Reading Ideas

I was wondering if anyone would be up for going back to basics and reading Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason this year.  I think that this is an important text that we should all be up on.  Perhaps we could follow with Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit and Science of Logic (an ambitious venture for sure)…  and then, maybe even Heidegger’s Being and Time.  For anyone interested in Lukacs, the latter should definitely be of interest since Heidegger wrote his book as a response to History and Class Consciousness.  Does this sound interesting to anyone else?

Reading for next week…

Seeing as we’re reading the sections that actually deal with Antigone next week, I think it would be in order to actually read the play as well.

To put a little twist in it, however, I suggest that we read Brecht’s version of it, as well as his “Mother Courage and her Children” – the lead character of which he characterizes as “definitely not an Antigone”. However, from a “Lacanian” standpoint we might be able to argue that she is in a formal sense like Antigone, perhaps in the same way that Badiou characterizes some events as ‘simularcra’ …

Any Takers? The plays aren’t that long. Brecht’s Antigone is only about 60 pages of dialogue, and we could limit our reading of Ethics to the section entitled “The essence of Tragedy” (pages 243-287).

And it might help further open up the question of the relevance of the social to the ethical…

G

Commentary on Lacan’s ‘Ethics of Psychoanalysis’

Although I haven’t come across such commentaries thus far, I’ll reserve this particular space for future findings. Anyone else can contribute if they wish. That being said, I have come across a potentially interesting secondary resource on the topic but it appears that it has yet to be published in English. I look forward to reading it once it is.

A point regarding future meetings: Is it possible to confine each week to around 50 pages? Especially with Lacan. I think it’ll give us a better opportunity to really examine key semantics that would otherwise, shall I say, suffer elision…

Movie Nite

So, I’ve done terribly at organizing a movei nite, but…

Anybody up for movies this Thursday?

I think I’m gonna vote for Ivan the Terribele.

Other suggestions?

T.

Next Reading

I don’t mind doing ‘Kant Avec Sade’ once we finish FTKNWTD…  it will be a nice little break from Zizek.  However, I would prefer to do Tarrying With the Negative before we do Ethics of Psychoanalysis.  What do you guys think?

And after Ethics, perhaps then we should do Ticklish.

Pauper’s or Dooney’s?

Where are we meeting this week?

Next Meeting…

Does anyone mind if we have our meeting a little earlier next week, say around 3pm?  There’s a lecture at York at 6pm that I’d like to go to.

2008 Edition of “For They Know Not What They Do”

Is the preface to the 2008 edition the same as the preface to the second edition (published in 2002, I believe)?

Next Meeting…

Would either of you mind if we postponed the next meeting for a week or so…  lots of work coming up in the next couple of weeks.

Next Meeting…plus ideas!

Monday, March 24, 3:00 at the Future. Chapter 6. I’ll also send a message to Bill again and see if he wants to come.

Is that Easter monday? Is shit open?

As for the next readings: Do we want to read The Other Side of Psychoanalysis? If so, bring a copy on Monday and we can discuss how much we want to read for the following meeting.

And now my ideas: there are 2. First, I want to invite other people in SPT to join. That is, I want to put out a general call over the listserve. Matt, you could do the same over at CommCult if you think there are people who are interested. Yes?

Second, I’ve been reading a bunch of stuff about Lenin and the Russian Revolution, and today started to read about the Autonomia movement in Italy as well. One of the things that struck me about this stuff is that change happens not simply by people seizing power or the state, but by first organizing parallel to the state. In Russia, the soviets rose up a people were self organizing at the same time as the provisional government, and that’s how the Bolsheviks were able to seize power. Now, I know of about 4 other reading groups that are going on right now. If they’re anything like ours, it’s like organizing university classes outside the university. So, I was thinking that it might be cool to send a message across the listserve and propose that people from each group meet once every couple of months to discuss what each group has been doing. It might be cool even have different people present ideas at meetings like these…

It’s a fledgling idea, but if you guys are down I’d like to give it a go and see what happens. Shaking hands with the Deleuze reading group might be an interesting exercise… and seeing what’s happening with the Frankfurt School group would be cool too.

Anyway…

G

Rochdale College