Filler: updating, reading, end of May start of June
▣ I find myself in the period between beginning to close down ongoing projects and opening up new ones, when it becomes impossible to say anything new. There is enough work left to occupy part of the day, but the rest is left blank. ▣ I wonder if anything will come of what I have written. I wonder if it will have any impact. ▣ I can tell you what I have been reading. Some of this reading is to distract myself and some of it is to try to force fresh ideas.
Giorgio Agamben, The Highest Poverty: Monastic Rules and Form-of-Life, translated by Adam Kotsko. The present study intends to show how, in these texts that are at once dissimilar and monotonous, the reading of which seems so difficult to the modern reader, a transformation is carried out. This transformation—to an extent probably more decisive than in the juridical, ethical, ecclesiastical, or historical texts of the same era— collides with law as much as with ethics and politics. It also implies a radical reformulation of the very conceptuality that up until that moment articulated the relationship between human action and norm, “life” and “rule,” and without which the political and ethical-juridical rationality of modernity would be unthinkable. In this sense, the syntagmas vita vel regula, regula et vita, regula vitae are not simple hendiadyses. Rather, in the present study they define a field of historical and hermeneutical tensions which demands a rethinking of both concepts. What is a rule, if it seems to be mixed up with life without remainder? And what is a human life, if it can no longer be distinguished from the rule? ▣▣ Agamben on the radical possibility of monastic rejection of legal codes. This has informed recent writing, although perhaps only its methods.
Oe Kenzaburo. Seventeen & J: Two Novels, translated by Luk Van Haute. I unsheathe the sword and grasp it with both hands. With all my might I thrust it into the darkness between the piles of junk, again and again. It must be blood lust, a feeling that fills the shed and thrills my heart. Giving myself to my muffled cries, I pierce the darkness with my Raikokuga sword. The day will come when I’ll stab the enemy to death with this Japanese sword. The enemy who I, like a man, will skewer. // That sudden realization comes to me with a premonition that’s brimming with fierce confidence. But where is this enemy of mine? My enemy, is he my father? Is my enemy my sister? Or the American soldiers from the base? The men in the SDF? The Conservative politicians? Wherever my enemies are, I’ll kill them. I’ll kill them, I say with the same low cries. ▣▣ I began reading Oe Kenzaburo again shortly after his death was announced earlier in the year, trying and failing to get through The Changeling. But this is early Oe Kenzaburo, political Oe Kenzaburo, mashing together reactionary and homicidal energy with male sexual energy. I like this period.
Fei-Ling Davis. Primitive Revolutionaries of China: A Study of Secret Societies of the Late Nineteenth Century. Moreover, membership of secret societies entailed a limitation on individual liberty which was extreme, even in Confucian terms: once a man joined a secret society, he joined for life. Any change of decision on the part of a recruit during or after initiation could bring upon him death or mutilation. Since the secret society existed within the tolerance of the State, it was logically less powerful than the State, and therefore demanded commensurately greater devotion and discipline from its members. Without strong loyalty and strict discipline among its members, a society could hardly hope to survive. The necessity of solidarity created a traditional (and probably justified) suspicion of literati or gentry candidates for membership among secret societies. The fact that members of the gentry (however disaffected) were linked to their class by ties of kinship, social and cultural, laid them, more than members of any other class, open to the temptations of betrayal. ▣▣ I remain interested in the possibility of secret societies. This book is useful, being a study of the formation of secret societies in North and South China. She is interested particularly in how secret societies helped speed the downfall of the Qing.
Gary Genosko. The Reinvention of Social Practices: Essays on Felix Guattari. For Guattari the bastions along the echo path are problematically productive, and that taking Gamma OH is not an obviously effective way of surviving a relationship, but a means nonetheless unfortunately resonant with depression. And one of the most difficult things for depression is to connect with a liberatory machine. One black hole may find and connect with another, both of which resonate with conjugality: a break-up and rebound: “Naively, I had thought I was done forever with this kind of conjugality!” Guattari wrote of his break-up with Donati, “But I got right back into it, and this time by my own doing. . . . I immediately dove right back into the bitter joys of jealous madness with it domestic vertigo and conjugal possession.” ▣▣ I was reading and then trying to subvert Guattari on micropolitics, then found myself looking for more coherent and capable contemporary riffs. I found myself distracted by the chapter on Guattari’s experiments with GHB.
Republican era Shanghai movie magazines on Archive. Movie Monthly from the late 1920s and early 1930s. Movie News from the 1930s. Movietone running from the 1930s to the early 1940s. Movie Sketch from the 1930s. Chin Chin Screen from the 1930s and 1940s.