The Whatcha Reading Thread

[oba hiloowlow]

oba hiloowlow;942608 wrote:

The terrifying tale of Joseph K, a respectable functionary in a bank, who is suddenly arrested and must defend his innocence against a charge about which he can get no information. A nightmare vision of the excesses of modern bureaucracy wedded to the mad agendas of twentieth-century totalitarian regimes.

[OdaySomali]

Haatu,

 

Genre? o.k I will give that a thought.

 

BUt reading fiction I would feel like I am wasting my time, reading someone's made up stories... nowadays that's how I view it. Hence why I asked what your motivaiton is?

[OdaySomali]

Oba I didnt take you as the book worm haha. Keep it up

[Safferz]

OdaySomali;942621 wrote:

BUt reading fiction I would feel like I am wasting my time, reading someone's made up stories... nowadays that's how I view it. Hence why I asked what your motivaiton is?

The richness of language, the thrill of a good plot? I also think the line between non-fiction and fiction is a blurry one, they use many of the same narrative techniques and literary devices.

[Safferz]

Tonight's reading (revisiting Agamben this week for a paper):

 

 

 

The work of Giorgio Agamben, one of Italy's most important and original philosophers, has been based on an uncommon erudition in classical traditions of philosophy and rhetoric, the grammarians of late antiquity, Christian theology, and modern philosophy. Recently, Agamben has begun to direct his thinking to the constitution of the social and to some concrete, ethico-political conclusions concerning the state of society today, and the place of the individual within it.

 

In Homo Sacer, Agamben aims to connect the problem of pure possibility, potentiality, and power with the problem of political and social ethics in a context where the latter has lost its previous religious, metaphysical, and cultural grounding. Taking his cue from Foucault's fragmentary analysis of biopolitics, Agamben probes with great breadth, intensity, and acuteness the covert or implicit presence of an idea of biopolitics in the history of traditional political theory. He argues that from the earliest treatises of political theory, notably in Aristotle's notion of man as a political animal, and throughout the history of Western thinking about sovereignty (whether of the king or the state), a notion of sovereignty as power over "life" is implicit.

 

The reason it remains merely implicit has to do, according to Agamben, with the way the sacred, or the idea of sacrality, becomes indissociable from the idea of sovereignty. Drawing upon Carl Schmitt's idea of the sovereign's status as the exception to the rules he safeguards, and on anthropological research that reveals the close interlinking of the sacred and the taboo, Agamben defines the sacred person as one who can be killed and yet not sacrificed—a paradox he sees as operative in the status of the modern individual living in a system that exerts control over the collective "naked life" of all individuals.

[Alpha Blondy]

Wadani;942605 wrote:

Safferz broke the very first law of the sacred 48 laws of power 'never outshine the master', and she's now paying the price.

Alpha, I know u feel threatened by her, since before she graced this forum u were the resident social commentator on SOL par excellence. But, I believe there is enough intellectual space for both of u to thrive on here.

be that as it may, it's unbecoming of pseudo-intellectuals to behave as though a ''waxaar'' (Mooge 2013). there are standards, protocols, etiquette and codes of conduct in our industry.

[oba hiloowlow]

OdaySomali;942625 wrote:

Oba I didnt take you as the book worm haha. Keep it up

lmao...

[SomaliPhilosopher]

Apophis;942693 wrote:

Plus, didn't Reeyo start the same thread not too long ago?

Its a qabil thing Apophis

[Safferz]

SomaliPhilosopher;942696 wrote:

Its a qabil thing Apophis

lool no... I looked at the threads Reeyo started and I don't see anything. But my apologies if this has already been done.

[Reeyo]

I don't think I did one. But there is one, a long one somewhere.

 

But there is nothing wrong with looking at what everyone is reading or listening to. Gives you a general idea of who they are.

[Wadani]

Safferz;942638 wrote:

Tonight's reading (revisiting Agamben this week for a paper):

 

 

 

The reason it remains merely implicit has to do, according to Agamben, with the way the sacred, or the idea of sacrality, becomes indissociable from the idea of sovereignty.Drawing upon Carl Schmitt's idea of the sovereign's status as the exception to the rules he safeguards, and on anthropological research that reveals the close interlinking of the sacred and the taboo, Agamben defines the sacred person as one who can be killed and yet not sacrificed—a paradox he sees as operative in the status of the modern individual living in a system that exerts control over the collective "naked life" of all individuals.

Yara jilci this paragraph.

[Safferz]

Wadani;942714 wrote:

Yara jilci this paragraph.

"Homo sacer" was a figure in Roman law who was essentially a social and political outcast living in the society, but denied all rights within the political system -- so living a "bare life" in the space between law and life (he calls it the "state of exception"), and their inclusion/exclusion determined by the sovereign state. Agamben is basically arguing that this has been the meaning of sovereignty since ancient times, that life itself is governed ("biopower") and sovereignty is the power to decide who is incorporated into the political body and how ("good life"), and who is excluded and how ("bare life" in the state of exception).

[Chimera]

[Wadani]

Safferz;942732 wrote:

"Homo sacer" was a figure in Roman law who was essentially a social and political outcast living in the society, but denied all rights within the political system -- so living a "bare life" in the space between law and life (he calls it the "state of exception"), and their inclusion/exclusion determined by the sovereign state. Agamben is basically arguing that this has been the meaning of sovereignty since ancient times, that life itself is governed ("biopower") and sovereignty is the power to decide who is incorporated into the political body and how ("good life"), and who is excluded and how ("bare life" in the state of exception).

Got it. Thanks.

[Safferz]

No problem Wadani, I'm still reading but that's what I'm getting so far. Theorists are always unnecessarily dense, this was a sentence in a chapter I was reading last week from Homi Bhabha's "The Location of Culture":

 

If, for a while, the ruse of desire is calculable for the uses of discipline soon the repetition of guilt, justification, pseudo-scientific theories, superstition, spurious authorities, and classifications can be seen as the desperate effort to “normalize” formally the disturbance of a discourse of splitting that violates the rational, enlightened claims of its enunciatory modality.

:mad: