square white world

HERE

by John Holcroft, from here

Thus reflexive patience, always directed outside itself, and a fiction that cancels itself out in the void where it undoes its forms intersect to form a discourse appearing with no conclusion and no image, with no truth and no theater, with no proof, no mask, no affirmation, free of any center, unfettered to any native soil; a discourse that constitutes its own space as the outside toward which, and outside of which it speaks. This discourse, as speech of the outside whose words welcome the outside it addresses, has the openness of a commentary: the repetition of what continually murmurs outside.

– Michel Foucault, “The Thought of the Outside” (Trans. Brian Massumi), 1966

I could possibly say that this book ruined my life. I have never grappled with a book for as long as this one, for months I read and re-read it. I decided that I had to incorporate it into a paper that ended up taking me over a year to actually write and then edit, and then edit some more and then write some more before I finally decided to mail the stupid thing out to the professor from a mailbox that happened to be in front of some buildings that some planes would crash into about an hour or so later. There are lots of parallels I could start to draw here between the events of a certain morning, their effect on me and my future and how this book I can’t help but sort of kind of place into the whole fucking mess (joke?) that my life has been ever since something like December 18th 1999, the day I picked this book off the shelf at the philosophy section that I am now responsible for running. (in fairness I have to include Kafka with this book, since the paper in question was about the Deleuze and Kafka)

Anti-Oedipus is like no other philosophy book I’d ever read. There is no way to write a real review of it. It’s difficult as hell. It has language in it that is both offensive and mind achingly difficult. The concepts are so concrete but at the same time abstract in a way that it’s difficult to keep ones mind working in the right ways to get the thoughts to even make sense. It’s like reading a paradox, but one which you know there is something more to it than just empty sophistry. The book stands for everything that can be good about life, but also a strong yelling reminder that you will only fail, that you’ll sellout or be destroyed in the process of living.

This review may be continued at a later time, the entire thread I was on just got annihilated in my head.

from here