A hero is bored edition
What are you reading, Holla Forums? How has it affected you? What are you planning to read in the future?
Currently reading Dante's Divine Comedy. Just finished Kierkegaard's Works of Love. Really want to read more Kierkegaard, but also want to start on Emile Zola- starting with Ladies' Paradise.
Hey man. I'm currently a 4-piece collection of diverse works by Marx and Engels. Skip over some, read some others more closely. I'm not paying too much attention though because I'm mostly learning Russian right now - so I'm watching Russian movies, using my Penguin Russian Course, and all that stuff.
Right now I'm reading Marxism and Freedom by Raya Dunayevskaya. It is a very interesting text on Marxist Humanism and has some good criticisms of Authoritarian Marxism, minus the State Capitalism shit. I'm planning on reading History and Class Consciousness Georg Lukács.
My post is later, but higher up. Feels good to be an Holla Forums Priority Poster.
I've had my fill of weird-ass postmodern mystery with Alain Robbe-Grillet's 1953 "The Erasers" and Thomas Pynchon's 1966 "The Crying of Lot 49" (both of which are great btw) so now I'm back to modernism with Franz Kafka's 1926 "The Castle".
Ever read infinite jest? It's a criticism of post-structuralism.
stop shitting up every single board with your faggotry
k
He's not really doing anything.
Currently on-and-off reading the Culture series. Shit's great.
I've always wanted to, but I find its 1,000+ pages length pretty intimidating. I think I don't have what it takes to tackles such a huge thing yet.
I am reading Feral Revolution by Feral Faun, its pretty damn rad and his writing on the state and street activism and intellectual masturbation in the academia is spot on.
How many books do you actually read per month faggot?
I Agree with this statement, to be verry truthfull person of family relations.
Dont ever read infinite jest
How is reading oldass lit related to leftism exactly?
Nothing, the dead white man of those days dont know anything about our current struggles.
I understand the theory threads, but these threads are pure dick measuring contests. Discuss theory or get out fetishist
N O
F U N
A L L O W E D
As long as you discuss is as simply a hobby, its OK. I was actually under the impression you were one of those who believe these old fucks have some profound wisdom we can learn from etc. etc.
Am I wrong? Maybe I misjudged, if I did, sorry
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Reading the complete short stories of Hemingway. I'm a big fan of his work. After reading it I can focus on his more 'disliked' books, like islands in the stream.
What are some socialist authors like hemingway? And I mean, true socialist, not a fucking liberal acting like it like like Virginia woolf.
Wow I sure got memed hard.But seriously it annoys me when people read some 6000 year old chinese novel or some shit and act as if they gained some epic wisdom from the sages of old. Am I wrong to feel this way?
it's ok
I just like to see what people are reading so I can add stuff to my list.
Never read Hemingway, so Idk how much it influences him, but Wilde wrote an essay called "the soul of man under socialism" and it's really based
Idk, it varies and it seems shallow to count anyway. I have a lot of free time rn though.
I'm reading a book by Nicholas Georgescu-Roegen called "Degrowth". He argue than the economical process doesn't escape the law of entropy, and that we should think about it with a thermodynamic lens rather than a mechanical (reversible) one.
Maybe Das Kapital, but I also want to get into post-left anarchy (already read a bit of Bob Black and Larry Law), any recommendations comrades?
Reading Absolute Erotic by Mark Driscoll, which is a pretty eye-opening piece about the brutality of Japanese imperialism during WW2 and provides a unique perspective into it through a Marxist perspective.
"In this major reassessment of Japanese imperialism in Asia, Mark Driscoll foregrounds the role of human life and labor. Drawing on subaltern postcolonial studies and Marxism, he directs critical attention to the peripheries, where figures including Chinese coolies, Japanese pimps, trafficked Japanese women, and Korean tenant farmers supplied the vital energy that drove Japan's empire. He identifies three phases of Japan's capitalist expansion, each powered by distinct modes of capturing and expropriating life and labor: biopolitics (1895–1914), neuropolitics (1920–32), and necropolitics (1935-45). During the first phase, Japanese elites harnessed the labor of marginalized subjects as Japan colonized Taiwan, Korea, and south Manchuria, and sent hustlers and sex workers into China to expand its market hegemony. Linking the deformed bodies laboring in the peripheries with the "erotic-grotesque" media in the metropole, Driscoll centers the second phase on commercial sexology, pornography, and detective stories in Tokyo to argue that by 1930, capitalism had colonized all aspects of human life: not just labor practices but also consumers’ attention and leisure time. Focusing on Japan's Manchukuo colony in the third phase, he shows what happens to the central figures of biopolitics as they are subsumed under necropolitical capitalism: coolies become forced laborers, pimps turn into state officials and authorized narcotraffickers, and sex workers become "comfort women". Driscoll concludes by discussing Chinese fiction written inside Manchukuo, describing the everyday violence unleashed by necropolitics."
Larry Law was a situationist, not post-left.
I'm reading "The Fourfold Root of the Principle of Sufficient Reason" by Arthur Schopenhauer. It's a pretty challenging read, mostly because I have to pause to check secondary sources because Schopenhauer has a few issues with the cosmological and ontological arguments.
I want to move into Nietzche, Tolstoy, Freud, Wittgenstein and others that were influenced by Schopenhauer.
John Steinbeck is one of the classic American socialist writers. The Grapes of Wrath is pretty overtly anti-capitalist and its subject is the Great Depression.
The Theory of the Subject - Badiou
Literally have no idea what he's talking about.
Currently reading Journey to the End of the Night by Louis-Ferdinand Céline. Kind-of existentialism, bleak as fuck but the narrator-protagonists unseriousness balances it out just enough to be bearable. Also I should probably be worried by how often I can identify with him while reading this
Waiting for that new book with short stories from Walter Benjamin to arrive so I can get started with that as well.
