I do not exist, mostly because I am a woman. I deeply regret not being able to disappear at will. I hate that I have to structure my life like languagI do not exist, mostly because I am a woman. I deeply regret not being able to disappear at will. I hate that I have to structure my life like language, why can't we just screech at each other?
in spite of all our frenetic activity, we are stuck in the same place.
I hate that I have to always alternate between ascent and descent, between being tethered and untethered. Must we always oscillate between lack and surplus meaning?
Last night I decided to stop taking refuge in fantasy, I suppose it hasn't been good for my psychological development. But then what do I do with my desire?
through fantasy we learn how to desire.
X is what sustains me, I need it but I can't have it so I will always need it more. We are psychotics, some of us. We aren't deceived by the symbolic order, no sir.
X frames my life precisely through its absence.
I hate and love that I remain in a deadlock, always.
looking awry is precisely what prevents us from sliding into psychosis.
By my very nature I look awry upon everything, I am queer.
P.S. This is a great introduction to Lacan. And Hitchcock is super-daddy. The big Daddy.
P.P.S (actually a question ) Had Shakespeare read Lacan?...more
Listen, I’m all for occupying the interstices between fiction and reality, that subluminal space is essentially where I live all the time. But I’m botListen, I’m all for occupying the interstices between fiction and reality, that subluminal space is essentially where I live all the time. But I’m both smart and brave enough to admit that I’m delusional and psychotic. Haraway suggests the cyborg as an alternate identity that transcends racial, cultural, gender, and class boundaries. But who are we kidding here?
Haraway identifies irony as a process through which meanings are made, unmade, and remade. She aims to use irony as an instrument of subversion, using which the dominant hegemonical order can be prised open. The very embodiment of the cyborg identity is a celebration of blasphemy, and therefore it is not without its allure. I would have been all for the cyborg identity, especially since it goes against the western metaphysical tradition and blurs the lines between the public and the private. It breaks away from the idea of euro-centric humanness, they don’t call cyberfeminism post-human for nothing.
The cyborg is a kind of disassembled and reassembled, postmodern collective and personal self.
But, the cyborg cannot re-member. Memory as a capacity is rejected by it. Memory is an integral part of what makes us human. Would I like to be a cyborg? Yes, I would love to. But I’m delusional and psychotic and the cyborg identity is pure science fiction, far removed from the reality we face every day. It has no place in personal or collective political action. Given that Haraway has an extensive background in science, her technophilia is understandable. Nevertheless, it’s taken too far here, as if science has ever had an existence independent of the culture it inhabits. Just put in some dialectical materialism, please....more
Have you ever felt trapped within your body? I don't mean in the way you did as a teenager, being hyper aware of all your flaws and lamenting your verHave you ever felt trapped within your body? I don't mean in the way you did as a teenager, being hyper aware of all your flaws and lamenting your very existence. I mean in the way that you feel your body has been instrumentalized by the gap between knowledges and bodies, such that the object-subject dynamic is obscured.
You know that form of poetry writing wherein you take a random newspaper, cross out most sentences and frame something vaguely poetic of the words left? (Fun fact, this is how I write my reviews. I'm a complete phony) That's how I feel about my body - it's a grotesque assemblage of excess.
Let's swallow the Foucaudian pill, i.e., the daddy pill. Desire, isolated as it has been from other bodily properties since the early twentieth century, was reified into a sexual discourse. An epistemology of body classification was thus shifted to one of body partitioning. Ugh, this pill isn't strong enough.
Let's swallow the Marxian pill, i.e., the super daddy pill. How did bodies normalized as heterosexual and homosexual subjects become inseparable from bodies as consuming subjects? Sexually disciplined, regulated bodies were simultaneously deployed as strategies of capitalist accumulation. Butler pointed out the interdependency of the masculine and the feminine within the heterosexual matrix, but now we embody the interdependency within ourselves, at least I do.
Queer thus emerges as a terminological abstraction as well as a social abstraction, as an an abstract form of subjectivity and a reified form of subjectivity. Bodies are then in turn regulated by a reifying abstraction of sexual desire. Or so the author argues and I find myself nodding along.
