Reviews and Comments

Alecs Ștefănescu

catileptic@bookwyrm.social

Joined 1 year, 4 months ago

i'm an activist thriving on layers and layers of affinity for shades of nuance. i have a life-long love for the Weird / Uncanny / Unheimlich.

chaos.social/@catileptic

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Franco Bifo Berardi: Breathing (2019, MIT Press) No rating

The increasingly chaotic rhythm of our respiration, and the sense of suffocation that grows everywhere: …

"Civilization is not crumbling, it is only diverging from civility"

No rating

This was my first autonomist book, author, and my first introduction to this particular vision. As someone who reads philosophy casually, I often felt I didn't have a good enough mastery of the terms being used, or the ideas being references. I come from the book not really having understood what Bifo's vision for the future is, nor what he is suggesting, concretely, we could do differently. But, that being said, I have still enjoyed this book a lot, and I don't feel like an "actionable take-away" is required in order for a piece of social critique to be valuable.

The middle part of this book was by far my favorite. His analysis of the conditions that have made solidarity difficult, unrewarded, that have pushed away the idea of communal life and self-organizing and platformed individuality felt very incisive and spot-on.

"Truth cannot be the ethical motivation of our choices, …

Samuel R. Delany: Nova (1983, Spectra)

Given that the suns of Draco stretch almost sixteen light years from end to end, …

Labor as technology

The way "Nova" experiments with the concept of labor, and its implications on culture, migration, social classes and religion is genuinely fresh, interesting and well-deserving of the "science-fiction" label. Even more so than the endless drivel about android and conquering faraway planets. The exploration of embodied labor, of a closer and more visceral link between people and the process of producing of maintaining, genuinely inspired me to look at the real-world alienated labor with an even more critical eye.

Tomislav Medak, Marcell Mars, Valeria Graziano, Valeria Graziano, Marcell Mars, Tomislav Medak: Pirate Care (Paperback, 2024, Pluto Press)

In many places around the world, the freedom to simply care for one another is …

This book makes the critical claim that care is work, and that care is inscribed in political struggle. The authors use the metaphor of "pirate care" to explain how to resist the tendency to see "caring for others" as an unprofessional, private act, that "comes natural" to some and, thus, justifies burdening and confining certain people to free, unrecognized and depoliticized labor.

The figure of the pirate stands for resisting the unjust laws and the ideology of privatization, private property and individualism. Instead, the pirate, as a symbolic figure used in this book, find their own language to create kinship, to practice solidarity and to expand their network of care.

There are numerous historical and present day "pirate care" practices to draw inspiration from. The book documents such practices in education, healthcare, migration, in digital technologies and even in the sphere of establishing bonds and connections outside of blood-bound kinship …

Thomas Pynchon: The Crying of Lot 49 (Hardcover, 1997, Buccaneer Books)

The Crying of Lot 49 is a novel written by American author Thomas Pynchon and …

Why have I waited so long to read my first Pynchon novel?

Coming from an affinity for the "new weird", his novel feels like post-modernism, yes, but with prefigurative "new weird" sprinkled all over.

The prose slips in and out of being descriptive about the world, about actual things the characters do, and then being descriptive of the meta, the feelings and intuitions, and musings that belong to nobody safe for, perhaps, the eye that watches all of it. The novel reads like interiority. I loved it.

Arundhati Roy: The God of Small Things (Hardcover, 1997, Random House)

The year is 1969. In the state of Kerala, on the southernmost tip of India, …

This is the most emotionally intense book I have ever read. The prose itself amplified the identification, the empathy, the solidarity I felt with the characters. Even though the narrator is of the "omniscient" type, the prose changes the tone, the assumed lens of the narrator as it shifts to focus on different characters. It's as though the "eye" of the reader becomes temporarily merged with each character, with their ways of seeing the world.

If someone reads & enjoys this book, I also recommend reading Pankaj Mishra's "Run and Hide".

Two lines of exploration fused into one book

The way I understand it, Post-Europe explores two questions: 1. What is the future of philosophy in Asia? 2. How can European philosophy transcend its roots in colonialism / violence / imposition and become relevant once more as a lens through which we can reason about the interplay between technology and society?

I think that the answers Yuk Hui proposes to these two questions are the following: 1. Asian philosophy needs to go through a process of individuation of thought. For this, it needs internal tension, an understand of its roots, counter-points to stand against and, crucially, a creative outlook. 2. Post-European philosophy can come from a Europe that leaves behind the obsession with nationality, and instead assumes the embodied position of the "homeless"/ "nation-less" person / people.