I just finished Player Piano by Vonnegut. I'm probably going to read Simulation and Simulacra next, as I never got around to it.
What I think is funny is how many of you read these meme books recommended by places like 4chan /lit/ and others. Like, some of you seem to have no kind of source for inspiration outside 4chan.
Anyway, can anyone give me an entry point into Laclau / his Gramscianism?
marxists.org
More or less in summary. Afterwards, after you get a general idea. Work towards things like Prison Notebooks/Letters
meme books pre 1990s recommended by lit arent that bad, post 90s middlebrow shit like DFW or Knausgard is the cancer
i wasnt commenting on the quality of any book
thanks dude, i was asking about Laclau though. Though I might buy the one essay collection with butler/zizek and some other guy iirc, new perspectives on the left or something it was called…..
Oh my bad. I thought you were asking for either. I'm not into Laclau at this point, same boat.
Read Cioran too
I guess you must be a connoisseurus rex.
I'm mostly meming but I do go to lit.
yo rebel, you still looking for rpgs/vns to play?
yes desu
Re-reading Sickness Unto Death. Really good book on the importance of BECOMING
abandonwaredos.com
Here. Have one.
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The "law of entropy" doesn't even apply in this situation or make predictions at this scale.
MORE IS DIFFERENT
robotics.cs.tamu.edu
Sounds like some useless post-hoc pseud crap
Bought the meme trilogy a week ago.
Need to finish a stack of actual leftist theory though.
Maybe reread trotsky's revolution betrayed. Last time I went through it was the summer before 9th grade (with animal farm) and I don't think I got as much as I should have.
David North's book on postmodernism is pretty timely with the modern idpol crisis, traces intellectual lineages well, cites a huge amount of original work and can broaden your general philosophical background while deepening your understanding of classical marx
IJ is trash. Wallace was an autistic reactionary Calvinist.
You mean the one where he wrong ascribes the evils of postmodernism to the Frankfurt School because he's a dolt?
Tracing the intellectual influences of a particular set of ideas is not the same as claiming the latter is a natural, automatic outcome/realization of the former.
Misapplication of Nietzsche does not cause Nazism, but the Nazis misapplied Nietzsche, and moreover can be better understood along the lines of how and why they did so.
They're separate in the title for a reason, and it's a fairly comprehensive look at modern liberal reactionary tendencies for its length. Especially the bits about neokantian ideas and rejection of particular enlightenment values, which in a way formalized the idea of "the regressive left" before it was coined as a phrase.
Is this the new "how to take a screenshot"?
Pedantry about the word "ascribe" aside, North, in typical orthodox Marxist fashion, is still incorrect. He aligns thinkers like Horkheimer, Adorno, Benjamin, et al. with thinkers like Foucault, Kristeva, Derrida, et al. If you've studiously read The Frankfurt School, or even Martin Jay's historical study of The Frankfurt School, you'd know this is total bunk. The aforementioned Frankfurt thinkers stand in stark contrast with, even opposition to, the latter mentioned PoMo thinkers. Furthermore, the only living philosopher carrying on the Frankfurt tradition is Habermas, and if you think his philosophy contributes or has contributed to the growth of the regressive left, then you've clearly never read his work.
I think the issue here is that the Frankfurt critique of materialism (Benjamin) and orthodox Marxism and authoritarianism (Horkheimer + Adorno) was so complete that it makes you Tanks tremble.
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Benjamin's Theses on the Philosophy of History destroyed materialism.
M8, that essay is above all shoddy and theological in its own right.
Benjamin was deluded by the soviet state and taken for a ride well past Lenin's death, through the purges and all the way up to the fucking Molotov-Ribbentrop pact. Rather than concede a flawed understanding of theory or his ideological bent, he sought to externalize his insecurity by claiming materialism itself is flawed!
His psychology was exactly that of the liberals who see Syriza's betrayal as evidence that "socialism doesn't work." North does an excellent job documenting this reactionary demoralization among sections of petty-bourgeois radicals and connecting it to unsound and idealist foundations that do not practically engage with the genuinely fundamental objective factors of the day (the same phenomenon that overtook the american radicals of the 60s and 70s and generated this postmodern glut in academia and the media.) In contrast, The Revolution Betrayed was submitted for publication in 1936 before the Moscow Trials and Stalinist purging began, and still contains a more correct assessment of the soviet state's degeneration.
You can reject materialism wholesale, but don't pretend to be any kind of Marxist when you do.
Yes.
goodreads.com
Holy fuck, is this one of you guys?
It's Zizekian. I don't think he's directly a leftypol user but he uses the bunkerchan IRC. I mostly see him on twitter.
he's a chad
Currently reading Ray Brassier Nihil Unbound and
L I G O T T I
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Both good shet, Stirnerfags that have read Marx would like Brassier.
Gonna be finishing off Ecrits by Lacan after a smash through Brassier but Lacan is a motherfucker.
Ligotti is a bit of a memester but he's britty gud. I rate 4/5.
Pls don't read Lacan; read secondary lit
;_;
W-what poetry and other things user?
Do you have the epic of gilgamesh?
Laclau is nothing but a word salad chef.
sweet library bro
NIGGA IS THAT A ZULFIQAR ON YOUR WALL
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kill yourself
Pls respond
The internet is at your service comrade.
Almost finished reading this. Probably the best analysis of the French Revolution that I've read. Very fascinating how the material conditions of France at that time are quite similar to the current material conditions in the United States.
After I finish I'll probably jump into Andrew Culp's Dark Deleuze and then maybe John David Ebert's new book.