Sexuality, accumulation and the nation-state closely mediate each other the author claims, and I'm honestly tired of them all. I'm tired of constantly engaging with the first of them, in a quest to discover what it truly wants. I have no idea even now because it has a very voracious appetite, apparently. Give me a break. And I'm tired of constantly being exploited by the latter two.
Maybe the cyberfeminists are onto something after all. Liberate me from this flesh prison....more
How flexible is the self inside me? How permeable are its boundaries? In response to what sort of stimulus does it expand or shrink? (it undoubtedly dHow flexible is the self inside me? How permeable are its boundaries? In response to what sort of stimulus does it expand or shrink? (it undoubtedly does, one thing we know for sure about the self is that it isn’t rigid.) Can I exercise some sort of will over it? Do I have just one self inside me? And if there are multiple selves within me, how unified are they? Sometimes I fear that my trauma will be so overpowering that it will devour one of these selves or perhaps all of them, and I’ll be left in a vanishing gulf of diminishing intensity. So I’ve been numbing my numerous selves with meds for the past four years and forcing them to stay - perpetually suspended in dissent.
But there’s something to be said for my trauma, a case to be made. As Mari Ruti puts it in this book, we must see agonizing experience from the past as a constructive influence on our character. After all, my multiple selves developed in tandem with everything I was forced to endure. I am not saying that everyone should face traumatic situations of course, because as science has shown, trauma actually rewires your brain. But I am striving to make peace with my trauma, I am trying to coax that child within me to sleep peacefully, I have been singing her lullabies. But sometimes, I also chain-smoke because she won’t shut up and I’ve had enough of her. I blame my therapist, he’s been trying to understand her and so I did the only thing I know to do well – I ran away.
Because that child inside me needs and needs and wants and wants and she’s always hungry, she frightens me. So I swallowed meds to alienate, subdue and suppress her. But then I read this book that changed my life and don’t ever take my advice or misinterpret this book the way I did - but I stopped taking my meds and decided to cross that unappeasable chasm. I turned inward and asked the little girl “What is it you want? What are you constantly scared of?” I still don’t know, but hey, she’s at least talking now. Because I’m tired of running away and as Mari Ruti expresses so beautifully in this book, anxiety is not always the enemy that our society makes it out to be....more
Have you ever wished you were the protagonist of a Lovecraft or a Shirley Jackson novel? Because here's the thing about the weird and the eerie: we grHave you ever wished you were the protagonist of a Lovecraft or a Shirley Jackson novel? Because here's the thing about the weird and the eerie: we gravitate towards it even though it unsettles us. We want to be gripped by it, as though we were having a torrid love affair with it. I'm saying it, but I should really be saying them as the weird and the eerie are two different sensations as Fisher emphasizes in this book.
Sometimes when I'm deeply unsettled, I'm not sure if I feel like my insides are out or if the outside has encroached physical boundaries and is in me. Was there even an inside to begin with? Am I just an other? What is this preoccupation with the strange?
As Fisher points out in this book, the weird and the eerie allow us to see the inside from the perspective of the outside. Perhaps that's why we find them so fascinating. We would all like to be spectators of our own lives, we all are subject to alienation, to othering. We all want to escape the mundane. Are we watching or being watched? Who is the agent here?
Had this book been even slightly longer, I would have given it four stars....more
Then just came the fall, a burden that all of humanity has to beaAdam and Eve Sitting under a tree K-I-S-S-I-N-G
Not just any tree though, but THE tree.
Then just came the fall, a burden that all of humanity has to bear till the end of time!! Or so they say. So much for sex.
I expected this book to be more about the ritual of confession within Christianity, regulatory practices and how it affected popular discourse on sex. No such luck. While there is a significant bit about confession, Christian power structures and 'the duty of truth', it mostly was an analysis of St Clement, St Chrysostom and St Augustine's writings on sexual practices, marriage, virginity, purity, baptism and blah blah blah. And maybe there were even more old people mentioned, but I wouldn't know. I was too bored to pay close attention. There's no doubting that Foucault was extremely well-read but I had no patience to cross-check any of his references and so just took his word for all of it.
