This link opens in a pop-up window
Anti-Oedipus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia (French: Capitalisme et schizophrénie. L'anti-Œdipe) is a 1972 book by French …
Ugh, I kinda lost track of what was going on. Gotta reset :(
At twenty-nine Valancy had never been in love, and it seemed romance had passed her …
A beautiful romance novel set in turn-of-the-century rural Canada. The plot is by our modern standards a bit too cliche and relies on a twist almost everyone will see coming from a mile away; however, the prose by itself is admirable and worth reading. Perfectly chaste, too. The most lewd thing anyone says is a comment about the main character's ankles, which is described later as "superannuated gallantry." I love this little novel fiercely and without a shred of embarrassment or hesitation.
I attempt to risk it in my own texts, a thing that brings me a lack of understanding, indeed, the removal from some academic or editorial circles that, instead of realizing that we must henceforth adopt another way of thinking, another logic, desperately cling to information, representation, and science’s language that they think they master, whereas it has dominated them for a long time.
— Through Vegetal Being by Luce Irigaray, Michael Marder (Page 6)
Anti-Oedipus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia (French: Capitalisme et schizophrénie. L'anti-Œdipe) is a 1972 book by French …
The theory of proper names should not be conceived of in terms of representation; it refers instead to the class of "effects": effects that are not a mere dependence on causes, but the occupation of a domain, and the operation of a system of signs. This can be clearly seen in physics, where proper names designate such effects within fields of potentials: the Joule effect, the Seebeck effect, the Kelvin effect. History is like physics: a Joan of Are effect, a Heliogabalus effect—all the names of history, and not the name of the father.
— Anti-Oedipus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia by Gilles Deleuze, Félix Guattari (Page 86)
This is a fascinating restructuring of the name.
When in the service station, my embodied self as a normal functioning network of projecting internationalities was suspended. In its place, an abnormal relation between visual and non-visual perception emerged, such that the “plenum of the world” lost its assurance. Experienced as anxiety and dizziness in the body, a disordering of space ensued. Together, this anxious affectivity was coupled with an acute awareness of the facticity of my body as both a thing in the world and a center of experience. That the body undergoes anxiety in certain places is notable.
— The memory of place by Dylan Trigg (Series in Continental thought) (Page 152)
I feel like there was a clearer way of saying this.
It is, in fact, the effort to recall that offers the major opportunity to "геmember forgetting," to anticipate the words of Augustine. Searching for a memory indeed attests to one of the major finalities of the act of remembering, namely, struggling against forgetting, wresting a few scraps of memory from the "rapacity" of time (Augustine dixit), from "sinking" into oblivion (oubli). It is not only the arduousness of the effort of memory that confers this unsettling character upon the relation, but the fear of having forgotten, of continuing to forget, of forgetting tomorrow to fulfill some task or other; for tomorrow, one must not forget ... to remember.
— Memory, History, Forgetting by Paul Ricœur (Page 30)
The beatings will continue until morale improves.
The last two or three chapters were painful to read. Irigaray has some good criticism of Hegel here and there but the antidotes proposed are more poisonous than the venom.
I knew it was going to be TERF-adjacent going in. I’d read articles from her students (some of them trans) defending her as misread, that I should read “at least two” genders where Irigaray says “two”… but this reading can’t be sustained. Not with any credulity. It breaks, shatters in a way that can’t be patched and glued back together into a more perfect unity, as in kintsugi.
A disappointment.
Content warning nsfw mention, portmanteaubuse
Indeed, a tactile experience can exist between two living beings, especially between two humans, and it is probably that which gives rise to desire.
— Sharing the Fire by Luce Irigaray (Page 73)
For a book supposedly about overthrowing Hegelian Aufhebuggering by fucking real hard, this is the upper limit of her horniness. “probably”!
It is true that desire is identifiable with difficulty, and it is even more the case for its mutual sharing. From a spatial viewpoint, would it be possible to first suggest that the masculine desire seeks to take shelter in the feminine body? If this is the case, is it in search of a union with a woman or of a regression in the mother? The way of inhabiting the inner space of the feminine body is quite different according to such an alternative: if seeking a union can exist in the first case, the man is only in search of self-affection in the second case. And, at the level of interiority, what corresponds for a man to the fact of being in the body of a woman? Has not this question been eluded by speaking of penetration, on the one part, and of reproduction, on the other part? We have no word, no logos, to say to what experience and meaning being in a body other than our own corresponds.
— Sharing the Fire by Luce Irigaray (Page 60)
With all due respect, ma’am, I write smut as a hobby.
Anti-Oedipus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia (French: Capitalisme et schizophrénie. L'anti-Œdipe) is a 1972 book by French …
This is not all, however, since the vegetal theme—the innocence of flowers—brings us yet another message and another code: everyone is bisexual, everyone has two sexes, but partitioned, noncommunicating; the man is merely the one in whom the male part, and the woman the one in whom the female part, dominates statistically.
— Anti-Oedipus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia by Gilles Deleuze, Félix Guattari (Page 69)
This is closer to the truth of gender that I think I would like to elucidate some day (at least closer than Irigaray) but there is still something slightly off.
Certainly Hegel, unlike Kant, is in search of what would be the final universal unity, but he remains within a logic which, in a way, prevents him from discovering it.
— Sharing the Fire by Luce Irigaray (Page 56)
This is the same Marxist critique of Hegel that Žižek fiercely lampoons in Less than Zero.
Hegel does not imagine that the internal unity with which sexuation can provide us represents a for-oneself but also a for-the-other, no side of which can be overcome by/in the other. Indeed, there is no contradiction in this duality of the for-oneself and the for-the-other, and it must be maintained in order that desire should exist and its strength make effective our sexuate identity.
— Sharing the Fire by Luce Irigaray (Page 56)
It is hard to continue reading sexuate here, as non-cis readers of Irigaray must, as meaning “at least two (genders).” How can any pair of at least two produce an “internal unity”? I want to believe, but I also don’t wish to delude myself.
Content warning philosophical wrong-headedness about bdsm
For example, when some of the last philosophers—like Maurice Merleau-Ponty or Michel Henry—approach the domain of sensuous relationships, they basically confine themselves to a subject-object logical structure, without considering what occurs between two subjects. And when such a relationship is envisioned it is more often than not according to a master-slave, dominant-dominated scheme which aims at nullifying at least one of the two subjectivities.
— Sharing the Fire by Luce Irigaray (Page 56)
Tell me you’ve never had dom/sub sex without telling me you’ve never had dom/sub sex.
Desire takes root in the body and cannot be completely distinguished from it. No doubt, energy can be transformed, it can become more subtle and more compatible with the nature of the transcendental. However, it cannot become completely incorporeal on pain of abolishing the evolution of life itself and the respect for alterity—something that our tradition mistakenly did.
— Sharing the Fire by Luce Irigaray (Page 50)
Okay but this slaps.