BERNEVAL

Leo Bersani
“Representation and Its Discontents”
in Allegory and Representation ed. Stephen Greenblatt (150-151).

Sexuality would be that which is intolerable to the structured self.

[… commentary on Jean Laplanche Life and Death in Psychoanalysis … ]

Sexuality would be desire satisfied as a disruption or destabilization of the self. It would therefore not be originally an exchange of intensities between individuals, but rather a condition of broken negotiations with the world.

[…]

An imitative sympathy is crucial to our ability to learn, and in the context of a more general epistemological investigation, one might speculate about the effects on our presumed knowledge of the world of a learning process that destabilizes the relations between subject and object and transforms the world into an excessive, sexualizing psychic expenditure.

And so for day 3112
19.06.2015

David Rakoff
Love, Dishonor, Marry, Die, Cherish, Perish
with illustrations by Seth

Accomplished on many fronts: a novel in verse.

A novel weaving the delicate impingement of characters across plot lines, little tricks of narration fostering in the reader a knowingness about connections…

One of the stories tells of the making of a picture, the picture then is found years later by a character in an unrelated plot line. Aside from the provenance, there is the illustration of said picture: you turn the page and you are in the position of the character viewing the picture. The mimicry works as a majestic if subdued finale. It is the book’s magic that the reader experiences both a reckoning with time’s passage and a moment lifted out of time.

There was just so much Now that the picture encapsed In the shot, this despite more than six-decades elapsed.

And so for day 3109
16.06.2015

Rated PG for elements of exaggerated meanness and ridicule, and for some mild language

Motion Picture Association of America Rating for Matilda

The movie based on the novel by Roald Dahl has indeed not only exaggerated meanness but also lots and lots of it.

And so for day 3107
14.06.2015