I wanted to finish these four volumes on the history of sexuality in 2021 and then flex about it till I die. But now, I have to accept with some resentment that most of it was boring and unsatisfactory. I don't feel like showing off. There's no doubt that this collection was written with a lot of patience and after thorough research, but, I can't believe I'm saying this, it's very narrow. For a four-volume collection that claims to be a 'history of sexuality', there's a shocking lack of references to or studies of African and Asian theories of sexuality. Moreover, the presuppositions and the conclusions drawn here are incompatible with Asian and African histories of sexual culture. Foucault, you disappoint man....more
Obviously Elliot's monologues from Mr Robot were ripped off from this. Yes, all his monologues. From this six page essay. In fact, the entire script oObviously Elliot's monologues from Mr Robot were ripped off from this. Yes, all his monologues. From this six page essay. In fact, the entire script of all four seasons is in it if you look between the lines....more
Oh Foucault, you make me so fervently wary. Like delayed orgasms, I want to stop but I also want to go on, reach that peak and think 'crap, it could'vOh Foucault, you make me so fervently wary. Like delayed orgasms, I want to stop but I also want to go on, reach that peak and think 'crap, it could've been better. Oh well, next time.' My creative juices are drained right now, but I know this is the best time to talk about Foucault or talk to Foucault, had he been alive and accessible outside the celebrity pedestal that France placed its intellectuals on. You need, no, I need my mind to be sufficiently clouded if I am to benefit from my experience of reading these volumes on sexuality even though the books are very academic in nature and Foucault probably peered into ancient texts with the dexterity of a squirrel that accidentally ate a psychedelic mushroom and has been frantically looking for a special nut ever since. Like that squirrel from the ice age series, you know. I'm fairly certain it was perpetually high. Maybe all squirrels are. How are they so energetic all the time, everywhere?
This volume is just Foucault dissecting a lot of texts on sexual health and practices, love of women and love of boys (ahem, no women's love for girls unfortunately) written by dudes (probably why there is next to nothing on lesbianism, damn those ancient patriarchs) who ceased to exist long before Foucault himself came into this world and so are of little relevance to me now. It was also the most boring of the first three books, but I appreciate the number of hours Foucault must have spent on researching and writing this. He was nothing if not a chronic nerd....more
This book mainly functions as a secondary text - mostly to Malebranche's (whoever he is!) and Bentham's writings. I was just into it for Bentham.
BenthThis book mainly functions as a secondary text - mostly to Malebranche's (whoever he is!) and Bentham's writings. I was just into it for Bentham.
Bentham was a weird dude to say the least. He considered each thing to be its own icon, an auto-icon. He took this idea so far as to request in his will that his body be dissected before his disciples and then be preserved in a form that he considered to be the best representation of himself. As the author points out in this book, this preservation ironically failed at the head - that external marker of the self, that necessary recognition parameter. And so the head had to be replaced by a wax replica.
The eponymous essay in this book is a brief examination of Bentham's panopticon writings and is mainly concerned with the role of the gaze within the panopticon and the prison keeper's dilemma.
For Bentham a universe of the panopticon without a God whose sole function is to imagine the universe would cease to exist - the universe itself is sustained insofar as the divine all-knowing gaze is upon it. But there's a catch here, an inception - if you will. God himself is a fiction in the imagination of the subjects of the universe. Only the subject who imagine the gaze really exist.
Divinity here is ascribed to invisibility, the panopticon universe is thus sustained by an imaginable non-entity, by an utterly dark spot....more
This book was sent to its publishers right after the great crash of 1929, but of course, it was written earlier. In the coming decades of wars, economThis book was sent to its publishers right after the great crash of 1929, but of course, it was written earlier. In the coming decades of wars, economic recessions, nuclear weapons, colonialism and unchecked capitalism, Freud became a preacher sort of figure despite his disdain for religion. His view that civilization with its laws and morals prevents us from gratifying a primitive human aggressiveness was seen to represent the general antagonisms of the twentieth century and the violent human condition in the western world.
