Summer 2023 | Read & Reviewed
Spring 2023 | Read & Reviewed
2022 Favorite Books & Other Writing
It was the warmest October in history. I read on the Overground train and I read in cafes. I read at the table, in the armchair, on the sofa. I read critical theory and essays and literature; poems and interviews and dictionary entries. And at one point, regardless of the ever-growing pile of books on my bookshelf, I knew I had read enough.
Because I also have to write. How easy to succumb to the infinite call of words – irresistibly beautiful and intelligent – already written. But I knew. I knew that I’d have to write.
So I went to the Hunterian Museum and saw animals preserved in jars; and I wrote a brief essay titled “What Is an Animal?” I went to the National Gallery to see the Crivelli paintings and the Dutch still live; and I got to work on a long-form essay, perhaps part of a more substantial project.
My mother asked what I’d like as a gift for my birthday, and I picked a 6-week online course by the Institute for Postnatural Studies. The seminars explore a post-anthropocentric approach to the human-nature relationship. We read texts by Timothy Morton and Donna Haraway et al. An idea that was recently discussed : that the constellation is nothing but our own imaginary. It is not how the stars – the other burning suns and the planets reflecting their light – really are. Some cultures, instead of looking for patterns in the sky, contemplate the space in between the stars; the shapes sculpted of darkness.
My current interest as a writer: to explore and question the dominant modern ideas regarding the natural and the animal. We’re used to speaking in binaries.
Now versus past
Here versus there
Part versus whole
Conscious versus unconscious
Person versus thing
Human versus animal
Us versus them
The problem with the prevalent ethics of our times is that they assume there exists an inside and an outside, we and them, and so on. Somebody belongs to the ethical category while somebody remains external to it. If there is a society that creates an outside, does it not entail the outside being located on the inside?
Timothy Morton: “At Earth magnitude, anthropocentric distinctions don’t matter anymore. Or, better, they cease to be thin and rigid. They matter amazingly differently.”
Instead of reading about war and finance, I want to read about (inter-species) empathy and interdependency. I want to write:
“We use language, politics, and media in order to transcend our complex systems of knowledge – by the blinding act of simplification. The modern discussion of ethics is stripped of variations of grey; of black, too. What is left is a blank page. Instead of enlightenment, we need (re)animation*. Which is to say we need a new language and ethics that gives breath, gives courage, enlivens.”
(For more personal meanderings, sign up for the newsletter.)
—
* The verb “to animate” derives from “alive,” late 14c., animat, from Latin animatus, past participle of animare “give breath to,” also “to endow with a particular spirit, to give courage to, enliven.”
Books read in October 2023:
- Divorcing by Susan Taubes | 4/5
- The Ghosts of Birds by Eliot Weinberger | 4/5
- These Possible Lives by Fleur Jaeggy | 4/5
- Living in the World as if it Were Home by Tim Lilburn | 5/5
- Sleepless Nights by Elizabeth Hardwick | 5/5
- Zoographies by Matthew Calarco | 5/5
Partly read:
- The Spell of the Sensuous by David Abram | 5/5
- Orfeo by Richard Powers | 4/5
- I Love Dick by Chris Kraus | 4/5
- Index Cards by Moyra Davey | 5/5
- The Undying by Anne Boyer | 4/5
- Essayism by Brian Dillon | 5/5
- Exposition by Nathalie Léger | 3/5
- Proxies: Essays Near Knowing by Brian Blanchfield | 3/5
- The Silent Woman by Janet Malcolm | 4/5
- Spontaneous Particulars: The Telepathy of Archives by Susan Howe | 2/5
- Being Here Is Everything by Marie Darrieussecq | 3/5
- Autotheory as Feminist Practice in Art, Writing, and Criticism by Lauren Fournier | 3/5
- The Situation and the Story by Vivian Gornick | 3/5
Stories, essays + poetry + all else
- “fiction | “Happiness” by Anne Carson, via Harpers
- #story | “The Spy” by Rachel Cust, via Harpers
- #ballet | The Limit, at the Royal Opera
- #cinema | The Bitter Tears of Petra von Kant (1972), IMDB
- #history | Hunterian museum, link
- #art | The National Gallery
- #art | Re/Sisters expo at the Barbican
- #art | The William Morris gallery & Radical Landscapes expo
- #literature | Marie Darrieussecq in conversation with Brian Dillon, at Libreria
- #poetry | Charif Shanahan poetry reading, at Libreria
- The William Morris Gallery + Radical Landscapes expo
- #essay | S. Sontag’s essays: “The Aesthetics of Silence,” “At the Same Time,” “Against Interpretation”
Book reviews
Divorcing by Susan Taubes
Susan Taubes, the bestie of Susan Sontag, moved to the US together with her Hungarian psychoanalyst father and went on to get a Ph.D. from Harvard. Her thesis? – The Absent God. A Study of Simone Weil. She married Jacob Taubes, a religious thinker and philosopher too charismatic to attend to anyone else’s needs but his own.
