instilling the state order. You are trained in the family so that you may fit into the socius from birth, that is why everything is triangulated to mommy-daddy, and the me which is always the one who is under scrutiny. Oedipus makes us feel stupid - it is described as a vampire that uses guilt as it contagion "aren't you ashamed to be happy?" Bad conscience is the extreme internalization of the state, and the capitalist field. It is not contrary to cynicism - the rejection of good and bad, it is rather the cynicism of private persons, the internalized rejection of good and bad. We endure so much under capitalism which we would not otherwise endure - poverty for the poor, forced austerity and hundreds of thousands of deaths annually, and tens of thousands on American soil, deaths of capitalist healthcare costs, hundreds of thousands dying of cutting off aid to foreign nations, those starving in Gaza. It is all part of primitive accumulation. The vampire takes your sense of self worth, and makes people rob and kill in the name of the social order. The colony is a private interior of each person.

Capitalism must be open to auto critique, to show how people become slaves of slaves as Deleuze and Guattari say in a previous section, even the people in charge a slave to the system. Capitalism, which is described in a previous chapter as occurring when surplus value is established, the differential of X, plus X, "D + DX," and capitalism is a possibility that can occur as part of what D and G call "universal history," while capitalism is not a necessary possibility. The equation expresses the desire to create a surplus of a specific thing, it's an equation that applies to the inner world, and the outer economic mega-machine's flows and arrangements of debts, inner and outer psychic and economic realms. Kind of like how things keep evolving into ant eaters and crabs, but that doesn't mean that those species can't go extinct. Capitalism is all part of the territory of the body without organs, which is the recording surface of capital, that organizes petty debts, the ressentiment that makes you feel bad as you navigate through capitalism, drawn by the unconscious flows that it drives you towards - which is why advertising is the enemy. Advertising not only sells you products, but the idea that capitalism will solve your problems for you, while the austerity on the poor and primitive accumulation only grows larger in scale. Hence, capitalism is the Oedipal side of what Deleuze and Guattari will describe in chapter 4 on a diagram with a swing - there's Oedipus, the state and capital, which governs guilt, and ressentiment in the Nietzschean sense, and then schizo flows which are basically deterritorialized lines of flight, that cross over various lines, as that is what deterritorialization means. Something a-temporal, something which does not follow the representation images of capitalism; specific representational pathways one can take - which is an accumulation of images as Deleuze and Guattari say, much like Guy Debord says of the Spectacle, in Society of the Spectacle, although Debord is not mentioned here.

I love Wilbur Smith adventure novels and Clive barker novels.

Back when i was 16 I was reading Galilee by Clive Barker and a teacher asked could she have a loan of it after i read it and she said to me "oh my there are some really graphic sex parts in this, do you like that sort of thing?" and i told her that I skipped past of all the sex parts and she was like "why? those are the best bits" I know it sounds weird and you would not be able to say things like this to a pupil now I bet but there was nothing wrong with it and i had respect for that teacher for just being normal with us.

Check Galilee out if you like fiction as it is really really good.


I also read a lot of self help books Atomic Habits is one to mention.