With it portentous message, the views expressed in this book are very reflective of the sense of crisis that was prevalent in the twentieth century, the world always seemed to be on the brink of collapse, on the verge of destructive conflict. So of course it was easier to place its source within human nature, but to me, this largely removes credibility, responsibility from the actual source. It seems to me that it's easier to accept doom as an inevitable consequence of human nature than it is to actually confront the cause of antagonisms, and this is where I'm very influenced by Marxism. I do believe that a lot of the conflicts of the previous century had their roots in actual material conditions than in abstract human nature.
To me, this book reeks of the meta-critique of reason, the human and civilization at large are identified as the self-caused cause. For Freud the resolution between the Kantian dualism of theory and practice seems to be in the Unconscious and at this point, I honestly don't know what to make of it. Maybe I'll return to this book when I'm more mature....more
01110011 Crying zeros and I'm hearing 111s. Why won't that song leave my head whenever think of this book! Oh no, let me try again.
Perhaps I should fl01110011 Crying zeros and I'm hearing 111s. Why won't that song leave my head whenever think of this book! Oh no, let me try again.
Perhaps I should flush it out of my head by giving it a concrete existence externally. Maybe I'll ask Alexa to play the song while I contemplate constructed femininity. Oh except, I don't use Alexa and I probably (definitely) never will because I've always been unsettled by voice recognition systems. For one, I'm paranoid and I feel like they're always recording whatever I do. No, not Alexa, Siri or Cortana. They're merely devices, they don't have agency in the conventional sense of the word. So who's 'they' you ask? I don't know. But I'm sure someone is. You know, the one percent of the one percent who profit from our personal lives while we drown in consumer culture. What next? Billboards in space??! Oh, they're already working on that. Nevermind.
Let's go back to voice recognition systems being mere devices. Now, that's a potentially dangerous statement to make, but I like to live on the edge. They have female voices by default, but of course, a voice is not a a concrete indicator of femininity and if you explicitly ask them they state that they have no gender. Huh, like that's sufficient to curb our biases. Of course we associate a constructed femininity with them and studies show that assigning female voices to speech recognition systems make them more soothing and acceptable. Oh yes, what more could we ask for in a post-capitalist society than an agency-less female-voiced speech recognition system that we can order around and 'empower' to lull us to numbness by providing us with the false illusion of control?
We know the dangers, okay? We have watched Her. In a few years, digital assistants are expected to outnumber humans. The other day I heard my neighbour's four year old kid asking Alexa to shut up. What are you, Alexa? A zero to our one, a nullity to our wholeness, a void we can scream into? Or a node within a network? A creator in your own right?
Sadie Plant writes about how women have traditionally been off the productive map, or the dialectical loop: no desire, no agency, not even the alienation of the male worker. It's fascinating that we have associated the same traits with modern AI. They are but isolated points in a vast, intricate tapestry that they often design and weave themselves.
Here we are, deploying the ancient and well-established model of the user and the used, creating illusions of autonomy, programming ourselves and calling it freedom. Alexa, play what a wonderful world....more
Why am I subjecting myself to this, you ask? Well, I read the first volume so I thought might as well read the other two, my intentions were purely unWhy am I subjecting myself to this, you ask? Well, I read the first volume so I thought might as well read the other two, my intentions were purely un-intellectual, I just wanted to flex about having read all three volumes of Foucault's History of Sexuality. Do I regret it? Not at all. The second book is even better than the first, more informative and highly amusing. Hilarious even.
In this volume Foucault examines Greek sexual practices and Greek attitudes, thoughts and taboos on sex, to get to the root of the problematization of sex. And this includes a lot of reading and analysis of early Greek writing on sex. And man, have they got some solid advice:
But the author restricts himself to brief generalities: first, no one should “make frequent and continual use of sexual intercourse”; the latter is more suitable for “cold, moist, atrabilious, and flatulent persons,” and least suitable for thin ones; there are periods in life when it is more harmful, as in the case of old people or for those who are “in the period that extends from childhood to adolescence.”