The characters in Divorcing – Sophie Blind and her estranged husband Ezra Blind – make for the perfect case of interrelated reality and fiction. The novel’s protagonist, Sophie Blind, has just moved to Paris with her three kids, leaving behind her life in New York. She wants a divorce from her husband, but before she gets him to sign the papers, another kind of divorce occurs: that of her spirit from her body.
Soon after her arrival in Paris, Sophie gets killed in a street accident. In death, her severed head is free to roam across time and space, across memories and grievances. The book is unforgiving and hyperfeminist, at times toxically so. There is no man Sophie ever has loved and none she is capable of loving. Their man’ness always gets in the way, and as they don’t truly care about her, neither does Sophie care about them.
The novel, written in the experimental style trendy at the time, is envenomed with snappy remarks and makes for an amusing guilty-pleasure read spiced with mid-century elite’s casual love affairs.
Read Merve Emre’s essay on Taubes in the New Yorker.
A few quotations from Divorcing:
“He had little to fear under the cover, this was only a woman, throwing her weight on him, fists pounding mostly wall, air, mattress; at worst a jab in the ribs, her fist passing through the barricade of arms and knees. Just a woman, and now increasingly molten, pliable, fluid with rage; his own beloved wife, he knew what to do with her, and in nine months there was a baby.”
“What sense did Sophie make of her life on the plane bound for New York when she was heading there to arrange her affairs so that she might settle properly in Paris? None.
What sense did Sophie make of her life on the plane leaving New York after having had a happy love affair? None.”“Even when Sophie couldn’t bear Ezra, she loved the marriage. It was a many-layered shroud whose weight she relished. To carry it eased, simplified entering a room full of people, it justified her presence in the room. There it was, a costume ready-made for public occasions. Ezra’s wife: this was the answer to anyone who wanted to know her.”
Zoographies by Matthew Calarco
I no longer remember how I came across Zoographies by Matthew Calarco. Along with Radical Animism by Jemma Deer, it quickly became one of the key books of my research project.
Both books analyse how we, in the Western world, think about the nature and non-human creatures. Both authors – Calarco by way of philosophy and Deer by anthropological research – challenge the anthropocentric approach to the world; they argue for deconstructing the human-animal binary, pointing out that there’s more of what we do not know about this world than we do know.
Zoographies walks the reader through four philosophers’ works on human and animal existence: Heidegger, Levinas, Agamben, and Derrida. The latter’s words – “And once again we are back to the question of the animal” – echo the intricately intertwined nature of human-animal relationship.
Heidegger called for a radicalized responsibility toward all forms of life. Agamben held the “anthropological machine” responsible for the horrors of the 20th century.
By exploring and commenting on the afore-mentioned authors’ works, Calarco arrives at an argument for abolishing the anthropocentric distinction of the human-animal binary. I agree.
“Beyond the senses intended by Derrida, the phrase “the question of the animal” carries additional meanings in this book. It is also intended to pose the question of whether we know how to think about animals at all. Are any of our extant discourses—whether they derive from science or philosophy, from anthropocentric or nonanthropocentric sources—adequate for describing the rich multiplicity of life forms and perspectives found among those beings we call “animal”?”
“Unlike much of the philosophical tradition that precedes him, Heidegger does not take it as philosophically evident that there is a straightforward distinction to be drawn between human being and animal, or between living beings and nonliving beings. Furthermore, he poses as a question the proper means of getting at the Being and world relations characteristic of nonhuman entities, which is to say, he does not take for granted the idea that our anthropocentric commonsense or even scientific approaches to understanding nonhuman beings will provide the best means of access.”
“What Derrida seems most interested in developing with these sorts of quasi concepts and infrastructures is not just a decentering of human subjectivity (as is sometimes supposed) but rather a thought of the Same-Other relation where the Same is not simply a human self and where the Other is not simply a human other. At bottom, what these infrastructures seek to give for thought is a notion of life as responsivity, where life is understood not exclusively but broadly and inclusively, ranging from human to animal and beyond.”
“Most religious and secular forms of humanism would have us believe a priori that human life has more value and moral weight than animal life and that it is precisely because of this value difference that any comparison between human and animal genocide is objectionable. I mentioned above, Derrida’s work is aimed at undercutting these kinds of value hierarchies, and, as a result, he is not as quick to dismiss the comparison of human and animal genocide on humanist grounds as other theorists have been. In addition to acknowledging that literal animal genocides have occurred and are still under way […], Derrida points out that many of the analogies that are drawn between human and animal genocide overlook the singular situation and suffering of animals. In so doing, he implicitly contests the humanist notion that comparisons between human and animal suffering are objectionable because human beings are supposed to carry more inherent value.”
