An Overview Regarding the Blog + a bit of Sartre

I tried to remain faithful to my promise to post a blog entry every day, and I was successful, even though some of those entries consisted of meagre lines. I shall try to do the same this month, hopefully write more substantial entries. I'm also thankful for those that have been reading my blog, and even more so for those that have been commenting (Izdiher).

I’ll comment briefly on what I read today, I started reading Jean-Paul Sartre’s Being and Nothingness. His prose seems circular to me, and I find myself constantly re-reading certain lines. Thankfully, I don’t have to read it in its entirety, but I am finding some of his ideas appealing. I’ve come across them in one way or another in the past, but I’m experiencing his concepts differently. In summation , what I understood so far, is that Sartre disrupts Kant’s distinction between noumena (or appearances) phenomena (things as we perceive or experience them), and posits the latter as the only reality. From there, he analyzes two categories of being: being-for-itself and being-in-itself. The former is the conscious—characterized by concreteness, passivity, and physical-- and latter the unconscious—characterized by fluidity, movement, and nonphysical. These categories extend into one another, since the being-for-itself comprises of physical attributes as well. We exist in an ontological web in which our facticity (being-in-itself) and our transcendence (being-for-itself) seep into one another, or even collide.

brief sentiment + Irigaray quotation

As usual, I am moved to explore the past, mine, that is, but I’ve discovered it to be a wastebasket

I will invoke a quotation by Irigaray, which might seem out of context, but it’s relevant, nonetheless: “Women among themselves begin by laughing. To escape from a pure and simple reversal of the masculine position means in any case not to forget to laugh.”

Laughter should transcend spaces, times, and tenses.

this feeling

this feeling of slipping, i sought silky sin hung on clothes lines. thoughts sinking of self worth slyly swinging against the murmuring wind.

july 28, birthday

i charge your memory amiably and there i am a sunken sun against the violent sky, aging.

ruins, repetitions

we repeat to forge simplicity; paradoxically this repetition enables us to zoom in on the shimmering details of dawn, colour in the crevices below the moon-windows, supplement angry fixes with fictional heroines, slip the sun-god underneath the door, invent embryos embracing magic balls, touch threads swinging forth from the painted curtains. repetition is a detachment from an origin, leaving not a trace, but a caress. this repetition betrays us, moving onto its own path, never settling between dreams.

Agency and Butler's Gender Trouble

Here’ s q quick post summarizing what I’ve read concerning gender norms and it is a text I’ve read a few times before. So you may have guessed which book I’m referring to, it’s Judith Butler’s groundbreaking book Gender Trouble. Following Simone de Beauvoir’s famous observation “one is not born a women,” Butler shows that gender roles are performed according to scripts that precede the emergence of the body. These are scripts that delineate our behaviour and normative constraints. It is only through repetition that these gender norms appear natural. She wonders whether there is room for subversion and whether such gender norms enforced on our bodies can be subverted. In response posits her famous example of gender subversion through performance: drag. She asserts that the parodying of gender norms does not, contrary to what some have argued, reinforce patriarchal norms, but, in fact, exposes the constructedness of that gender, whether through femme-butch or male drag, that is supposedly traced back to the body. Her work has been influential not only for queer studies but also for minority studies, but it did come under criticisms that were rallied with the following two objections: Butler assumes a fluid identity that one can slip into and out of as one wills; she evades the materiality of the body. In Bodies that Matter, however, she addresses both criticisms making a strong argument against the first criticism, and what I find a less persuasive response to the latter criticism. Perhaps more on that in a post to follow.

take your time

turn it over slowly
scatter bullets on the album which is bursting with fables of fanciful thoughts exposing
open minds that bleed through bright lights demolishing someone’s reality, a being’s fantasy
scattered with doubt, toxic drinks below pyramids, peel the sky and look, name the bitter being
then
admit you could have been somewhat, slightly, perhaps, possibly, maybe...
no, take your time