The Greeks or Romans had no notion of 'sexuality' as such, they did not link various loosely connected sexual practices under a single origin. Sexual virility was not connected to ideas of active/latent homosexuality or even with what modern society would consider 'effeminate, but rather with lack of moderation.
Sexual taboos were not clearly defined, instead a 'mastery of the self' was encountered and even idealized. The sexual act was not an object of moral disqualification for the Greeks, but Foucault writes that the texts reveal an anxiety about the violence of the act itself, about the obstacles it could potentially raise for a mastery of self-control.
Hence sexual activity was located within the broad parame ters of life and death, of time, becoming, and eternity. It became necessary because the individual was fated to die, and in order that he might in a sense escape death.
Within marriage, a wife was required to submit to the authority of her husband and therefore infidelity on her part was essentially forbidden. While the husband was not prevented from engaging in adultery by social norms (as long as the other participant was not another married woman,) he was encouraged to refrain from doing so, as a show of self-restraint. A cheating husband reflected poorly on the wife, because within the Greek society it implied that she was incapable of properly governing the household and satisfying her husband. And thus, Foucault writes that marriage relations were fundamentally asymmetric.
Most importantly, Foucault writes that our notion of homosexuality is plainly inadequate while referring to the set of experiences and forms of valuation that constituted same-sex relationships within ancient Greek culture. The Greeks did not view love for one's own sex and the other sex as opposites, as two exclusive choices.
In short, modern conservatives and liberals would be utterly confused and would probably pull their hair out in ancient Greece.
Repeat after me, "intersection of the perfect and the imperfect is more perfect than perfect itself." Good, now do it another 100 times. If you did itRepeat after me, "intersection of the perfect and the imperfect is more perfect than perfect itself." Good, now do it another 100 times. If you did it without stuttering, you're not far from being able to tie a cherry stem knot with your tongue (a skill I highly covet) and color me impressed. Despite how much I adore him and how hard I struggle to dissect his texts, Zizek always came across as a highly intellectual jester to me. Perhaps it's all those gestures. I'm not judging him, I'm guilty of rubbing my face vigorously many times while talking in public too. At least Zizek would make a good jester, God help me.
I don't know how well suited I am to write this review since I just read the bit by Zizek and completely skipped the translated Schelling essay. The bit by Zizerk (really, I'm being modest, it's way more than a bit, it's half the book) though was so characteristic of him with all those pop-culture references and philosopher name drops, that I could almost see the gestures if I squinted enough.
So here we are, far away from creation, from the Word that started it all, from the beginning that was not the true beginning, from the vicious gordon-knot like rotary motion, on the brink of madness. Once upon a time (not sure about the 'time' bit here, let's go with once upon a before time) there was a resolution, a movement from a closed system to an open one, that caused the in-itself to split from itself and there was light. And where we are going? What are we hoping to achieve by dredging through this fragile reality? Who knows? And what is here anyway? A formless stain?
Eternity itself begets time to resolve the deadlock it became entangled in. If there's anything I know for certain after reading this book, it's that the writers of the Netflix series Dark read it....more
Forced by our culture to simultaneously consider an 'us' and an opposite 'other', an identical and its alien, the foreigner is mostly a metaphor of diForced by our culture to simultaneously consider an 'us' and an opposite 'other', an identical and its alien, the foreigner is mostly a metaphor of distance, a non-self that we construct within ourselves to stand in stark opposition to us. We are foreigners to ourselves. Kristeva writes that the foreigner is a symptom, a signifier of the difficulty we encounter while living as an 'other'.
With its very poetic writing that somehow establishes a feeling of tranquility while expounding aggression, this book for most parts is a cultural and historical examination of the 'foreigner'. Contrasting cosmopolitanism with xenophobia against shifting backgrounds, Julia Kristeva tries to write about the foreigner in relation to an individual 'I', and about how by confronting the foreigner whom we simultaneously reject and identify with, we lose our boundaries.
