22 Matching Annotations
  1. Jul 2020
    1. Besides the tension between play and history, there is also the ten-sion between play and presence. Play is the disruption of presence. Thepresence of an element is always a signifying and substitutive referenceinscribed in a system of differences and the movement of a chain. Playis always play of absence and presence, but if it is to be thought radic-ally, play must be conceived of before the alternative of presence andabsence. Being must be conceived as presence or absence on the basisof the possibility of play and not the other way around.

      I like this relationship between play and the world. I'm still unclear on the usage of the word play, but the best I can surmise is that play is about the inherent uncertainty behind any system, as everything has a little bit of "wiggle room". Centering presence around uncertainty is something that has been incredibly pertinent in this global catastrophe, but I think that's been the only option that's been presented to the world. What do you think of the philosophical implications of this globally cataclysmic events? Will we build societies that can work off of uncertainty as all of our systems and institutions are pushed to be their most flexible, inevitably closing and opening at locally determined intervals?

    2. But in the very first pages of the ElementaryStructures Lévi-Strauss, who has begun by giving credence to these con-cepts, encounters what he calls a scandal, that is to say, something whichno longer tolerates the nature/culture opposition he has accepted,something which simultaneously seems to require the predicates of natureand of culture. This scandal is the incest prohibition. The incest prohibitionis universal; in this sense one could call it natural. But it is also aprohibition, a system of norms and interdicts; in this sense one couldcall it cultural

      I think that calling incest universally prohibited is incredibly humanist. For example, male-born clownfish, in times of genetic scarcity, may change their sex and sometimes mate with their "sons". In any human context, this is taboo and actually just incompatible with our hormone systems, but I think we need to remember that we are still animals, and calling the incest prohibition natural is something that is incorrect. What are some animal social constructs that challenge human societal constructs that we pose as "universal?"

    1. and this is why I called it a sediment, since the food itself becomes no more than an indeterminate bed-rock)

      the chicken really died to become a fancy cake.. would you consider putting a lot of effort into presentation as doing honor to the dead bird or as besmirching the original food and taking focus off of the meat?

    2. We find again here this disease of thinking in essences, which is at the bottom of every bourgeois mythology of man (which is why we come across it so often)

      This was covered in my ISF 100B class! We talked about how any label of the self is exclusionary, and in essence, it's personal reductionalism. Trying to put people into boxes isn't typically the right move, in my opinion

    1. The literary scholar of the twenty-first century can no longer be content with anecdotal evidence, with random “things” gathered from a few, even “representative,” texts.† We must strive to understand these things we find interesting in the context of everything else, including a mass of possibly “uninteresting” texts

      mining nuggets from mass of information

    2. lose reading is not only impractical as a means of evidence gathering in the digital library, but big data render it totally inappropriate as a method of studying liter-ary history.

      How dismissive of human work can you be? We need to be more clear on the contributions towards historical research added by big data, this is such a huge leap to make!

    1. After the first death, there is no other

      "A single death is a tragedy; a million deaths is a statistic." -maybe Stalin

    2. The majesty and burning of the child’s death. I shall not murder The mankind of her going with a grave truth Nor blaspheme down the stations of the breath With any further Elegy of innocence and youth.

      The words that rhyme in this verse seem to push the themes of this poem forward, (death-breath, murder-further, truth-youth

    3. breath
    4. daughter
    5. dead
    6. Deep
    7. Never until the mankind making Bird beast and flower Fathering and all humbling darkness Tells with silence the last light breaking And the still hour Is come of the sea tumbling in harness

      Rhyme Scheme: A B C A B C

    8. sackcloth
    9. sow
    10. salt seed
    11. shadow

      sh- sound repeats

    12. Shall

      sh- sound repeats

    13. of the ear of corn

      rhythmic repetition

    14. last light
    15. Bird beast
    16. mankind making