Kathe Koja: The Cipher (1991, Dell)

Nicholas is a would-be poet and video-store clerk with a weeping hole in his hand …

The Cipher is addictive. The first-person narration manages to name a lot of details, to make room for a lot of backstory, while still sounding like it could be the transcript of someone telling you a really long anecdote.

The "horror" of the entire novel is, perhaps, contained in how fast the unbelievable becomes mundane. In how easy it is to accept the premise of the book and perhaps wonder what we might do, faced with similar circumstances.

Slavoj Zizek: Against Progress (2024, Bloomsbury Publishing Plc)

To define 'progress' is to lay claim to the future. Seminal thinker Slavoj Žižek turns …

Žižek allowed some optimism to slip through his critique

"Against Progress" is a collection of essay that are digestible and lend themselves to be re-read several times. This is unlike my experience reading anything else Žižek wrote, so I am extremely thankful for meeting the author in a milder form. In a way, these essays feel like refined, denser, more strongly phrased versions of his explorations posted on Substack.

The entire collection is timely and addresses the present directly, head-on. Reading it, I wish that this were an eternal collection, and that he was adding essay after essay as the weeks went by, as the world plunged into a painful reckoning with fascism. I wish I could have read his views on things I was seeing on the news, described in the careful and clear-minded way these essays do. But, then again, such essays, I know, can only emerge some distance away from what they describe.

Highly recommended read.

Han Kang: The Vegetarian (EBook, 2016, Hogarth)

Before the nightmare, Yeong-hye and her husband lived an ordinary life. But when splintering, blood-soaked …

Silence as violence

The first two thirds of the book were a chorus that I am all too familiar with: some men turn everything they touch into burning pain. Han Kang allows us to experience patriarchal violence both through the eyes of the men, and through the thoughts of the women they hurt. The book opens with a first-person view that made me feel the familiar nausea of realising that the women are trapped narcissistic men.

There's only one character whose inner thoughts we never read, except through her dreams. And, honestly, after the last third of the book, I feel like reading her thoughts would have been too much to bear. Perhaps even too much to imagine, as an author.

The silence of the main character feels like a different kind of violence. Just like "Greek Lessons", it feels to me like Han Kang portrays women fighting back at the men that …

Mark Fisher: Capitalist Realism (EBook, 2009, Zero Books)

Capitalist Realism: Is There No Alternative? explores Fisher's concept of "capitalist realism," which he takes …

A lightweight must-read

I should have read Mark Fisher's "Capitalist Realism" at the very beginning of my incursion into philosophy - it would have made many concepts easier to grasp. It's a solid introduction to concepts such as "reality versus The Real", "the big Other", to the critique of ideology.

The tone is closer to "anecdotes told over beer" than to a formal philosophical essay. To my understanding, the book is, after all, an extension of ideas that Fisher was already writing about on his blog.

Beverley Clack: Freud on the Couch: A Critical Introduction to the Father of Psychoanalysis (Paperback, Oneworld Publications)

Almost 75 years since his death, Freud remains as influential and divisive as ever. This …

An easy read, a light introduction

After hearing Freud's work referenced so heavily, I read Beverley Clack's book with a hope to understand what Freud actually thought about matters such as transference, the death drive, and so on. In a way, I got what I wanted, but I was also left wanting more.

The first part of the book which describes Freud's life and his relationships with important people in his life is by far the part that I found most useful to my personal effort to envision Freud. The detail that he had an difficult professional relationship to men, but an open and collaborative one with women, was surprising - and maybe a little bit endearing? The tender feelings don't go far, though - not when the details of the ways in which Freud's perspective has often failed to note the abuse and the horrific entrenched practices directed at young women at the hands of …

Martin McDonagh: The Pillowman (2003)

The Pillowman is a 2003 play by British-Irish playwright Martin McDonagh. It received its first …

Serious Weakness brought me here

Porpentine recommended [1] The Pillowman in her post about "the aftermath" of writing Serious Weakness. There is a common essence between the two, though it's captured in very different forms / presentations. I loved the pace of the dialogue, and the sparse metalanguage indications were enough to bring the scenes to life clearly in my mind.

I suspect that, had I read this all the way back in high school, I would at least try my hand at staging it in the most amateur and fangirl-y way possible.