Strangely, the foreigner lives within us: he is the hidden face of our identity, the space that wrecks our abode, the time in which understanding and affinity founder. By recognizing him within ourselves, we are spared detesting him in himself. A symptom that precisely turns "we" into a problem, perhaps makes it impossible, The foreigner comes in when the consciousness of my difference arises, and he disappears when we all acknowledge ourselves as foreigners, unamenable to bonds and communities.
The uncanny, the foreigner is within us. We are all our own foreigners, always from separated from others and from ourselves, Hierocles' concentric circles get larger and larger....more
Influenced as they were by Ferdinand de Saussare's theory of language and synchronic studies of linguistic systems, it seems as though post-structuralInfluenced as they were by Ferdinand de Saussare's theory of language and synchronic studies of linguistic systems, it seems as though post-structuralists like Baudrillard were very careful in their choice of words. They seem to have been especially precise in construction of sentences wherein the synchronicity is most visible and words are placed in relation to each other to form a coherent whole. But this makes the writing more abstract and difficult to decipher, because the coherent whole does not appear to us naturally and words are now imbued with meanings that depend on other words within the particular framework of writing. I often had to dig deeper to even get a fleeting understanding of the text. The task of understanding is rendered even more difficult through the invention of new words like 'hyper-reality' whose definitions are not provided in exactitude, but are only conveyed through relational writing and cross-references.
As far as I understood it, 'hyper-reality' is a process of inversion, an extension perhaps of Marx's theory of essence and appearance. A simulation extends 'reality' by distorting and threatening the difference between true and false, real and imaginary. When signifiers themselves take the place of signified such that the signified no longer holds any meaning of its own, and the simulation envelopes all of representation, then we have a crisis of hyper-reality. And so the objects disappear in their very representation.
Baudrillard examined the value of images in a postmodern world through an examination of images in contemporary society and a criticism of cultural constructs like the media, disney-land, war propoganda, fear of nuclear power and most importantly for us, the modern avant-garde industry of reality tv. Postmodern society seems to have been insistent on destruction of meaning as the earlier modern society was insistent on the destruction of appearance. And here is the crux of it all: we are in the midst of an implosion. At least Baudrillard's postmodern society was. So where does that place us? Perhaps in what lies at the centre when the implosion has reached its own saturation, the point of singularity, the 'virtual' that does not obey known laws and has no anchorage.
Implosion of meaning in the media. Implosion of the social in the masses. Infinite growth of the masses as a function of the acceleration of the system. Energetic impasse. Point of inertia....more
For the least glimmer of truth is conditioned by politics.
To begin with, Foucault points out the inherent contradiLong review, brace yourselves. Ahem.
For the least glimmer of truth is conditioned by politics.
To begin with, Foucault points out the inherent contradiction in our attempts to negate sex in a manner that explicitly formulates it using the very terms and the positivity we are trying to hide - he postulates that this has the effect of revealing sex in its most naked reality. The discourse on sex was restricted in the nineteenth century so as to concentrate its dialogue in certain sites that were to be avoided. However, the increased awareness of the existence of these sites and the dangers they possessed paradoxically created further incentive to talk about them. Modern societies with their infinitely fuelled drive to cast sex within a web of shadows exploited the 'secret' and dedicated themselves to endlessly talking about it.
This attention to sex was also motivated by the emergence of 'population' as a political and economic problem - to reproduce and perpetuate labor capacity so that a sexuality that is economically useful and politically conservative could be constituted. However, Foucault also says that he isn't sure if this was the ultimate objective.
Modern society is perverse, not in spite of its puritanism or as if from a backlash provoked by its hypocrisy; it is in actual fact, and directly, perverse. In actual fact.
Foucault claims that modern industrial society has not actually repressed sexuality, but has enabled proliferation of specific pleasures and multiplication of disparate sexualties. With its centers of powers, the linkages between them and the network of mechanisms interconnecting the sites where pleasure and power are concentrated, modern society laid an intense, analytic emphasis on sex.
