In “This Sex Which Is Not One” (an essay in the book of the same title), Luce Irigaray critiques the masculine conception of feminine/female sexuality and proposes descriptions that come from a woman. Irigaray explains that within female sexuality, an opposition is set up “between ‘masculine’ clitoral activity and ‘feminine’ vaginal passivity” in which “the…
Category Archives: Hippie
starts out as anti-Oedipus, but, in existing historically, has gained an actual character: sexually-liberated, peace-loving, carefree . . . How faithful is s/he to anti-Oedipus?
I watched Ryan Fleck’s Half Nelson again last night. It was for the nth time, yet I continue to be moved by the subtle beauty of the film. It was quiet, still, uneventful, with a minimal plot, but not boring. There was no shouting, no spectacular confrontations, no grand battles (except for those underneath that…
[The Berkeley Free Speech movement; Image from The Berkeley Daily Planet] In the section of the essay of the book of the same title, Jean-Luc Nancy explicates his notion of being singular plural. Composed of three words that, as Nancy describes, “do not have any determined syntax (‘being’ is a verb or noun; ‘singular’ and…
From a new map: a new dawn, a new day? The election of Barack Hussein Obama as President of the United States is a milestone: 1. It signals the end of neoconservative control of the state that banked on fear and jingoism, free-market dogmatism predicated on greed and self-interest, and submission to a secretive hierarchy…
I have just passed my comprehensive exam for my MA in Comparative Literature at Louisiana State University. The area of focus is critical theory, specifically Marxism, psychoanalysis, and Foucault and Deleuze. I thought I would pose my responses to the first two parts of the exam (the third and last part being the oral defense).…
[A painting by Filipino Revolutionary artist Juan Luna, The Spolarium] Things have of late been stirring in the Philippines. The current President, Gloria Macapagal Arroyo (also referred to as GMA), is being challenged by a string of protests to step down from the post. Arroyo ascended to the Presidency in 2001 (same day as George…
It has been a common thing in academic circles to talk about the travails of scholars-in-training (i.e. graduate students) in the field of the humanities, most notably in the “superfluous” concentrations of philosophy, literature, history, anthropology . . . (where scholars-in-training spend at least seven years of their “most productive lives” (their twenties) reading books…
So: Who am I? (Either) Ryan or Aless? (Or) Aless or Ryan? And, isn’t it: / ? As it turns out, I am constituted by parts that connect (especially with alien parts, in all different sorts of connection, ones no I can really claim), that is, when they’re not saying No!, when they could, when…
[A chart of secret societies] In an overture to fascism, a preliminary suggestion as to what underlies its potency (to capture the masses, to make one desire to be led, one’s own repression, that then connects with social oppression (of the other, e.g. the Jews, but also of the supporting populace itself, i.e. of oneself)),…
[Image from Cartoonstock] In the preface (the “Attempt at Self-Criticism”) to The Birth of Tragedy, written more than ten years after the main text, Friedrich Nietzsche recapitulates the question he had broached in the work of his youth. He asks, “Is pessimism necessarily a sign of decline, decay, malformation, of tired and debilitated instincts [.…
