Weaponized Joy

Here's my review of Canguilhem's The Normal and the Pathological . An old book, but deserving of new love. This is a lovely and humane book which takes as its starting point the advent of something new in the empire of nature: the presence of pathology among the living. For if neither the hurricane nor the waterfall can fall sick or recover, strictly speaking, then the arrival of life-which-falls-ill marks a break in the continuity of things, the eruption of an interruption in the cosmic order. While what counts as the ‘living’ has been the subject of much healthy debate (the inclination to ‘finality’, the work of the gene, the capacity for reproduction, to list a random few), Canguilhem’s wager is to look for the singularity of life in the presence of exactly what threatens it: illness and disease. Accompanying life as its ever-present shadow, it’s just in plumbing the recesses of pathology that the living itself comes into relief. Trained as both a physician and a

Finished reading Lara and Stephen Sheehi's Psychoanalysis Under Occupation: Practicing Resistance in Palestine (2021) yesterday, and wrote up a little recap and review: This book is a few things, but what immediately stands out is its archiving of testimony. Testimonies less of patients - although there are a few here - than of clinicians, the practitioners of psychoanalysis who, in issuing the ‘talking cure’, have to do so under conditions of brutal, unspeakable violence: a violence that, as I write, continues to murder and maim Palestinians in the most horrific genocide this side of the 21st century. Symptomatic is the fact that Gazan voices remain largely absent from this book, on account of the authors having been barred from entry by Israeli authorities. This gaping testimonial void, acknowledged and apologised for, speaks, nonetheless to just those very conditions whose effects and responses are charted out in the writing: those of trauma, occupation, and silencing:

I finished reading Guillaume Collett's The Psychoanalysis of Sense: Deleuze and the Lacanian School not too long ago, and since there is almost nothing I can find that's been written about it, here's a small review. Published in 1969, Gilles Deleuze’s The Logic of Sense has by now garnered a small handful of dedicated studies, each of which continues to plumb the depths of that strange yet magnificent book (cf. the work of James Williams, Sean Bowden, Piotrek Świątkowski, and Mehdi Parsa). Guillaume Collett’s contribution, The Psychoanalysis of Sense , is distinguished by its focus on Deleuze’s engagement with psychoanalysis (as advertised!), as well as doing the one thing which has been desperately needed for a while now: reading the book back to front. For, as any reader of the Logic of Sense knows, its already brutal level of difficulty is compounded by the book’s organizational schema, composed as a series of loosely overlapping chapters (or ‘series’), who

 OK so I'm going to kind of stream of consciousness a little about the topic of education. In particular I'm trying to think about what education in the wake of deconstruction looks like. What is a post-deconstructive pedagogy? And I'm going to cobble together an unholy alliance of Derrida, Karatani, Felman and now Negarestani to think this through. I'll start with Karatani actually. Karatani starts from the question of solipsism, before moving to the question of teaching. The idea being that the very possibility of teaching, when taken seriously, is what explodes any possible solipsism: the one who teaches has to, as it were, cross a chasm to the other. The chasm is simply a lack of shared ground, or rules. Teaching in this regard is always two-levelled: one has to teach not just "content", but at the same time, one has to teach the other how to learn at all. If we don't share the same rules, if we don't share the some idea of what what counts as our

I've been trying to think about like, Why Oedipus? It's the story of the birth of the Symbolic yes, but like, why this story? You can take the D&G line on Oedipus and write it off as a particularization that has been illicitly universalized, under the very specific conditions of capitalism. Which is of course a really nice way to give it a historical-materialist reading. And from here you attempt to give an account of anoedipal operations of desire and so on. But, under the influence of Colin Drumm's dissertation, and having just reread Shoshana Felman's absolutely magical reading of Oedipus, what if they key to Oedipus is that it functions as an auto-critique of itself? Like, what is Oedipus? Oedipus is effectively the most basic attempt to put a stop to circulation - the circulation of woman. Incest is the hoarding of sovereignty among patrilineal descent so that no other bloodlines can be introduced. This is Drumm's reading: "Incest between son and moth

OK so here’s the case for a non-ontological Deleuze - a Deleuze against ontology and for: ethology. The best book ever written on Deleuze? Yes. The first point is simply textual: “establish a logic of the AND, overthrow ontology…” - these are the lines that close out the first chapter of A Thousand Plateaus , where a logic of the “AND” is elevated over and against any logic of the “IS”. This is the first sense in which Deleuze is not an ontological thinker: he not only makes no effort to think ‘what is’, but works to displace the question of ‘what is?’ entirely. It would not be an exaggeration to say that the profusion of Deleuzian concepts - event, becoming, multiplicity, rhizome, etc - are all so many ways to think otherwise than ‘what is’. Of the event, for example, Deleuze wrote: “I’ve tried to discover the nature of events; it’s a philosophical concept, the only one capable of ousting the verb ‘to be’ and attributes.” (If anyone's interested, I wrote more about the logic