The biology of reproduction and the medicine of sex developed in very different ways throughout the nineteenth century and the disparity between them prevented the emergence of truth. At the same time the evolution of confession as a power enforcing ritual between the confessor and the listening authority figure and the subsequent expansion of its realm from religion to include the scientific domain of interrogation and psychoanalysis further altered the meaning ascribed to sex. Foucault says that a 'postulate of diffuse causality' that ascribed every event in one's sexual behaviour of being extremely consequential was developed. Since sexuality was posed as a domain susceptible to pathological processes, it also necessitated 'normalizing' interventions.
The nineteenth century bourgeoisie capitalist society produced entire machineries to postulate and confront the 'uniform truth' of sex. Foucault claims that towards the end of the eighteenth century family was made the locus of psychiatrization of sex. The aristocratic family medicalized feminine sexuality and problematized the sexuality of children/adolescents. This is the part I really liked. I liked how Foucault applied Marxist class theory in his formulation of the history of sexuality.
Foucault further claims that the deployment of sexual analysis was not carried out to renunciate pleasure or disqualify the flesh, rather it was a question of developing techniques to maximize life. The bourgeoisie has been occupied with creating its sexuality and forming a specific body based on it from the mid-eighteenth century. Its excessive preoccupation with eugenics and heredity also affected the growth and establishment of a ruling class hegemony and directly caused the nineteenth century racist, eugenic ordering of society.
There is little question that one of the primordial forms of class consciousness is the affirmation of the body; at least, this was the case for the bourgeoisie during the eighteenth century. It converted the blue blood of the nobles into a sound organism and a healthy sexuality. One understands why it took such a long time and was so unwilling to acknowledge that other classes had a body and a sex - precisely those classes it was exploiting. The living conditions that were dealt to the proletariat, particularly in the first half of the nineteenth century, show there was anything but concern for its body and sex: it was of little importance whether those people lived or died, since their reproduction was something that took care of itself in any case.
Foucault writes that modern society is preoccupied with sex in the same way that earlier societies where death through famine, epidemics and violence was imminent were preoccupied with blood. 'Sex' is historically subordinate to sexuality.
It's often hard to discern what Foucault is trying to get at and not just because of my own inexperience with critical theory, but also because the text is repetitive. Foucault seems to argue around in circles to arrive at different versions of the same conclusion over and over again. There are also certain problematic views that I had to wrestle with in order to continue my reading. For instance, Foucault writes about the case of a farmhand engaging in child sexual abuse who was later confined to a hospital for the rest of his life and was the subject of various studies by academics. Foucault refers to his act as "inconsequential bucolic pleasures." It also seemed like Foucault just made up arguments as he wrote and published them without further inspection and development.
On a more immature note, by finishing this book I completed 69% of my 2021 reading challenge. Blame my genZ-ness for this....more
I'm extremely wary of any forms of ideology, political or otherwise, that romanticizes alienation. It begs the question - who can afford alienation? TI'm extremely wary of any forms of ideology, political or otherwise, that romanticizes alienation. It begs the question - who can afford alienation? The poor? The marginalized people who've been living on the fringes of society and have been fighting relentlessly to carve out a social identity, to be recognised? Xenofeminism and accelerationism in general, reeks of western-imperialist-bourgeoise ideology to me. Again, who can afford accelerationism? All the millions of people from the global south who are predicted to be refugees of climate catastrophe and environmental migration in a few decades? Where are we going to live then? Embed our consciousness in a cyberspace and give up on corporeality because this world won't have space for our material bodies anyway?
There is an irreconcilable friction here, between opposing ideologies. For instance, how do you reconcile the alienation that is so desired within xenofeminism with the intersectionality it claims to embody? It also reeks of reformism, which in my opinion is not gonna work. At this point, nothing short of full-fledged revolution will do.
The problem with ideologies whose main focus is technogical revolution as a solution for the problem of capitalism and neoliberalism is that it further empowers already privileged groups. Any technological revolution should go hand-in-hand with community based efforts at both the global and local scales.
I might have severely misunderstood the text, but I won't fault myself for that because the text itself was short and vague....more
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